Emerson and East-West Synthesis

Abstract

SOME SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, OLIVER WENdell Holmes pointed out the Men of Letters series' that Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and feeling. As if to check himself, he added immediately: American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism. Indeed, this qualification could not very well have been left out any just appraisal of the great poet and seer. Nearly all biographers of Emerson have noted his Oriental leanings, among them his son Edward Waldo, Moncure Daniel Conway, James Elliot Cabot, and George Willis Cooke. Some have discussed detail Emerson's literary relations with the Orient, notably Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, William Torrey Harris, George Williamson, Frederick Ives Carpenter, and Arthur Christy. A good deal of romanticism has been entertained the writings of others not mentioned. Nevertheless, there are few who would not concur claiming an Oriental side to Emerson's character, however vaguely it might have been defined. A perusal of Emerson's essays, lectures, poems, his journals as edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, his letters published by Ralph L. Rusk and others, and the list of books he studied, as compiled by his editors as well as Harold Clarke Goddard, Arthur Christy, Kenneth Walter Cameron, and others, will convince anyone that the words of his professor of Greek at Harvard, All tends to the mysterious East,2 served Emerson as a guide, and that the admonitions of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, to study the Orientals did not fall on deaf ears.