Emerson on The Scholar, 1833–1837

Abstract

“The American Scholar” (1837) grew organically out of Emerson's thinking about his own vocation after he left the pulpit and began secular lecturing in 1833. The scholar described first in his journal is like Emerson himself at the time, an inactive observer or “Watcher” preparing himself for some still-undefined public service. Later, Emerson developed his ideal figure of “the true scholar” as a writer and teacher who actively guides and inspires mankind, just as he hoped to do when composing his first book, Nature, in 1836. The scholar as Emerson draws him is successively the “intellectual” or “spiritual” man, “the great Thinker” who “thinks for all,” and finally the type of Emerson's Universal Man. As “Man Thinking” the scholar is neither a narrow specialist nor the parrot of other men's thoughts; he exemplifies “the active soul” by creatively transforming temporal events into timeless truth. It is self-reliant originality and creativity, the objects of Emerson's own dedication, that became the central themes of the oration as he shaped it during July and August of 1837.