Emerson, Romanticism, and intuitive reason: the transatlantic "light of all our day"

Abstract

Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive is a comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson's part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy. The book's guiding theme is the concept of intuitive Reason, which Emerson derived from Coleridge's distinction between Understanding and Reason and which Emerson associated with that of all our day in his favorite stanza of Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality. Intuitive Reason became the intellectual and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism. That light radiated to illuminate Emerson's life and work, as well as the complex and often covert relationship of a writer who, however fiercely self-reliant and original, was deeply indebted to his transatlantic precursors. The debt is intellectual and personal. Emerson's supposed indifference to, or triumph over, repeated familial tragedy is often attributed to his Idealism - a complacent optimism that blinded him to any vision of the tragic. His art of losing may be better understood as a tribute to the healing power, the consolation in distress, which Emerson considered Wordsworth's principal value. The second part of this book traces Emerson's struggle - with the help of the benignant influence shed by that of all our day - to confront and overcome personal tragedy, to attain the equilibrium epitomized in Wordsworth's Elegiac Stanzas: Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.