Question: What ideas have you formed about Emerson as an essayist?
Or, Give you an assessment of Emerson as an essayist.
Or, Evaluate Emerson as an essayist.
Or, Why do you think that Emerson is a great essayist?
Answer: The greatness of Emerson as an essayist rests on his essays, though he wrote a good number of poems also. The most important aspects of his essays are their lofty, philosophical ideas, and the art of presenting them in a distinctive, individual style marked with the effective use of rhetorical figures. As an essayist in American literature, his place is as high as his English counterpart, Bacon, and the French Montaigue. His essays form a rich treasure of American literature in particular, and of world literature in general.
Emerson was a great essayist, philosopher, thinker, and poet of America. He is more famous as an essayist than as anything else. He, as a man of letters, illuminated a thousand timeless themes with simplicity and taste. “Whether he wrote of Nature or man's conscience, of self-reliance or of democracy, he blended sound "Yankee common sense with penetrating insight into the heart of man”. E.C Lindeman, a famous critic says, "Nothing needs to be said by way of introduction to the essays and the poems. These are firmly woven into the very fabric of American life and culture. Emerson is to American life what Shakespeare is to British and Goethe to German. He was our most completely expressed writer and philosopher.”
Another notable critic, Bronwell, says, “Emerson's essays are the scriptures of thought. ... Every statement stimulates thought because it is suggestive as well as expressive. Everything means something. additional. Every thought is potent rather than purely reflective.”
About the worth of Emerson as an essayist, Mathew Arnold remarked, "As Wordsworth's poetry is in my judgment, the most important work done in our language during the present century, so Emerson's “Essays" are, I think, the most important work done in prose."
Emerson's first essay was "Nature", published in 1836, followed by his first Essays in 1841, and Essays: second series in 1844. From the viewpoint of themes, his essays can be arranged into three groups: (1) descriptions of the universe and its laws, (2) analysis of the moral faculties in human relationships in general, and (3) Studies of more nearly particular problems of experience.
Emerson reminds us often of Milton, especially in The Amen Scholar, by his eloquence, the amplitude, and sweep of sentences, the rhythm, and the poetry of his descriptions. He reminds us just as often of Bacon with his confident aphorisms. The fullness of the longer sentences is balanced by the sharpness of the epigram and the greatness of the antithesis. He has a whole series of antithetically, balanced sentences. His style is best illustrated in selected passages The sentences are terse, vital, and epigrammatic; yet they are always poetic rather than practical and always hint at much more than they express.
Emerson wrote always from his own convictions. His inner voice. his guide. He did not borrow ideas from his predecessors, but his ideas were his own. In his writings, one comes across the true spirit of American civilization, its preoccupation with individual liberty, individual judgment, and insatiable love of adventure.
W.F. Taylor has given a fine assessment of Emerson as a writer. His writings reveal the sources of a rich and beautiful mental life by means of unique art. His essays, poems, and journals give the reader an opportunity to explore a range of speculations only less amazing than the great German writer Goethe. Beneath the pale glow of transcendentalism, we get in his essays, the fruits from all past cultures strangely reconciled, strangely transformed.
The greatness of Emerson as an essayist rests on three solid foundations. He treats the themes which are of universal human interest: nature, love, friendship, self-reliance, heroism, characters, ethics, and so on. Secondly, his treatment of these themes is in his individual way, which appeals to the lofty stratum of the human mind, and which proceeds from his own convictions. His extraordinary expressions, which have the weight of proverbs, have marked his essays as prominently as Bacon's were by his style.
His essay The American Scholar exhibits almost all the qualities of his writings as an essayist. He has tried to bring Americ thoughts out of the shackles of European hegemony. He has nope that "A nation of men will for the first time exist”. He has bestowed this power of reviving a nation, on the American Scholar. It is we in an individual style. His thoughts are lofty and expansive, bi has tried to compress them within a short space. As a result, sentences have become aphoristic and epigrammatic, much in the way of Francis Bacon. From the point of view of the organization, it is almost impeccable. To ordinary readers, they might appear to be unlinked and incoherent. But they are not; they have coherence through the concatenation of ideas. He has also made effective use of rhetorical figures, allusions, imagery, and symbol. His rhetorical devices make his prose poetic in tenor and lofty in style.
But still, many critics have tried to find out some faults in his writing. About “The American Scholar” Joel Porte said, “His stress throughout was on the soul's activity the thinking process that he had argued for so strenuously in "The American Scholar"- and as a result, we see him not so much displaying his thoughts as dancing among them in a wild play of intellectual energy”. There is a hint of the disorganization of his essay in this remark. But on closer analysis, we find that this complaint is baseless. The imaginative quality of his prose might give the impression of his being too lofty for mechanical precision in his organization of materials in an essay, but his essays are well organized, viewed from a supra-mundane scale.
All factors considered, Emerson appears the greatest of American essayists and one of the greatest in world literature.
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