Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 115And he dedicated himself to living and writing the truth as he saw it. He had been
keeping a journal since he was a student at Harvard, in which he recorded his daily
experiences and impressions, the facts of his life. He was to continue this practice
until he died; and the facts he recorded there became the source of the truths he
endeavored to develop in his essays and poems. From these were to be drawn pieces
such as the “Divinity School Address” (1838) and “The Over-Soul” (1841), in which
he rejected institutional forms of religion in favor of his belief that “God incarnates
himself in man.” For Emerson, as for many of the poets and philosophers on whom
he drew, nature was a manifestation of the spirit. There was a pervasive spiritual
presence, which he called the Over-Soul, from which all things emanate. Each
individual, along with all creation, drew their own soul, the divine spark of their
inner being, from this source: each was at once a singular self, an utterly unrepeatable,
unique being and an integral part of the entire rhythm and pulse of nature.
Returning to the United States, Emerson began to lecture regularly on the lyceum
circuit, to spread his ideas as well as to make a living. He settled in Concord,
Massachusetts in 1835, where he became intimate friends with other writers like
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller.
It was here that the movement known as Transcendentalism, gathered around his
ideas, took shape; and it was here also, at Emerson’s home and elsewhere, that
meetings of the Transcendental Club were to be held during the seven or eight years
following 1836 – a group, known among its own members as the Symposium or the
Hedge Club, that met together occasionally and informally to discuss philosophy,
theology, and literature. Emerson himself was to become involved in the publication
of the Transcendentalist quarterly magazine, The Dial, in 1840, assuming the post of
editor in 1842, but it was in his lectures and essays that his creed of self-help and
self-emancipation was most fully developed and most widely disseminated. Many
volumes of essays and poems were to be published by him during the course of his
life. They include Essays (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844), Poems (1847),
Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), The Conduct of Life (1860), May-
Day and Other Pieces (a second collection of poems (1867)), and Society and Solitude
(1870). The core of his beliefs and of the Transcendentalist creed can, however, be
found in a half-dozen pieces: “The American Scholar” (1837), “Divinity School
Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “The Poet” (1844), and, above all, Nature.
At the heart of Nature is an intense commitment to the power and wonder of
nature and the individual and to the indelible, intimate character of the connection
between the two. The self-reliance that Emerson embraced was not selfishness, since,
as he saw it, to be true to the true self was to be true to the self, the spirit present in
all human beings, all nature. To obey the promptings of the soul was to obey those
of the Over-Soul. “Every real man must be a nonconformist,” Emerson insisted, but
nonconformity meant going against the superficial dictates of society, not pursuing
the grosser forms of self-interest and egotism. “Standing on the bare ground – my
head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism
vanishes,” Emerson declares in the first chapter of Nature. “I become a transparent
eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate throughGGray_c02.indd 115ray_c 02 .indd 115 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM