1. Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar"
About "The American Scholar"
Originally titled "An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge,
[Massachusetts,] August 31, 1837," Emerson delivered what is now referred to as "The
American Scholar" essay as a speech to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society, an honorary
society of male college students with unusually high grade point averages. At the time,
women were barred from higher education, and scholarship was reserved exclusively for
men. Emerson published the speech under its original title as a pamphlet later that same
year and republished it in 1838. In 1841, he included the essay in his book Essays, but
changed its title to "The American Scholar" to enlarge his audience to all college
students, as well as other individuals interested in American letters. Placed in his Man
Thinking: An Oration (1841), the essay found its final home in Nature; Addresses, and
Lectures (1849
The text begins with an introduction (paragraphs 1-7) in which Emerson explains that his intent is to explore
the scholar as one function of the whole human being: The scholar is "Man Thinking." The remainder of the
essay is organized into four sections, the first three discussing the influence of nature (paragraphs 8 and 9), the
influence of the past and books (paragraphs 10-20), and the influence of action (paragraphs 21-30) on the
education of the thinking man. In the last section (paragraphs 31-45), Emerson considers the duties of the
scholar and then discusses his views of America in his own time.
Readers should number each paragraph in pencil as these Notes make reference to individual paragraphs in the
essay.
Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 1-7 - "Man
Thinking"
Emerson opens "The American Scholar" with greetings to the college president and
members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. Pointing out the differences
between this gathering and the athletic and dramatic contests of ancient Greece, the
poetry contests of the Middle Ages, and the scientific academies of nineteenth-century
Europe, he voices a theme that draws the entire essay together: the notion of an
independent American intelligentsia that will no longer depend for authority on its
European past. He sounds what one critic contends is "the first clarion of an American
literary renaissance," a call for Americans to seek their creative inspirations using
America as their source, much like Walt Whitman would do in Leaves of Grass eighteen
years later. In the second paragraph, Emerson announces his theme as "The American
Scholar" not a particular individual but an abstract ideal
The remaining five paragraphs relate an allegory that underlies the discussion to follow.
According to an ancient fable, there was once only "One Man," who then was divided into
many men so that society could work more efficiently. Ideally, society labors together —
each person doing his or her task — so that it can function properly. However, society
has now subdivided to so great an extent that it no longer serves the good of its citizens.
And the scholar, being a part of society, has degenerated also. Formerly a "Man
Thinking," the scholar is now "a mere thinker," a problem that Emerson hopes to correct
successfully by re-familiarizing his audience with how the true scholar is educated and
what the duties of this scholar are
Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 8-9 - The
Influence of Nature
In these two paragraphs comprising the first section on how a scholar should be
educated, Emerson envisions nature as a teacher that instructs individuals who observe
the natural world to see — eventually — how similar their minds and nature are. The first
similarity he discusses concerns the notion of circular power — a theme familiar to
readers of the Nature essay — found in nature and in the scholar's spirit. Both nature and
the scholar's spirit, "whose beginning, whose ending he never can find — so entire, so
boundless," are eternal
Order is another similarity — as it is in Nature — between the scholar and nature. At
first, the mind views a chaotic and infinite reality of individual facts, but then it begins to
classify these facts into categories, to make comparisons and distinctions. A person

2. discovers nature's laws and can understand them because they are similar to the
operations of the intellect. Eventually, we realize that nature and the soul — both
proceeding from what Emerson terms "one root" — are parallel structures that mirror
each other (Emerson's term for "parallel" may be misleading; he says that nature is the
"opposite" of the soul). So, a greater knowledge of nature results in a greater
understanding of the self, and vice versa. The maxims "Know thyself" and "Study nature"
are equivalent: They are two ways of saying the same thing
Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 10-20 - The
Influence of the Past
Emerson devotes much of his discussion to the second influence on the mind, past
learning — or, as he expresses it, the influence of books. In the first three paragraphs of
this section, he emphasizes that books contain the learning of the past; however, he also
says that these books pose a great danger. While it is true that books transform mere
facts ("short-lived actions") into vital truths ("immortal thoughts"), every book is
inevitably a partial truth, biased by society's standards when it was written. Each age
must create its own books and find its own truths for itself
Following this call for each age's creating truth, Emerson dwells on other dangers in books. They are
dangerous, he says, because they tempt the scholar away from original thought. Excessive respect for the
brilliance of past thinkers can discourage us from exploring new ideas and seeking individualized truths.
The worst example of slavish deference to past thinkers is the bookworm, a pedant who focuses all thought on
trivial matters of scholarship and ignores large, universal ideas. This type of person becomes passive and
uncreative, and is the antithesis of Emerson's ideal of the creative imagination: "Man hopes. Genius creates. To
create, — to create, — is the proof of a divine presence." The non-creative bookworm is more spiritually
distanced from God — and, therefore, from nature — than is the thinker of original thoughts.
But the genius, too, can suffer from the undue influence of books. Emerson's example of this kind of sufferer
are the English dramatic poets, who, he says, have been "Shakespearized" for two hundred years: Rather than
producing new, original texts and thoughts, they mimic Shakespeare's writings. Citing an Arabic proverb that
says that one fig tree fertilizes another — just like one author can inspire another — Emerson suggests that
true scholars should resort to books only when their own creative genius dries up or is blocked.
The last three paragraphs of this section refer to the pleasures and benefits of reading, provided it is done
correctly. There is a unique pleasure in reading. Because ancient authors thought and felt as people do today,
books defeat time, a phenomenon that Emerson argues is evidence of the transcendental oneness of human
minds. Qualifying his previous insistence on individual creation, he says that he never underestimates the
written word: Great thinkers are nourished by any knowledge, even that in books, although it takes a
remarkably independent mind to read critically at all times. This kind of reading mines the essential vein of
truth in an author while discarding the trivial or biased.
Emerson concedes that there are certain kinds of reading that are essential to an educated person: History,
science, and similar subjects, which must be acquired by laborious reading and study. Foremost, schools must
foster creativity rather than rely on rote memorization of texts: ". . . [schools] can only highly serve us, when
they aim not to drill, but to create
Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 21-30 - The
Influence of Action
In this third section, Emerson comments on the scholar's need for action, for physical
labor. He rejects the notion that the scholar should not engage in practical action. Action,
while secondary to thought, is still necessary: "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but
it is essential." Furthermore, not to act — declining to put principle into practice — is
cowardly. The transcendental concept of the world as an expression of ourselves makes
action the natural duty of a thinking person
Emerson observes the difference between recent actions and past actions. Over time, he says, a person's past
deeds are transformed into thought, but recent acts are too entangled with present feelings to undergo this

3. transformation. He compares "the recent act" to an insect larva, which eventually metamorphoses into a
butterfly — symbolic of action becoming thought.
Finally, he praises labor as valuable in and of itself, for such action is the material creatively used by the
scholar. An active person has a richer existence than a scholar who merely undergoes a second-hand existence
through the words and thoughts of others. The ideal life has "undulation" — a rhythm that balances, or
alternates, thought and action, labor and contemplation: "A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to
think." This cycle creates a person's character that is far superior to the fame or the honor too easily expected
by a mere display of higher learning
Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 31-45 - The
Scholar's Duties
After Emerson has discussed how nature, books, and action educate the scholar, he now
addresses the scholar's obligations to society. First, he considers these obligations in
general, abstract terms; then he relates them to the particular situation of the American
scholar
The scholar's first and most important duty is to develop unflinching self-trust
and a mind that will be a repository of wisdom for other people. This is a difficult
task, Emerson says, because the scholar must endure poverty, hardship, tedium,
solitude, and other privations while following the path of knowledge. Self-
sacrifice is often called for, as demonstrated in Emerson's examples of two
astronomers who spent many hours in tedious and solitary observation of space
in order to make discoveries that benefited mankind. Many readers will wonder
just how satisfying the reward really is when Emerson acknowledges that the
scholar "is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human
nature."
The true scholar is dedicated to preserving the wisdom of the past and is
obligated to communicating the noblest thoughts and feelings to the public. This
last duty means that the scholar — "who raises himself from private
considerations, and breathes and lives on public illustrious thoughts" — must
always remain independent in thinking and judgment, regardless of popular
opinion, fad, notoriety, or expediency. Because the scholar discovers universal
ideas, those held by the universal human mind, he can communicate with people
of all classes and ages: "He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart."
Although he appears to lead a reclusive and benign life, the scholar must be
brave because he deals in ideas, a dangerous currency. Self-trust is the source
of courage and can be traced to the transcendental conviction that the true
thinker sees all thought as one; universal truth is present in all people, although
not all people are aware of it. Instead of thinking individually, we live vicariously
through our heroes; we seek self-worth through others when we should search
for it in ourselves. The noblest ambition is to improve human nature by fulfilling
our individual natures.
Emerson concludes the essay by observing that different ages in Western
civilization, which he terms the Classic, the Romantic, and the Reflective (or the

4. Philosophical) periods, have been characterized by different dominant ideas, and
he acknowledges that he has neglected speaking about the importance of
differences between ages while speaking perhaps too fervently about the
transcendental unity of all human thought.
Emerson now proposes an evolutionary development of civilization, comparable
to the development of a person from childhood to adulthood. The present age —
the first half of the 1800s — is an age of criticism, especially self-criticism.
Although some people find such criticism to be an inferior philosophy, Emerson
believes that it is valid and important. Initiating a series of questions, he asks
whether discontent with the quality of current thought and literature is such a
bad thing; he answers that it is not. Dissatisfaction, he says, marks a transitional
period of growth and evolution into new knowledge: "If there is any period one
would desire to be born in,is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the
new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; . . . This [present] time,
like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
Emerson applauds the views of English and German romantic poets like
Wordsworth and Goethe, who find inspiration and nobility in the lives and work
of common people. Instead of regarding only royal and aristocratic subjects as
appropriate for great and philosophical literature, the Romantic writers reveal
the poetry and sublimity in the lives of lower-class and working people. Their
writing is full of life and vitality, and it exemplifies the transcendental doctrine of
the unity of all people. Ironically, we should remember that at the beginning of
the essay, Emerson advocated Americans' throwing off the European mantle that
cloaks their own culture. Here, he distinguishes between a European tradition
that celebrates the lives of common people, and one that celebrates only the
monarchical rule of nations: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of
Europe."
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Making special reference to the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg, Emerson contends that although Swedenborg has not received his
due recognition, he revealed the essential connection between the human mind
and the natural world, the fundamental oneness of humans and nature. Emerson
finds much inspiration for his own thinking and writing in the doctrines of
Swedenborg.

5. In his long, concluding paragraph, Emerson dwells on the romantic ideal of the
individual. This fundamentally American concept, which he develops at much
greater length in the essay "Self-Reliance," is America's major contribution to
the world of ideas. The scholar must be independent, courageous, and original;
in thinking and acting, the scholar must demonstrate that America is not the
timid society it is assumed to be. We must refuse to be mere purveyors of the
past's wisdom: ". . . this confidence in the unsearched might of man, belongs by
all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar," who
will create a native, truly American culture
Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Glossary
Troubadours A class of lyric poets and poet-musicians, they lived in southern France in
the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries and composed poems of love and chivalry
sere Withered.
constellation Harp another name for Lyra, a constellation of stars in the northern hemisphere; it contains
Vega, the fourth brightest star in the heavens.
monitory A warning.
refractory Unruly.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B.C.) A Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, he is best known for
his speech making.
Locke, John (1632-1704) An English philosopher, Locke developed a theory of cognition that denied the
existence of innate ideas and asserted that all thought is based on our senses. His works influenced
American Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, who modified Puritan doctrine to allow for more play of
reason and intellect, building a foundation for Unitarianism and, eventually, transcendentalism.
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626) An English essayist, statesman, and philosopher, he proposed a theory
called the inductive method, a scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment.
Third Estate The "common people" under the French monarchy; the clergy and nobles formed the first
two estates.
emendators Those who make textual corrections.
efflux To flow outwardly.
fig tree A Mediterranean tree or shrub, widely cultivated for its edible fruit.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (d. 1400) The English poet who wrote The Canterbury Tales.
Marvell, Andrew (1621-78) An English metaphysical poet, his works include "To His Coy Mistress" and
"Damon the Mower."
Dryden, John (1631-1700) English poet, dramatist, and essayist.
Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) A Greek philosopher, he formulated the philosophy of idealism, which holds that
the concepts or ideas of things are more perfect — and, therefore, more real — than the material things
themselves.

6. elements Here, the basic principles of a subject.
pecuniary Of, or involving, money.
valetudinarian A person in poor health, or one who is constantly anxious about his or her state of health.
empyrean The highest reaches of heaven; paradise.
ferules Sticks used for punishing children.
Savoyards Inhabitants of Savoy, now a province of southeast France; during Emerson's lifetime,
Savoyards were renowned for their woodcarving.
Algiers The capital of Algeria, a country in northwest Africa, on the Mediterranean Sea.
copestones Meaning capstone, the top stone of a wall.
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727) An English mathematician and scientist, Newton is chiefly remembered
for formulating the law of gravity.
unhandselled Unappreciated.
Druids Prehistoric Celtic priests.
Berserkirs Savage warriors of Norse mythology.
Alfred (d. 899) Alfred was the king (871-99) of what was then called West Saxony, in southwest England.
Flamsteed, John (1646-1719) English astronomer.
Herschel, Sir William (1738-1822) An English astronomer, he is credited for discovering Uranus, the
seventh planet from the sun.
glazed Having a roof of glass.
promulgate To make known publicly.
fetish An obsessive preoccupation.
ephemeral Short-lived; transitory.
presentiment A feeling that something is about to occur.
firmament The expanse of the heavens; the sky; poetically, a symbol of strength.
signet A small seal pressed into a hot wax wafer in order to make a document official.
Macdonald Emerson substitutes this typical name of a Scottish chief in the old proverb, "Where Macgregor
sits, there is the head of the table."
Linnaeus, Carolus (1707-78) The Swedish botanist who founded the modern classification system for
plants and animals known as binomial nomenclature.
Davy, Sir Humphry (1778-1829) English chemist.
Cuvier, Georges (1769-1832) A French naturalist, he is considered to be the founder of comparative
anatomy.

7. Provencal Minstrelsy Provence, an ancient province in southeast France, was a center for troubadours.
lumber room A room cluttered with discarded household articles and furniture.
Goldsmith, Oliver (d. 1774) English poet, playwright, and novelist.
Burns, Robert (1759-96) The Scottish poet who wrote "Tam o'Shanter" and "Auld Lang Syne."
Cowper, William (1731-1800) The English poet whose major work is The Task.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832) A German writer, he profoundly influenced literary
romanticism; he is noted for his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832.
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850) An English poet, his most important collection, Lyrical Ballads
(1798), helped establish romanticism in England.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881) English historian, philosopher, and essayist.
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) English poet and translator.
Johnson, Samuel (1709-84) The English writer and critic who wrote Lives of the Poets, a study of
English poetry.
Gibbon, Edward (1737-94) Considered to be one of the greatest English historians, Gibbon authored the
six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688-1772) A Swedish scientist, mystic, philosopher, and theologian,
Swedenborg insisted that the scriptures are the immediate word of God. He postulated many scientific
theories that were far ahead of their time, including the idea that all matter is made up of tiny swirling
particles (later called atoms). He also set out to prove the existence of an immortal soul. Theologically, he
asserted that the heavenly trinity is reproduced in human beings as soul, body, and mind. His teachings
became the nucleus of the Church of the New Jerusalem.
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746-1827) Swiss educator
Emerson's The American Scholar - Mere Thinkers and Men Thinking
In his speech, "The American Scholar," Emerson expresses his distaste for the "mere thinkers" who obtain their ideas from the
work of other men. These other men, called "Men Thinking," are the ones who truly deserve credit because they derive their
ideas from nature and the world. A truly unique idea is often one that is stumbled upon by a man while he is alone, with no
distractions or outside sources to draw information from. He simply takes his knowledge of the world and draws it together, as
described by Emerson: "To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things
and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on
tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things
cohere and flower out from one stem." Nature allows man the freedom to tie together his knowledge and create his own ideas.
Ideas that are truly new are ones that are discovered in this way by "Men Thinking", because ideas of mere thinkers are
prompted by literature containing old ideas. Mere thinkers are the bookworms who spend their days studying the philosophies
of thinkers, learning from them, but not creating their own ideas. Emerson writes that books are written by "Men of talent, that

8. is who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles." He believes that these men,
although intelligent, have been heavily influenced by other people, and therefore have biased opinions which have not come
directly from their own minds. Mere thinkers combine theologies from various sources, but have little that they can consider to
be their own private thought.
Emerson's reasoning, although it seems logical, has a paradoxical flaw in it. Although he his advocating pure thought, by writing
down his thoughts, he is helping to contribute to the massive amounts of mere thinkers who will hear his ideas and be
influenced by them. Emerson writes that "The sacredness which attaches to the art of creation, the act of thought, is transferred
to the record." He gives the impression that he wants to keep creative thoughts sacred by not writing them down and making
them available to others. Yet at the exact same time as he is describing this phenomenon, he is doing exactly what he is opposed
to. Although he mentions later that the one good purpose books serve is to inspire, his work has done much more than simply
inspiring people. He has become one of the great thinkers who people study; a more modern Cicero, Locke, or Bacon. His work
has contributed more to the increase in population of mere thinkers than it has to the increase of "Man Thinking" because he is
defying his own principle
STRUCTURE AND THEMES
Emerson begins his address with a polite nod to the tradition of such talks on the role and
especially the future of learning and the arts in America, but he quickly separates himself
from the traditional celebratory and jingoistic tone of such performances. He does not praise
American cultural productions but instead wishes that the "sluggard intellect of this continent"
would awake and produce "something better than the exertions of mechanical skill," a clear
jibe at the anti-intellectualism and the practical, materialistic bent of American life (p. 81).
Then, as he typically does at the beginning of his essays, Emerson attempts to ground his
discourse in an appeal to common experience, in this case the sense of incompleteness and
isolation that follows upon the specialization of roles in society. He recounts the fable that
"the gods, in the beginning, divided man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself."
"The fable implies," Emerson goes on, "that the individual to possess himself, must
sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed in multitudes, has been so
minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered."
What we have then, in "the divided or social state," is a condition in which "Man is thus
metamorphosed into a thing, into many things," but is nowhere complete (pp. 82, 83).
In this scheme the ideal of "Man Thinking," that is, the intellectual and creative facets of the
individual self, are wrongly delegated to the scholar. But it is worth noting that this fable and
Emerson's interpretation of it also link up to the economic developments of the age and in
particular to the financial crisis brought on by the panic of 1837. Emerson describes here a
kind of transcendental version of what Karl Marx, a few years later in Europe, would call the
alienation of labor, the dis-ease brought on by industrialization and specialization, where the

9. worker has no sense of a whole task or a whole product completed because he is relegated to
some partial and repetitive function within a large-scale industrial operation. Emerson is not
finally concerned with such a materialist economic analysis, but he is responding with some
urgency, as so many writers did, to the increasingly complex, urban, and industrial drift of
nineteenth-century society.
After this introduction, the first half of the essay is
devoted to an elaboration of the principal formative
influences on the scholar's development. Still
influenced by his preacherly habit of numbering the
points of his discourse, Emerson divides this section
of the essay with roman numerals to signal the three
major influences: nature, books (or what Emerson
calls "the mind of the Past"), and action. What is
noteworthy about this list, of course, is the demotion
of books and formal learning to a secondary position
in the hierarchy of influences. Or, conversely, the
elevation of nature to the primary position. Of course,
those familiar with Emerson's little book Nature
would not be surprised. And the sense in which
Emerson thinks of nature as a teacher to the potential
scholar, "this school-boy under the bending dome of
day" (p. 86), corresponds to the uses of
natureommodity, beauty, language, and disciplines he
enumerates and describes them in Nature. Particularly
he has in mind the last of these uses, "discipline," by
which he means something like "teaching": nature
teaches us through its immense richness and variety
and invites us to probe and fathom its complexity
through our lower intellectual faculty, the
Understanding. But nature also appeals to our higher
faculty, the Reason, to intuit underlying truths and the
divine laws that animate all creation. Referring to the
process of sealing an envelope with a wax seal
imprinted on the paper, Emerson employs one of his
most resonant metaphors to describe the relation
between nature and the mind or spirit that brings it
forth: "He shall see that nature is the opposite of the
soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one
is print." And thus, as he concludes, "the ancient
precept, 'Know thyself,' and the modern precept,
'study nature,' become at last one maxim" (pp. 86,
87).
The next section of Emerson's discourse takes up the education of the scholar by books ("the
mind of the Past"), in what must have been to his auditors the most surprising if not the most
perverse part of his address. Not only is this traditional mainstay of education relegated to
second place, as it were, but book learning also undergoes further disparagement. The
problem of the book, for Emerson, is the same problem that attaches to any doctrine or form;
it supplants the original thought or spirit that created it: "The sacredness which attaches to the

10. act of creation,he act of thought,s instantly transferred to the record. . . . Instantly, the book
becomes noxious. The guide is a tyrant" (pp. 889). Books thus become a bar to original
thought, and traditional education becomes an exercise in imitation. The right use, indeed the
only legitimate use of books is to inspire, to prompt us to think originally or, as Emerson
phrases it more boldly, to "read God directly" (p. 91). If this last notion made some in the
audience uneasy, as verging on heresy, it would get worse, for Emerson would return to
Harvard the following year and, in his speech to the divinity school students, employ this
same critique of the book to attack orthodox Christianity and its reliance on a literal
interpretation of the Bible.
Lest one think, on the basis of this principle, that one can simply do without books or formal
education, Emerson ends this section with an important caveat that puts us all back in the
classroom: "Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History
and exact science he must learn by laborious reading." Yet even here, in getting back to
basics, Emerson has a dig for Harvard: speaking of colleges, he says, "they can only serve us,
when they aim not to drill, but to create" (p. 93). Because the traditional Harvard pedagogy
involved endless numbing recitations sections, his implication is clear.
The third influence on the scholar's development is action, and by his emphasis on this
requirement Emerson seeks to counter the stereotype, especially common in nineteenth-
century America, that intellectuals reside in ivory towers and shirk the rough-and-tumble of
ordinary life and work. The ground for the scholar's action is the same principle that Emerson
announces in the "Nature" section of the essay: nature and the world correspond to the self
and provide the tangible means to both self-knowledge and productive action: "The world,his
shadow of the soul or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my
thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult"
(p. 95). Besides, thought and action participate in what Emerson calls "That great principle of
Undulation" or Polarity, by which apparently opposite qualities actually depend upon one
another and call one another into being. This principle is "ingrained in every atom" and
partakes of the overarching polarity of Power and Form in life, as Emerson would sketch it in
"Experience" a few years later (p. 98).
The education of the scholar completed, it remains for Emerson to sketch his duties and to
address the larger issue of how to solve the problem of Americans' long-standing sense of
cultural inferiority with respect to Europe. His duties are rather easily dispensed with; they are
conveyed in a sort of pep talk that Emerson addresses to the audience (and to himself) out of
his own experience and hopes for his fledgling career as public intellectual. Though the
scholar is liable to suffer disdain, poverty, and solitude in keeping on the right track,
eventually he emerges as a hero:
He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by
preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies,
melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the
human heart in all emergencies, in all solemn hours has uttered as its
commentary on the world of actions,hese he shall receive and impart. (Pp.
10102)
The concluding section of the essay is devoted to an anatomy of the power that the American
scholar will need to draw upon to produce this transformative effect on culture. This power
comes from a simple yet profound shift in how culture itself is defined and conceived: "This

11. revolution," Emerson says, "is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of
culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man"
(p. 107). In thus locating the source of culture within the individual radical "domestication" if
ever there was onemerson disposes of the principal negative condition that had stood in the
way of America's cultural independence and maturity. Suddenly, instead of looking to Europe
we could simply look within. The embarrassing disparity between the long history of
European cultural production and the paucity of the same in the United States could be
transcended or rendered moot by the realization that Culture with a capital "C" did not consist
of the monuments and artifacts stored in museums or libraries but in the potential for self-
culture within the individual. This is "domestication" in a double sense: domestic as opposed
to foreign, and domestic as pertaining to the individual and the internal as opposed to the
public and the external. This subtle but profound shift in the conception of the sources, the
expression, and the transmission of high culture is what distinguished Emerson's call for
American literary independence from the myriad of such pronouncements that preceded it.
This is the foundation of Emerson's claim at the beginning of the essay that "our long
apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close" (p. 81), and his assertion, at the
end of the essay, that "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe" (p. 114).
Another sense of this domestication pertains to the subject matter of American art and the
artist's treatment of materials. There follows from Emerson's individual basis of culture,
which in turn comes from a belief in each person's ability to access the divine and its
manifestations in the world, a democratizing and anti-hierarchical turn in the arts.
Interestingly Emerson sees this trend as already having happened, not as prospective: "the
same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state,
assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and the
beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized" (p. 110). Thus Emerson
does not so much predict the radical democratic practice of Walt Whitman and the realists as
look back to English poets of the previous century and early-nineteenth-century Romantics:
"this idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and in a newer time, of
Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle" (p. 112). There is no call yet, as there would be a few
years later in "The Poet," for poets to sing specifically American songs celebrating the
richness and diversity of the United States, and there are no Americans in Emerson's list of
literary models. Instead there is a kind of generic invocation of the ordinarythe meal in the
firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat"one of which has a
specifically American valence (p. 111). In fact, that already archaic word "firkin" signals that
Emerson is chiefly thinking along pre-existing literary lines, much as his own poetry, for all
the radical implications of his theory, remains largely grounded in conventional poetic diction
and forms.
Nevertheless, "The American Scholar" gave American intellectuals and would-be writers a
firm basis for overcoming their sense of cultural inferiority with respect to Europe and
especially England. Neither the immediate prospects for literature nor the materialistic
obsessions of contemporary business culture (in which idealistic young people have no choice
but to "turn drudges, or die of disgust") were promising, but the long-range outlook, based on
nature, self-culture, and a healthy skepticism about received wisdom, was hopeful (p. 114