I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Emerson and New England Transcendentalism

Although biographers have debated the different ways in which Dickinson’s reading habits affected her work, almost all concur that the single most important author that influenced her poetry was the American philosopher, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882). To understand the intellectual climate of Dickinson’s time, one cannot avoid an examination of this important American thinker.

Emerson was one of the founders of transcendentalism, a loose but dynamic philosophy which, in many ways, was a reaction to what its followers saw as the stifling Puritanism of America’s past and, specifically, the rigid attention to reason urged by eighteenth-century enlightenment writers. Above all, transcendentalists believed in the divinity of human beings and the supremacy of the individual. Unlike enlightenment thinkers, who held that the world could only be perceived and understood through observation and rationality, transcendentalists were more like the European romantics in their focus on intuition as a means of discovering the truths of human existence. Transcendentalists also believed in the oversoul: a force present in all the universe that embodies truth, wisdom, and, above all, virtue and goodness. (Emerson’s poem “Brahma” is an examination of the workings of the oversoul.)

One aim of human life was to harmonize one’s individual soul with the oversoul; such a harmony would result in the fulfillment of that person’s potential. Such an idea was shocking to hard-and-fast New England Calvinists, who held that God acted as a judge of man’s sinful actions and doled out harsh but fitting punishments. The beauty and force of nature as an absolute good was another transcendentalist tenet, as was the value and virtue of complete self-reliance. Many of these ideas were articulated at length by Emerson in his Essays: First Series (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844), Poems (1846), and Representative Men (1850). Dickinson received a copy of Emerson’s Poems in 1850, and the ideas behind such lines as “Beauty through my senses stole; / I yielded myself to the perfect whole” (from “Each and All”) and “Beauty is its own excuse for being” (from “The Rhodora”) surface throughout Dickinson’s work and the work of many other New England authors who lived during Emerson’s career.

Much of Emerson’s work urges his readers to look to the best artists and poets for a greater understanding of both the world and themselves. For example, in his essay “Circles,” he states, “All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.” The great value placed here on verse as a means by which humans could better understand their worlds — a means even more powerful than the “Body of Divinity” — was a shocking one that would have certainly delighted Dickinson, whose poems often express religious frustrations and doubts.

There are even remarks in Emerson’s work that echo Dickinson’s decision to pursue a solitary life of the mind. In the essay “The Celebration of the Intellect,” for example, Emerson commands, “Keep the intellect sacred. Go sit with the hermit in you, who knows more than you do,” and in his essay “The Poet,” Emerson tells potential artists, “Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only.

Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shall take all from the muse.” Finally, in his poem “Saadi,” he offers the aphorism, “Men consort in camp and town / But the poet dwells alone.” While the exact extent to which Dickinson responded to Emerson’s individual remarks is a matter of conjecture, she did adopt something of a transcendentalist attitude in her decision (like Henry David Thoreau, who lived alone at Walden pond for awhile) to withdraw from a world founded on materialism and logic and, as she herself described in one of her poems, “dwell” in the “possibility” of discovering the truths of human existence.

Compare & Contrast

• 1855: Walt Whitman publishes his first edition of Leaves of Grass, his groundbreaking collection of free verse that revolutionizes American poetry.

  Today: Free verse is so widely used that it is no longer seen as the revolutionary style it once was. Many modern American poets such as William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and Allen Ginsberg have followed Whitman’s course and written much of their own work in free verse.

• 1861: The American Civil War begins when Confederate forces attack and capture Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The war continues until 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union forces.

  Today: The Civil War is perhaps the most widely studied period in American history; many contemporary artists are drawn to the Civil War as an inspiration for their work. For example, the filmmaker Ken Burns’s 1997 documentary The Civil War has been seen by millions of television viewers, and the novelist Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) has been a bestseller.

• 1841: The transcendentalist movement in America begins with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: First Series and gains force with the publication of Emerson’s Essays: Second Series (1844) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). For a number of years, many Americans (most of them New Englanders) are drawn to the transcendentalist philosophy through these works.

  Today: While transcendentalism is no longer the vibrant philosophical force it was during the nineteenth century, millions of readers still pore over the works of Emerson and Thoreau, hoping to glean some insight from these two important American thinkers.