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Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric in Transcendentalist Nature Writing and
Twentieth-Century Eco-Poetry
In the fall of 1993, I attended a reading by W. S. Merwin at Baylor University. At the time, I had had little contact with Merwin's writings and went to the reading on the advice of a professor who knew my interests well. I remember an intense excitement about seeing a poet, as though I were about to come into contact with a prophet who would utter profound and universal truths about nature and spirit. As Merwin began his reading, however, I was struck by what I considered (at the time) a lack of lyricism in his poems and a complete absence of soul shattering, divine utterances. I left the reading feeling that I had gone to see an activist speak, not a poet.
Since the reading I have realized that my conceptions of poetry descended from the traditional curriculum in which I was educated: the poet was Romantic messenger of God, not civic spokesperson. Even so, I have never forgotten the discomfort I felt at Merwin’s reading. In fact, a similar discomfort is often expressed by my students, who conceive of poetics as distinct from rhetoric, lyricism divorced from overtly persuasive appeals. The reason for the lines of demarcation between poetics and rhetoric being drawn so strictly is historical, wrapped in a lineage of criticism from the eighteenth century through much of the twentieth century that insists on a view of poetry as divine or romantic inspiration and rhetoric as materialist, sophistic persuasion. And while these differences obscure some shared traits between poetics and rhetoric, they also highlight the significant difference between nature poets of the nineteenth century and nature poets of the twentieth century; they indicate the fundamental differences between poets such as Whitman and Merwin, or Emerson and Snyder.
For the nineteenth-century transcendentalists in particular, poetics and rhetoric are conflated as unique expressions of divine eloquence, and both arts prioritize the role of the individual in his/her connection to the divine. By the mid-twentieth century, the focus on the individual and his/her connection to divinity has slowly given way to a predominant view of poetry as a consciously rhetorical act, whose purpose is social change. In terms of contemporary environmental poetry, this shift from a conflated poetry and rhetoric to an overtly rhetorical poetic highlights a fundamental shift in conceptions of self and social responsibility. While the nineteenth century might be seen as an era of "nature as inspiration" or even "nature as divine metaphor," the twentieth century has increasingly conceived of the environment, at least in part, as the location of revolution, as source of scientific inquiry, and as location of metaphoric connections between social classes. Indeed, transcendentalist nature poetry can hardly be called eco-poetry in the contemporary sense, the term "eco-poetry" being so deeply saturated with rhetorical purpose that it diverges significantly from the explicit purpose of transcendental poetics—the communication of the divine without regard to social action.
Transcendentalist writers conceive of nature as metaphor for the divine. As Emerson writes:
Emerson, here, constructs the metaphorical value of nature by assigning spiritual power to all nature-symbols. The transcendentalist nature poet, following from Emerson's formulation, takes as his/her subject divine immanence. As described by Walt Whitman: "The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky and heaven and the orbs, the forests mountains and rivers are not small themes . . . but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects . . . they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls." With nature as divine subject, social activism is subjugated to fortunate by-product of poetry's ultimate goal: contemplation of spiritual essence. Nature, therefore, is location of reflection and divine illumination, and the hope for any sort of social action remains secondary.
Because social action is secondary to contemplation of the divine, the usual art of civic activism, rhetoric, is conflated with poetry in order to ensure that spirituality remains at the center of the arts. Emerson articulates most clearly the nineteenth-century conflation of rhetoric and poetics through a reliance on divine insight. In "The Poet," he declares that
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high
sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature,--him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.
Emerson configures poets as "liberating gods" (35) and "the true and only doctor" (14) because they have a special connection to the divine. In "Shakespeare; or the Poet" he explicitly seeks this connection through a "poet-priest, a reconciler," which betrays the transcendentalist hope for a unifying vision of the world through divine immanence.
Emerson's conception of the poet as the articulator of the divine parallels his conception of the orator as communicator of divine mission. In his "Eloquence" essay of 1847, Emerson defines the orator's power as overflowing spiritual power:
Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this word eloquence, but the power that being present, gives them their perfection, and being absent, leaves them a merely superficial value. Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
For Emerson, the "highest personal energy" results from self-reliance that has at its heart an immanent God. So, to express the personal energy is to express universal laws and principles: the orator has "an immortality of purpose," and he speaks of "nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the splendors and shades of Heaven and Hell."
Emerson's twin conceptions of eloquence and poetry surface through the explicit conflation of the two arts throughout his work. For example, in "The Poet" he calls the poet "the true and only doctor" and in "Eloquence" (1867) he labels the orator "the physician." Perhaps more clearly, in "The Method of Nature," Emerson compares the eloquence of debators and the literature of poets, describing both as "authoratative and final," and in "The Poet," he lists the orator alongside the "epic rhapsodist" as among those artists who seek to express themselves "symmetrically and abundantly." The power of the poet and the power of the orator are at root the same.
The significance of this conflation is that it situates the purpose of both poetry and rhetoric outside the realm of materialist and sophistic persuasion. Emerson denounces firmly that poetry and rhetoric whose purpose is simply persuasion. In "Eloquence" he argues that such rhetoric is base: certain levels of rhetoric are prioritized so that the top level, yoked to the divine, outstrips lower levels that involve only the day-to-day affairs of mankind. In the transcendentalist vision of poetry and rhetoric, persuasion is a result of divine workings in the world—social action a useful by-product of the divinely inspired poet. As he writes in "Shakespeare; or the Poet," "A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with time and country." The poet is connected to his place and times, but he ultimately transcends those times through universal expression. To conceive of an art that fails to invoke the divine is to fail to transcend the material realm that binds the artist, and transcendence ultimately has the persuasive force of a true rhetoric.
In terms of transcendentalist nature poetry, then, the divine power in nature is prioritized over its rhetorical function: indeed, the rhetorical function is disavowed in favor of the configuration of nature as exclusively divine metaphor. This disavowal can be most clearly seen in poems that concern obviously rhetorical topics but that shift the focus of rhetoric away from social action and back to reflection on the power of divine nature. For example, Charles Timothy Brook's "Channing" constructs the outspoken and eloquent W. E. Channing in natural metaphors for spiritual power. Reflective of the life of Channing (who had secured a church position for Brooks, and whom Emerson lauded as a preeminent orator), the poem self-consciously moves from nature-based, divine power to a suggestion to social change, but that call for change remains invariably tied to a conception of nature as metaphor for divine. The opening stanza ensures that the place of the divine in Channing's life is prioritized:
From the pure upper world to-day
A hallowed memory meets us here, --
A presence lighting all our way
With heavenly thoughts and lofty cheer.
Channing's connection to the "pure upper world" has practical results in the material world in that he lights his parishioners' way in the world. Even so, his guidance is couched in traditionally spiritual terms: "lighting our way" and "heavenly." As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that Channing's connection to divinity results from a unique connection to nature that allows an in-flowing of spiritual power:
And in the broad blue sky above,
In the large book of Nature, then
He felt the greatness of God's love
Rebuke the narrow creeds of men.
Communing there with Nature's word,
Beside the vast and solemn sea,
With awe profound his spirit heard
The holy hymn of Liberty.
Here the power of nature as divine again leads to "Liberty," so that Channing's power as orator, preacher, even poet has concrete rhetorical results. Nonetheless, those results remain couched in terms of divine, natural metaphor. In fact, the rhetorical results depend on the connection to a spiritualized nature.
This interplay between social action and divine, natural metaphor bears out in Emerson's poetry, so that in "Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing," Emerson refutes social activism in favor of contemplation of divine laws. Though speaking of a different Channing than Brooks, Emerson situates his claims for social change, like Brooks, in the immediacy of divine power, not a base rhetoric. Emerson declares he cannot leave his "honied thought/ For the priest's cant, / Or the statesman's rant," and he argues that his studying Channing's "Politique" angers his own muse and results in confusion. He argues, in a famous phrase, that "Things are in the saddle/ And ride mankind," reflecting a belief in the primacy of natural power, a spiritual metaphor, over the political powers of the "blindworm." Ultimately, Emerson returns to his own place in nature to reject the appeals of an empty rhetoric:
Yet do not I invite
The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods,
Nor bid the unwilling senator
Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes
The final stroke is that the universal law divides the world on its own accord, so to seek out action is to fail to connect to universal truths: "He who exterminates/ Races by stronger races,/ Black by white faces,-- / Knows to bring honey/ Out of the lion." Action is literally the natural result of connecting to divinity in nature, and "The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side" because the spiritual power makes the division possible and supplies the muse with her might.
Ultimately, the rhetorical power of transcendentalist nature poetry is best called the power of the divine; spiritual movement may (or may not) result in civic action. This is not to say that nineteenth-century American nature poetry is not rhetorical; indeed, poems such as Emerson's "Ode" demonstrate clearly that a desire for radical change in social structures was desired by, in particular, the transcendentalists. The point here is that poetry and rhetoric are conflated because both are conceived of as issuing from the divine and as acting in accordance with universal principles and essences. When Whitman writes in "Song of the Redwood-tree," for example, that he sees in the Redwood tree "certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, til/ now deferr'd, / Promis'd to be filfill'd [sic], our common kind, the race," he engages in an act of persuasion, but the force of the argument is in its appeal to universal laws that transcend sophistic appeals to social action; even the sound of falling trees sound "of voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling," and echo across the world even "to the deities of the modern henceforth yielding." The spirit of the work, the Poetic, is intended to move the audience to contemplation and, if properly moved, a reconfiguration of social structure. The purpose is ecstasy, the result, possibly, persuasion.
This prioritization of divine ecstasy is absent in most contemporary eco-poetry, and its absence bespeaks an entirely different worldview, one in which nature is seen as location of argument for social change and for dynamic center of revolutionary new visions of civic duty. Indeed, the name "eco-poetry" highlights its rhetorical roots, deriving from environmentalist movements whose purposes are a cultural reconfiguration of the value of nature. Nature, even if vaguely divine for the eco-poet, needs social action to halt its rapid destruction; thus, poetry needs explicitly rhetorical movements to enact that action.
W. S. Merwin's eco-poetry (paralleling his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War) illustrates how poetry becomes an increasingly overt vehicle for social change. In "For a Coming Extinction," nature might be lamented as lost heavenly host, but the power of the poem is in its direct appeals for change; in other words, persuasion is the purpose more than the contemplation of the spiritual force of nature. Hank Lazer suggests that the persuasive element of Merwin's poetry in The Lice, including "For a Coming Extinction" is at root political, closely tied to Merwin's opposition to the Vietnam war. For Lazer, however, Merwin transforms the political into a broad mythology, reliant on spiritual themes. This maneuver to the mythological, however, too easily leads to a reading of Merwin as a poet of contemplation; instead, the move to the mythological highlights the rhetorical function of the poem. The opening lines demonstrate the polemic:
Gray Whale
Now that we are sending you the The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
The invocation of deity, here, is accusatory, immediately condemning humanity for breaking its own civic virtues. The gray whale represents nature and the future connection to divinity, but the certainty of the whale's extinction drives within the poem a call for reform. So, in the final lines of the poem, the condemnation culminates in an ironic request that the whale, at its death, tell the god "That it is we who are important." The irony that humanity is essentially the more significant of the creatures creates a shift of world-view and explicitly calls for change.
Wendell Berry has driven to the heart of this call for change in terms of explicit rhetorical purpose by shifting the idea of morality and virtue from contemplation of transcendental signifiers to social action:
Moral value, as should be obvious, is not separate from other values. An
adequate morality would be ecologically sound; it would be esthetically pleasing. But the point I want to stress here is that it would be practical. Morality is long-term practicality.
The conception of morality as practicality has profound effect on conceptions of poetics and its role in social activism. While Emerson and the transcendentalists might see morality as necessarily linked to experience of nature, that experience is not necessarily yoked to practical, social virtue; Whitman can declare with force that "the greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of moral . . . he knows the soul." By contrast, Berry's morality insists on use, so that that which is moral in terms of ecology must have some practical purpose. Poetry, then, if it is to be part of a virtuous ecological moral system, must have a practical purpose. In short, it needs to be rhetorical.
So, with Merwin, poetry becomes ecological rhetoric. The poem, shifting clearly from its Romantic roots, enters the world of pragmatism, so that in works such as "Witness," nature is tied to the practical world of language in order to ensure a clear signifier between language and nature: language must provide a persuasive message about a slowly ebbing environment:
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak in a
forgotten language
While the poem posits a lost language at the root of understanding nature, the poem's rhetorical turn projects a "forgotten language" if current conditions continue. In fact, the language of the poem attempts to capture that disappearing natural world and its lost language in order to suggest the need for change.
Merwin's rhetoricity is not unique among ecological poets. Leonard Scigaj, in distinguishing between linguistic essentialism and referentiality, asserts that Wendell Berry "is deeply suspicious of those who sever language from its intimacy with action and referentiality . . . ." Similarly, William Rueckert argues that in Gary Snyder's Turtle Island, "Every poem is an action which comes from a finely developed and refined ecological conscience and consciousness. The book enacts a whole program of ecological action; it is offered (like Walden) as a guide book." What both Scigaj and Rueckert approach, in vastly different theoretical analyses, is the rhetorical roots of eco-poets, their need for environmental reform. To suggest that Turtle Island is a "guidebook" for "ecological action" illustrates the degree to which poetry becomes an overt rhetorical document.
Ultimately, the eco-poet might be called cause-centered, declaring the natural world as center to societal reform. Eco-poets are, in fact, eco-critics themselves, shelving notions of nature as solely metaphoric divinity in favor of a conception of nature as potential action, possible location of human reform. While the nineteenth-century nature poet might self-consciously attempt to make the divine real through natural metaphors, and in so doing attempt to obscure the rhetorical act by calling it poetical, the twentieth century eco-poet increasingly writes overtly rhetorical poems. The poem becomes increasingly the location of argument for social change and environmental awareness—not an argument embedded in conceptions of divine poetics and eloquence, but an argument self-consciously rhetorical and overtly persuasive.
Walter Jost has argued that Robert Frost’s "Two Tramps in Mud Time" is a rhetorical document, and he suggests that to best understand the poem, scholars must use rhetorical criticism to conceive of its meaning. Jost’s argument suggests distinctions between what is rhetorical and what is poetical while simultaneously attempting to break down those distinctions. The exercise is useful, not only because it shows the rhetorical vector of poetry (which is so often conceived of as non-rhetorical), but because it highlights how a culture's conceptions of the two arts has significant impact on ideas of selfhood and social responsibility. The distinctions between rhetoric and poetry are, ultimately, bound by different time periods, so to discuss poetry and its relationship to rhetoric depends largely upon the era of literature. The difference between rhetoric and poetics of nineteenth-century environmental writing and twentieth-century eco-poetry highlights the shift from conceptions of nature as divine metaphor to nature as location of social responsibility and action. With this move, the poet becomes a new kind of prophet: no longer is the poet messenger of God, but he/she is instead messenger of civic virtue. In this way, the eco-poet might be called uniquely American, or, at least, uniquely democratic, because eco-poetry is less about specialized, priestly incantations and more about accessibility to people whom the poet hopes to call to action, not simply contemplation.