Emerson’s prose-style. What are its merits and demerits

Emerson’s prose-style is noted for its aphoristic quality and its epigrammatic terseness. The essay is with him, as with Bacon, a series of short, quotable assertions without the logical unity of the discourse, but all bound together by the intellectual atmosphere of the source from whence they proceed. Very many of the sentences are remarkable for their force, subtlety, and impressiveness, and some for their poetical beauty. The imagery is of great range, from the sun and stars and down to the meanest weed or insect, and the diction is quaint and original but not in the lest affected. With Emerson prose is the other harmony, i.e. poetry. He is one of the greatest writers of poetic-prose. His sentences have the rhythm and cadence of poetry.

He has used a number of stylistic devices such as figures of speech, analogy, antithetically balanced sentences, epigrams, rhetorical etc. The use of these various devices can easily be illustrated from any of his essays – For example take the following: “It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men” Here there is the fine cooperative contact achieved between the phrases, “the lips of Etna” and “the throat of Vesuvius” and between the verbs lightens and illuminates, enabling Emerson to repeat himself without repetition.

The perception of analogy takes also the less direct and more forceful form of metaphor. Literary fashions are seen as “the mere remains of foreign harvests.” He expects confidently a time, “when the intellect of this continent will look out from its iron lids.” The young scholar is, “a school boy under the bending dome of day.” Books are lamps to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.

To the poet’s privilege of metaphor, Emerson adds the idealist’s prerogative of paradox, which is at once a way of seeing things as well as a way of saying them. It is a philosopher’s game, played with appearance and reality. Diversity and even contrariness are to him only a dramatic presentation of some great designs. “The drop is a small ocean,” “The near explains the far,” “One design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench”, and, of course, the most basic paradox of all is the one in which, “Everything that tends to insulate the individual ……tends to true union as well as greatness.”

Emerson reminds us often of Milton, specially in The American Scholar, by his eloquence, by the amplitude and sweep of his 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 epigram and the greatness of antithesis. He has a whole series of antithetically balanced sentences, where he describes how experience becomes truth and art in the crucible of the scholar’s mind. Readily noticeable also is the skilful use of rhetorical devices, like inversion, repetition or interrogation. “Emerson has the poet’s ear for the music of words, and something even of the more obvious phonetic and musical satisfaction of verse may be found in Emerson’s prose. Apart from the usual balancing of sound with the sense, characteristic of the antithetical construction, we notice also the devices of rhythm, the balancing of sound through repetition and contrast in passages like this one:

“Every day, the sun; and after sunset. Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women cover sing and beholding.”

According to a noted critic, it is idle to analyse Emerson’s style, if we think of style as meaning order and arrangement: for his method of writing—by stringing together selections from his note-books—made it impossible that his works should have any continuity of thought or unity of expression. But if we think of style simply as manner, as the reflection of personality, and then consider Emerson’s most characteristic paragraphs which suggest stars, flowers and glimmering crystals, then there is no style to compare with his in our literature.

There can be no denying the fact that Emerson is one of the greatest of prose-stylist in the English language, but he has also glaring faults and short-comings. He lacked the gift of sustained construction. His style is best illustrated in selected passages. The sentences are terse, vital, epigrammatic; yet they are always poetic rather than practical, and always hint at much more than they express. Because he lives much out of doors and is intimate with earth, air and water, Emerson’s figures have an elemental quality unlike those of any other writer. 

The dew and fragrance of the morning are in all his works. Because he has read widely he gives an air of culture to the most homely matters by associating them with the great characters and the great books of the world. He has a large vocabulary at perfect command, but his instinct leads him to the simplest and most picturesque words. He chooses his expressions from the most unexpected places, here from the nursery, there from the Apocalypse or from the mystic books of the East; and not even Lowell approaches him in the ability to clothe his thought in a new dress, making its appeal as fresh and original as if it had been spoken in Eden at the spring time of the world.

Emerson is always striving after eloquence of expression, not to convince his hearers—such a personal motive would never occur to him—but simply because it is in his blood, because eloquence seems to hi Man’s natural expression, his unconscious reflection of his harmony with the universe.