Analysis Of Emerson's The American Scholar

Apart from the stronger focus on the common life, the importance rendered to the individual was another political phenomenon characteristic of the time, which is in line with and also adds to Emerson’s idea of an American scholar, who has to be someone who “take(s) up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contribution of the past, all the hopes of the future” and becomes “a university of knowledges”. Emerson therefore claim that the American scholars should refuse the “courtly muses of Europe” and “walk on [their] own feet; … work with [their] own hands; … speak out [their] own minds”.
Emerson’s “The American Scholar” has been widely regarded as America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence” (Holmes).
If the ideal Man and

Almost being deliberately contradictory to the common belief in Shakespeare’s individual genius, the very first thing that Emerson says about Shakespeare is that Shakespeare is born out of his time and country. Shakespeare’s power lies not in his ability to create, but in his ability to sympathize with the people of his time. Instead of spinning ideas out of his own head as if they come from nowhere, he is taken forward by the “rivers of thoughts and events … [and] the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries” (111). Emerson does not render genius to Shakespeare himself; instead, he takes this genius away from Shakespeare and gives it to “the human race” that “has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the rivers” (112). Shakespeare’s genial power, says Emerson, lies not in “being original at all, [but] in being altogether receptive” (112), just as the ideal scholar, who “breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts”, and is

In his paper “American Literary Nationalism and the Cultural Politics of De-Nationalizing Shakespeare”, Engler demonstrated how in the early 19th century, the Americans, feeling discouraged by Shakespeare’s overwhelming genius while endeavoring to establish a distinct national literature, tried different strategies to denationalize Shakespeare, in order to make him their own. Methods include disregarding the Britishness of Shakespeare’s works as the mere surface and demonstrating that Shakespeare’s genius lies actually in not being contaminated by anything British; elevating Shakespeare into a universal genius so that the Americans can claim him their own. Coming to the analysis of “Shakespeare; or The Poet”, Emerson’s act of rendering Shakespeare’s genius to his ability to absorb and transform the “structure of feeling” of his time was read by Engler as a way of discrediting the bard, in order to liberate the American writers from the pervasive influence Shakespeare had in the literary class in the nineteenth century. Engler failed to see the connection between “The American Scholar” and Emerson’s treatment of Shakespeare in this later essay, and how, by arguing Shakespeare’s genius as being “receptive”, Emerson, instead of questioning that very genius, was portraying the bard as the representative man, the representative poet, from whom the American writers can learn. Precisely because Shakespeare’s