Emerson as a Rhetorician

ACCORDING TO JAMES ELLIOT CABOT, Emerson remarked late in his life that he would have become a professor of rhetoric at Harvard College had the position been offered to him. Emerson lends credence to this view of a vocational path not taken when he asks in his journal in 1862, “Why has never the poorest country college offered me a professorship of rhetoric?” For Emerson, the question is and isn't rhetorical, as he suggests in the bifurcated response by which he seems to offer an answer: “I think I could have taught an orator, though I am none” (JMN 15: 246). Unlike Adams Sherman Hill, who became the fifth Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard in 1876 and was the author of the influential handbook The Principles of Rhetoric and Their Application (1878), Emerson was never offered the professorship. This despite the fact that Emerson celebrated throughout his work and embodied in his lecture career the value of what he names, by way of Isocrates, “the orator's office,” going so far as to evaluate Hill in his office, observing his rhetoric classroom in 1875 while serving as a Harvard Overseer.

Nevertheless, a long-standing assumption from Cabot forward has been that Emerson somehow failed in his desire to be a rhetorician. To reckon with the rhetorical Emerson, which is to say, to understand him as a writer who both performed and professed rhetorical thinking, is thus to trace something of that elusive circulation of truth he represents in “Progress of Culture,” the 1867 Phi Beta Kappa address that marked his return to Harvard. There, echoing back to his essay “Circles,” Emerson characterizes “[t]ruth in the intellectual world” as one whose “centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere” (CW 8: 116).

Rhetoric may be centered everywhere in Emerson's work, circulating among his journals, lectures, and essays, yet his rhetorical legacy has been difficult to describe with any finitude. Emerson was certainly at the center of nineteenth-century American rhetorical culture, given his status as one of the most prominent lecturers of his era, America's “first public intellectual,” as Lawrence Buell proposes.