THE AMPHIBIOUS SELF

“Experience” signals a break in Emerson's development, and there seems to be a general perception that the “late” Emerson can be dated roughly from that essay. But how his transformation occurred, and how we are to value it, are more difficult questions. “Acquiescence,” Stephen E. Whicher's loaded term, has dictated the assessment, and I suspect the teaching, of Emerson since the 1950s, with a resulting stress on the importance of the work of the late 1830s. In this model, “Experience” exploded the romantic ethos of the earlier work and forced Emerson to retreat into chastened final commentary on “fate.” But this explanation has obscured a full sense of Emerson's enormous creative achievement in the late 1840s and 1850s. The break “Experience” signals is better understood as the movement toward an ethical pragmatism, a growing insistence that the ideal must be experienced in and through the world of fact, time, and social relations. “Experience,” especially in its conclusion, suggests that direction, but it is best understood through the texture of the entire volume of Essays: Second Series, from which only “The Poet” and “Experience” have achieved much stature in the Emerson canon. “Experience” was certainly the most compelling expression of Emerson's pragmatic reaction to the polarities of experience, but the significance of its conclusion is amplified by other essays in the volume.