02 Oct 23 Transcendentalism Revisited:

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles. 

Walt Whitman

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty. 

Ellen Sturgis Hooper

Because reading well can change your life. 

Janice Campbell

In 2021-22, three Monday posts highlighted two of the best-known poets of the Transcendentalist Period in America: Ralph W. Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau. As we make our way through key poetic spirits, we come again to this Period. This post focuses on two more Transcendentalists – Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) and Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812 – 1848). Whitman was arguably the most famous of the Transcendentalist writers, while Hooper, today, is barely a literary footnote in most minds, even those of students of creative poetry. Why so? You know at least one of the answers: Ellen was a woman. Not so obvious is that she died at just 36 years old. Not a 

What was (is) Transcendentalism? Here is a refresher:

Transcendentalism is a philosophical and social movement, which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.

Individualism lies at the heart of Transcendentalism. Every individual needs to be self-reliant and thus not depend upon others if he or she is to be free and to live life fully. Self-empowerment is attained by defying the authority of “empty” conventions and senseless rules.

Transcendentalists believe that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—corrupt the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community can form.

Today’s selection of poems begins with one work by Ellen Sturgis Hooper. It gives us an example from a long list of poems about poets writing poetry. It also echoes Ralph W. Emerson’s long essay, The Poet. Both poems examine the place of the poet in observing and serving humanity. Hooper’s detailed profile of the “magic” of “The Poet’s” work is a veritable directive to the necessity of poetry as a magnifying glass that the observant reader can use to unravel its secrets. Obviously, Hooper believed in the craft.

For anyone interested, yours truly recently created and presented a workshop called “Poets on Poetry.” Many poems of the type Hooper wrote are included. Contact catherineastenzel@gmail.com for a copy. Free! Walt Whitman would approve.

The Poet

by Ellen Sturgis Hooper

He touched the earth, a soul of flame,

His bearing proud, his spirit high,

Filled with the heavens from whence he came,

He smiled upon man’s destiny.

Yet smiled as one who knew no fear,

And felt a secret strength within,

Who wondered at the pitying tear

Shed over human loss and sin.

Lit by an inward brighter light,

Than aught that round about him shone,

He walked erect through shades of night,

Clear was his pathway—but how lone!

Men gaze in wonder and in awe

Upon a form so like to theirs,

Worship the presence, yet withdraw,

And carry elsewhere warmer prayers.

Yet when the glorious pilgrim guest,

Forgetting once his strange estate,

Unloosed the lyre from off his breast

And strung its chords to human fate;

And gaily snatching some rude air,

Carrolled by idle passing tongue,

Gave back the notes that lingered there,

And in Heaven’s tones earth’s low lay sung;

Then warmly grasped the hand that sought

To thank him with a brother’s soul,

And when the generous wine was brought,

Shared in the feast and quaffed the bowl;—

Men laid their hearts low at his feet,

And sunned their being in his light,

Pressed on his way his steps to greet,

And in his love forgot his might.

And when, a wanderer long on earth,

On him its shadow also fell,

And dimmed the lustre of a birth,

Whose day-spring was from heaven’s own well;

They cherished even the tears he shed,

Their woes were hallowed by his woe,

Humanity, half cold and dead,

Had been revived in genius’ glow.

For You O Democracy

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

I will make divine magnetic lands,

                   With the love of comrades,

                      With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,

                   By the love of comrades,

                      By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

For You O Democracy

by Walt Whitman

  Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

I will make divine magnetic lands,

                   With the love of comrades,

                      With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,

                   By the love of comrades,

                      By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

Beat! Beat! Drums!

by Walt Whitman

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying,

Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;

Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,

No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?

Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?

Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?

Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,

Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,

Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,

Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,

Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,

So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Background

Ellen Sturgis Hooper died of tuberculosis in 1848, at the age of 36. Her poems were published in Transcendentalist periodicals during her lifetime. After her death, her son Ned printed her poems for private distribution, in an edition of just 8 copies. Several of her poems were also included in hymnals and anthologies.

Biographical information on Hooper is scant. We do know that she was married with children, friends with Margaret Fuller, and her relationship to famous men like William Ellery Channing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, Sr.

Ellen’s father was a sea captain and co-owner of a large merchant trading firm; her mother was the daughter of a judge. At age fourteen, Ellen’s beloved older brother died in a tragic accident, an event that completely unhinged her mother, who in her grief was no longer care for Ellen and her other children. Ellen, as the second oldest child, wound up being mother to her younger siblings. 

Although many other Transcendentalists became active in various social justice causes, such as abolition, Ellen followed her duty in another direction; according to Dykstra, “Ellen’s husband and three children were the heart of her life.” This makes sense, given Ellen’s experience of her own mother, who had in grief over the death of one child abandoned all her other children. After her third child and favorite child, Clover, was born in 1843, Ellen’s tuberculosis again grew worse. Ellen died in 1848, when Clover was only five years old, and before her death Ellen must have wondered and worried about what would happen to her children after she died. Who would be a mother to them, once she was dead? She found no easy religious or spiritual answer to such a difficult question. Ephraim Peabody, minister of King’s Chapel, who officiated at her funeral, wrote that in her last year of life she had become “almost a mystic.”

 

Walt Whitman American poet, essayist and journalist, was not widely known or celebrated in his lifetime. Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is often thought of now as the United States’ great poet-philosopher and poet of the people—a humanitarian, a poetic genius, and a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In his central book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, he celebrated democracy, nature, love, sexual liberation, and friendship. This expansive work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, championed American individuality and the power of the collective, and found beauty and reassurance in life as well as in death. 

Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.

During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C. and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. A stroke near the end of life hastened the decline of his health. When he died at the age of 72, his funeral was a public event.

Whitman's influence on poetry remains strong. Art historian Mary Berenson wrote, "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him." Moderniest poet, Ezra Pound, called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."

Exploration 1: Do female writers from the Transcendental Era deserve more artistic (and social) credit than do male writers of the same period?

Exploration 2: How could women of this creative period find their way among male writers, especially essayists?

Exploration 3: Are there parallels to today with Whitman’s poetic and social sentiments in “O Democracy”?