Emerson and Other Essays — Text and Context

Emerson as a Weapon Against the Masses

Chapman frames Emerson’s entire career as a sustained protest: 'The unending warfare between the individual and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a musician who exalts and deifies the individual.' He insists that Emerson’s opinions are so abstract that they cannot be turned into dogma—'Schools cannot be built on it.' Yet Chapman himself is not shy about using Emerson as a cudgel. He quotes Emerson’s dismissal of 'shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers' without irony, and he amplifies the elitism. The essay is as much a performance of Chapman’s own pugnacious individualism as it is a study of Emerson.

Whitman: Spontaneous Body, False Sentiment

Chapman’s Whitman is a paradox: a poet of 'the spontaneous and unaccountable functioning of the mind and body in health,' yet also 'unreal' in his treatment of human relations. He praises 'When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed' as a lyric where 'grief, overwhelming grief, is in every line of it,' but he dismisses Whitman’s talk of comradeship as 'gush and sentiment' false to American life. The critique is blunt: 'The man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part of it.' Chapman’s admiration for Whitman’s physical joy—'the throb of the whole physical system'—is undercut by his insistence that Whitman lacked 'human passion.'

Browning and the Social World

In contrast to Whitman’s isolation, Chapman presents Robert Browning as a poet who 'deals constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life out of the close relationships, the ties, the duties and desires of the human heart.' Browning is 'a guide-book or a note-book, a highly trained and intelligent companion.' This framing reveals Chapman’s criteria: literature is valuable insofar as it engages with social complexity. The essay on Browning, like the others, is less a systematic analysis than a series of forceful assertions. Chapman’s voice—opinionated, aphoristic, and unafraid of contradiction—gives the collection its unity.

Chapman’s essays reward readers who enjoy strong, idiosyncratic literary criticism. He does not hide his biases; he flaunts them. The collection is best approached not as a balanced survey but as a series of provocations, each essay a performance of the very individualism it champions. Readers may disagree with Chapman’s judgments—his dismissal of Whitman’s sentiment, his embrace of Emerson’s elitism—but they will find his arguments bracing and his prose memorable.

Chapman’s insistence on a fierce, private self feels less like a lecture than a hand on the shoulder. I found myself thinking of an older, quieter voice that made room for the same stubbornness in its own way — The works of Richard Hurd, volume 3 (of 8) — Themes and Context, where the arguments whisper rather than shout. That contrast seems fitting for a Sunday afternoon.