Emerson and Melancholia

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a poet and essayist during the Romanticism Period. The Romantic Period of Literature was a time where people wrote things based on religion, feelings, intuition, patriotism, love, nature, and the exact opposite of the reason and the logic of Rationalism. He was considered a Romanticist early in his career, but he later gave that up and is now considered a transcendentalist poet. Transcendentalists are those who went off of intuition and to find the meaning of something took a long process of thought and examination. Ralph Waldo Emerson has written many things, including Self-Reliance, and Nature, a very famous piece of work. The criticism on Emerson says that he basically goes through changes in life that has therefore shown up in his writing, common to the Romanticism time period. "What Freud characterizes as the progression from narcissistic attachment to melancholia to mania is the movement central to the great Romantic lyrics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens, to all of the poets of certain loss and qualified restitution" ("Emerson..."). So what were these changes? It says he progressed from narcissistic attachment to melancholia to mania. But what are those things? Narcissistic is being self-obsessed, basically. One is in love with oneself. They are self centered, and they do not notice much outside of themselves. Melancholia is the state of being overwhelmed by one's life to the point where they become depressed and sad, and they are like that most of the time. Mania is being excited with something, being again obsessed with it, like it is the newest and most popular thing around. These progressions are obvious in his work, such as Self-Reliance. It is interesting how Emerson goes through these changes, and even though they are completely different from each other as compared individually, one can see how they are linked together. If a narcissist, one who is self-obsessed, self reflects and sees how his life is not the way he wants it to be, then he could become depressed and saddened therefore emerging into melancholia. But what about the switch from melancholia to mania? "Freud would perhaps stigmatize this exuberance as mania, the exultation which follows upon an achieved work of melancholia, when 'a large expenditure of psychical energy, long maintained or habitually occurring has at last become unnecessary, so that it is available for numerous applications and possibilities of discharge….'" ("Emerson"). Well, this has happened numerous times before. For example in response to the scientific ways of the Rationalism Period, there came the Romanticism Period. This was quite the opposite, and it came on strong. This is the same idea with the different generations. This is the stages Ralph Waldo Emerson went through with his life and his writing, since poets lives were usually connected with their writing. This is another common style of the Romanticism Literature Period. "Freud, against his own wishes, has provided us with a map of that process in which the self is constituted by powers not its own, and initiates a self-wounding drama of exorcism and incorporation whose final issue will be nothing better than a motive to begin the process once again. This unfolding act of self-destroying self-invention, which is at odds with our humanistic ethical principles, may in fact be the driving force within what we have come to call the Romantic sublime" ("Emerson"). This criticism is interesting that it explains the switch and progression of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it did an excellent job explaining Emerson's life and the connection of that to his life.

Works Cited

"Emerson and the Work of Melancholia." Raritan (Spring 1987). Quoted as "Emerson and the Work of Melancholia" in Bloom, Harold, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Updated Edition, Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2006. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=1&iPin=MCVRWE007&SingleRecord=True (accessed November 7, 2010).