I want to start by thanking all of you for coming out on a lovely Sunday afternoon to spend some time with me. I would also like to thank Nan Fischlein and the Emily Dickinson Museum for asking me here today. It is an extraordinary honor for me to be a part of the series, especially when I look ahead to the offerings later in the summer. I see that Susan Hess will be speaking here next Sunday, and the poet Maxine Silverman on July 27. 

Also, after returning literally this morning from a visit with family in California, I can borrow from Emily's January 17, 1848 letter to her friend Abiah Root:  "Never did Amherst look more lovely to me, and gratitude rose in my heart to God, for granting me such a safe return to my own dear home."

So, now on to our journey this afternoon.  Before we get going, it may help to explain a little about Roaring Forties Press and the ArtPlace series.  These books(and the Transcendentalists book is the third in a series of seven so far) explore the interactions between art and place.  The books examine artists (or in my case a group of artists) and the places they lived and worked with the aim of exploring how landscape, culture and history combine to spark and fan the fires of creative genius.  They are meant to bring the reader on a journey (either figuratively or literally) to those places most associated with those artists.  The story of how I came to do one of these books is a journey as well.  

As was mentioned in the introduction, I was an English teacher for 9 years before I became a writer.  Well, I guess I was a writer all along, but it took a stroke of luck for me to become a book author.  I had submitted my resignation to the school where I worked and was prepared to spend a year trying to start a career as a freelance writer when, literally a month before school ended, a friend of mine emailed me to ask if I knew of any writers in the New England area willing to take on a book project.  I just so happened to be a writer in New England willing to take on a book project, and when I found out that it was to be a literary travel guide, I could not believe my luck.  Well, that turned out to be this book and I had so much fun doing this one that I decided to do one on Ireland's Literary Revival, (which is here), and one on England's Lake District Poets, (which is still in the works).

When I began work on the Transcendentalists, I started by looking around for a few concise definitions of Transcendentalism.  One of the first definitions I found came from a minister named Father Taylor, who was a friend and colleague of the Transcendentalists.  He defined Transcendentalism as "a seagull with long wings, lean body, poor feathers, and miserable meat."  Not very helpful.

The writer Rebecca Harding Davis characterized its followers as "hordes of wild-eyed Harvard undergraduates and lean, underpaid working-women, each with a disease of the soul to be cured by the new healer." 

Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, got in on the act, calling the hometown of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the center of Transcendentalism, the Boston suburb of Concord  "a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals."  

It's not surprising that when the British novelist Charles Dickens came to Boston and inquired about Transcendentalism, he was told that "whatever is unintelligible would certainly be transcendental."  Clearly, these answers were not going to help me, so I went to the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. This house was home to Ralph Waldo Emerson from 1834 to 1835 and to Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne from 1842-1845. 

While Emerson lived at the Manse with his mother, he wrote the book that quickly became one of the core documents of Transcendentalism: Nature. The book begins with this remarkable challenge:

The forgoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes.  Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?  Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Then follows an Emersonian, and therefore Transcendentalist solution:  go spend time in nature, and see what new ideas this brings. 

Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?

It seems particularly telling that Emerson wrote these words, with their central metaphor of "the flood of life," looking out at the river from the window of his study.  As he states, however, "to go out into solitude [to achieve our ‘original relation'], a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society."  Emerson made good on this premise by going out daily to walk the hills, forests, and meadows of his chosen town of Concord.  He let neither the elements nor the demands of society keep him from his walks.

Emerson is also clear about the benefits of the move into nature:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.  There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.  Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- a mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

It  was in these passages from Nature that Transcendentalism first came alive for me, and I structured the book around what I view as Transcendentalism's central quest:  to forge an original relationship with the universe or, as Emerson puts it, to behold "God and nature face to face."

So, what quickly became interesting to me was how this group of writers, philosophers, poets, activists and dreamers conducted their quests.  Where did they go for that "face to face" interaction?  How does one forge one's own unique relationship with the universe?

That idea of a quest helped me through the writing of the book, but I also had to take the photographs that accompany the text.  And in taking those pictures, I tried to be Emerson's eyeball.  I tried to see all and vanish into nothing.  Not an easy trick standing on the Boston Common in the middle of rush hour.  But I tried. 

And, after the book was published, and I was putting together an collection of photographs from the book for an exhibition at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, I realized that Transcendentalism was more than just a quest to create that unique place for one's self in the universe, it was also a way of seeing the universe -- not just looking, but truly seeing.  The Transcendentalists were both unfailingly dedicated to the careful study of the natural world and unequivocal about the benefits.  Again, from Emerson's Nature, I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me."  And Henry David Thoreau challenges us, with his usual play on words, to go beyond looking to really seeing:  "Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer."  He was also the one who claimed that he had done a great deal of traveling...in Concord.  He did this by walking each day and noticing things nobody else would see.

It is perhaps no surprise to this crowd that the person who was met Emerson's challenge and was clearly much, much more than a student was probably the least traveled.  Although Emily Dickinson did make trips to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and of course her long sojourn in South Hadley at Mount Holyoke, she seemed to prefer more the journeys of the imagination, especially when prompted, like Wordsworth and Emerson before her, by what she's seen.  In this poem, she tilts her head upwards to follow in her mind the trail of bees and butterflies:

           

A little road not made of man,

Enabled of the eye,

Accessible to the thill of bee,

Or cart of butterfly

 

If town it have, beyond itself,

‘Tis that I cannot say;

I only sigh, -- no vehicle

Bears me along that way

 

And even when the roads lead to more earthly destinations, Dickinson is still satisfied (and rightly so), with seeing things in her mind.

           

I never saw a moor

I never saw the sea;

Yet know I how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be

 

I never spoke with God

Nor visited in heaven;

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the chart were given

 

In fact, it seems that she recognizes the power of her imagination to create riches from what she sees:

 

‘Tis little I could care for pearls

Who own the ample sea;

Or brooches, when the Emperor

With Rubies pelteth me;

 

Or gold, who am the Prince of Mines;

Or diamonds, when I see

A Diadem to fit a dome

Continual crowning me.

 

That is not to say that she dismissed the value of what she could see with her eyes.  As someone who actually had to travel to Cambridge for uncomfortable eye treatments (at which the doctor forbid her to write and even took her pen from her, forcing her to use an pencil she must have snuck in), vision is not something Dickinson takes lightly.  Like her predecessor, the visionary British poet William Blake, When Dickinson does turn her eyes to something, she sees it as well as something else:  From that "narrow fellow in the grass" to the trains she saw from her bedroom that

           

"lap the miles,/And lick the valleys up

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step

 

Around a pile of mountains,

And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare

 

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill

 

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop - docile and omnipotent -

At its own stable door.

 

In one poem, she even goes so far as to portray the last moments of vision before a person's passing.  In this poem, she locates, as many do, the last flickers of life, in the eyes.  She wonders what those eyes are looking for, and what comfort they find in what they've seen.

 

I've seen a dying eye

Run round and round a room

In search of something, as it seemed,

Then cloudier become;

And then, obscure with fog,

And then be soldered down,

Without disclosing what it be,

‘Twere blessed to have seen.

 

Nor is this in any way suggesting that Emily Dickinson shied away from seeing the truth of things - that she somehow hid behind her imagination.  When Thoreau went to Walden, he said it was to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Although Dickinson never walked the shores of Walden Pond, or even went to Concord, she clearly lived deliberately, fronted the facts of life, and lived her life to the fullest.  And even though she was never invited to one of the famous conversation groups Emerson held at his house, when Emerson extolled his audience, "to see God face to face,"  Dickinson knows the way.  In fact, where others put their eyeballs (transparent or otherwise), Emily puts up her soul:

 

Before I got my eye put out,

I liked as well to see

As other creatures that have eyes,

And know no other way.

 

But were it told to me today,

That I might have the sky

For mine, I tell you that my heart

Would split, for the size of me.

 

The meadows mine, the mountains mine, --

All forests, stintless stars,

As much of noon as I could take

Between my finite eyes.

 

The motions of the dipping birds,

The lightning's jointed road,

For mine to look at when I liked, --

The news would strike me dead!

 

So safe, guess, with just my soul

Upon the window-pane

Where other creatures put their eyes,

Incautious of the sun.

 

And perhaps that is the best place for us to end, with our souls upon the window pane."  I believe it is the best way to create what Emerson called "an original relation with the universe" -- something that Dickinson, perhaps more than Emerson himself, or even Thoreau, was able to do through her vision, her imagination, and her poetry.

Thank you so much for your time and wonderful attention.  I would also like to thank Nan Fischlein and the Emily Dickinson Museum again for having me.