...whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man, belongs...is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent,...

...street. . .the news of the boat. . .the glance of the eye. . .the shop, the plough and ledger . . . We have listened too long to the courtly muses of...is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. . .we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.' Telescoped...

...earth. And when he declares that "the world is nothing, the man is all," it is only to reaffirm that "the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives,...prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar." Rising from "hope" to "confidence," he declares, summarily, that a "nation of men will for the first...

...whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs,...is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent,...

...whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs,...all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar.9 A distinctive feature of Emerson's reflections on power is that he associates a mythic self...

...address at Harvard in 1837, "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe" and lamented that "The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame," he was only saying what scores of American commencement speakers had said before. The United States...

...of man," for the "new importance given to the single person," the task of embodying which belonged, "by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar."43 Clearly the deforming power of society itself was the mortal enemy of such confidence:...

...conceive it which makes us pause and consider. 78 *Seldes surely recalled this sentence from Emerson's "American Scholar": "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." Seldes sounded like a more polite, less caustic alter ego of HL Mencken. Seldes would change his tune,...

...Society articulated most of the concerns, sometimes in more or less the same terms, of later artists: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of...is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent,...

...construction of the American scholar as a distinctive racial identity. "Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs,...prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar," Emerson concludes (Essays, 70). Almost a decade after the 1837 address, Emerson expressed a concern...