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The Date of Emerson's Terminus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Carl F. Strauch
Carl F. Strauch*
Affiliation:
Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pa.
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Extract

Whether scholars and anthologists have assigned a precise date of composition to Terminus or not, the general impression has been that Emerson wrote the poem upon approaching old age. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson implied that it was written in the 'sixties:

In the month of December, 1866, I, returning from six months on a Western railroad, met my father in New York just setting out for his winter's journey to the West, and we spent the night together at the St. Denis Hotel. He read me some poems that he was soon to publish in his new volume, May Day, and among them Terminus. I was startled, for he, looking so healthy, so full of life and young in spirit, was reading his deliberate acknowledgment of failing forces and his trusting and serene acquiescence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , June 1950 , pp. 360 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

1 Emerson in Concord (Boston, 1890), pp. 183, 257; Complete Works, Ix, 489-490. The passage is in Journals, x, 42.

2 Kennedy, “Clews to Emerson's Mystic Verse”, The American Author (June 1903), p. 226; Page, ed. The Chief American Poets (Boston, c. 1905), p. 101, col. 2; Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, c. 1941), p. 360; Rusk, ed. Letters of Emerson (New York, 1939), v, 339, n.

3 See George Willis Cooke, A Bibliography of Emerson (Boston, 1908), pp. 25, 40.

4 See Journals, vIII, 50, with the dates I mention on pp. 48 and 60. The first two lines had been written, however, as early as July 26,1840 (ibid., v, 444).362

5 The quatrain appears in Journals, vIII, 327.367

6 To the Latin quotation from Bacon (vIII, 134) Emerson attaches the title De Fontibus Juris, Aphor. 6—not the actual title of a work by Bacon, but a significant phrase from the heading of a subdivision of “Liber Octavus” of De Augmentis Scientiarum. See The Works of Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (London, 1875), I, 803-805.

7 See William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1770), I,41, 43, for the passage.

8 Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr., ed. Young Emerson Speaks (Boston, 1938), p. 184

9 For Emerson's own dating of Days see Journals, vIII, 273-274.

10 See my article, “The Daemonic and Experimental in Emerson”, in a forthcoming issue of The Personalist.

11 See my article, “The MS Relationships of Emerson's ‘Days’”, forthcoming in PQ.

12 A. Warren Stearns, ed. “Four Emerson Letters to Dr. Daniel Parker”, The Tuftonian, I (Nov. 1940), 9. The text as printed has the phrasing, “a consolation to far ones.” For my disagreement see the photograph of the MS on the same page.

13 I wish to thank the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association for permission to use MSS owned by it and housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; and I wish also to thank Mr. William A. Jackson, Curator of the Houghton Library, for the use of apparatus in the reading of erasures in the MSS.