Emerson's Geographical Imagination: Private Journeys of Grief and Healing Through the American Landscape‪.‬

The historicizing tendency in contemporary criticism of Emerson often leads scholars to interpret the American landscapes in his writing as pointedly political: Emerson is seen as complicit in American imperialism. This paper balances those interpretations with an examination of the role of geography in Emerson's efforts to cope with personal loss and grief in his life. It first identifies the 1844 essay "Experience" as a particularly rich locus of Emerson's landscapes--actual and ideal, political and emotional, public and private. The body of the paper then explores Emerson's periodic trips into the mountains of New England as described in his journals, letters, poems, and sermons. It argues first that Emerson uses a representation of the landscape in "Experience" to help him cope with the death of his son by reenacting his 1831 "journey of healing" after the death of his first wife. The second section identifies a pattern in Emerson's life of retreating into the landscape to deal with trauma throughout the 1830s, paying special attention to what the increasingly figurative landscapes tell us about Emerson's intellectual and spiritual development. It then examines the 1842 poem "Threnody" as an early attempt to deal with grief according to this pattern before the more successful "Experience" two years later. The third section considers the shift from a New England landscape to a Western one in "Experience," not from the public narrative of westward expansion, but from the private narrative of Emerson's development as a writer. By tracing the role of the landscape in Emerson's artistic life, culminating in his admission that the New England landscape no longer inspired him to poetry as it once had, it argues that for Emerson, the mourner's journey of healing becomes inseparable from the poet's search for new language. The essay concludes by reconsidering the national landscape of "Experience" in light of the very personal landscapes explored here, and suggests that Emerson is in fact using his own experience of suffering to question the national narrative of the settlement of the West. **********