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Masters of Chiasmus: Ralph Waldo Emerson (Part 1)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

An examination of the most reputable quote books—Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the Columbia Dictionary of Quotations—will reveal that Emerson is the most frequently-quoted American author of all time. While his essays can sometimes be ponderous, many of his sentences are crisp and very quotable. One critic even called him "the philosopher of the sentence." And, happily, some of his best sentences are perfect examples of chiasmus.

Emerson is not only one of history's most quoted people, Robert Frost listed him as one of "my four greatest Americans," alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In his "On Emerson" essay, Frost even composed a wonderful chiastic observation about him: "Emerson's name has gone as a poetic philosopher or as a philosophical poet, my favorite kind of both."

Emerson seemed to think of himself as both a poet and a philosopher, and often tried to bridge the gap between these two ancient and often antithetical endeavors:

This observation, from Emerson's Nature (1836), was probably inspired by the famous chiastic line from Ode on a Grecian Urn, written by John Keats in 1819: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Stimulated by Frost's earlier observation, I believe it's possible to say that Emerson was one of only a handful of people in history who've been able to successfully bring poetry to philosophy and philosophy to poetry. And when it came to philosophy, Emerson was influenced by thinkers from both the Western and the Eastern tradition, but he appeared to have a special fondness for one Greek philosopher in particular:

"Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato."

A chiastic compliment like this is just about the best thing that can be said about someone who absolutely dominates a field of endeavor. In the early 1990s, one could have said essentially the same thing about Michael Jordan and the NBA. By the way, Emerson is not alone in extolling Plato's importance. Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

After becoming an ordained minister in his early twenties, Emerson spent the remainder of his adult life shedding religious doctrine and moving further and further away from organized religion. He was often critical of the religious leaders of his day. Railing against clergyman with screwed-up priorities, he once wrote:

And in The Preacher (1867) he wrote these oft-quoted lines:

The "old story" phrase at the beginning of the quote suggests that the sentiment was well known when Emerson was writing. In fact, it had been well known for centuries. The original observation was created more than 250 years earlier, when religious dissidents were making their break with the church of Rome. John Jewel, an Anglican bishop who is considered the father of English Protestantism, wrote in 1609: "In old time we had treen chalices and golden priests, but now we have treen priests and golden chalices."

Treen is not a commonly-used word these days, but it's one of those great Anglo-Saxon words whose meaning you can almost guess by examining the word itself (here's a hint-think tree). Treen means "wooden" (those of you who are a little long in the tooth may even recall the word "treenware"). Here are a couple more of Emerson's chiastic quotes with a religious or moral theme:

Emerson was not only fond of using chiasmus in his writing, he appeared to enjoy chiasmus in the works of other writers. Here's another:

This observation reflects an age-old irony about wedlock—many who are married wish they weren't, and vice versa. Like the John Jewel quote earlier, the sentiment was not original with Emerson, he was simply recalling a memorable passage from one of his favorite writers, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who described marriage this way in 1580: "It may be compared to a cage, the birds without try desperately to get in, and those within try desperately to get out."

 Continue to Part 2

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