Voices of a Nation

The American Scholar has an interesting article about 19th century American writers, struggling to discover who they were and who we are.

From the piece...

Henry David Thoreau once famously said that Americans lead lives of quiet desperation, that flitting circumstances cause our distraction and that, despite Christianity and candles, we sit in the dark. There, in a nutshell, is the conundrum of the 19th-century American writer who frowned on the country’s aesthetic lassitude, its getting and spending, its fundamental malaise—and yet wanted, above all, to create a language commensurate with a luminous, moral vision of national freedom; what could be more American?

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s spiritual cheerleader, complained. The writer, the American writer, would be different. “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands,” Emerson continued, “we will speak our own minds.” But though Emerson’s call for self-reliance is one of the common­places of American literature, not until I began systematically assembling material for my anthology of 19th-century American writers on writing did I understand how these authors, who frequently meditated on craft or style, also anguished about what self-reliance, to them as writers, truly meant.