Here is the link to the Google Doc in case it doesn’t appear correctly: (waves for thought).

Writing this final project was like being aboard the Virginia Reel, twisting, turning, pivoting, plummeting, rising, and falling. My time with Emerson was personally revolutionary; I carry his call for fierce individualism and the necessity for one’s relationship with nature with me. I look up at the clouds we walk under and see my reflection in the waves of the turtle pond, bonding with the world around me and forming my own relationship with it. I hear my classmates talk about their education, their days, and I hear the murmuring heartbeat of America’s past, present, and future. In everything, I see Emerson’s message and call to action. And that is why I saw it reflected throughout Melville’s novel, Moby Dick. 

Though there is no evidence that Melville read or regularly engaged with Emerson’s “American Scholar,” his novel Moby Dick can be read in dialogue with and in reflection on Emerson’s work, affirming Emerson’s overarching call for experimental learning, intellectual independence, and the value of nature. By reading Moby Dick as a reflection of Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” the novel becomes a living fossil of the American Renaissance and an attempt to realize Emerson’s American individuality through scholarly work. Reading Melville’s work alongside Emerson’s touches on one of Emerson’s central messages throughout “The American Scholar”: individuality. It is in the combined effort and mediations of multiple diverse scholars that we find the call to action posed to scholars in America’s Renaissance. Through a return to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” I seek to relate Melville’s relation to the call to action that Emerson presents through his work, showing how this unconfirmed relationship between the two American scholars defines the historical and academic context of our nation, shaping the development of an American literary identity grounded in experience, embodied knowledge, and cultural self-definition. 

At first, I wanted to experiment with the structure of my poem and explore the forms of Emerson’s and Melville’s works. But then, every attempt that I had at the playful organization of Emerson’s quotes and Melville’s quotes felt off and not fluid. I began thinking about how these two American scholars are engaging in the same larger conversation on American individuality and identity, and what is a conversation but two columns? The dialogue between Emerson’s call to action in “The American Scholar” and Melville’s Moby Dick is indirect, meaning there is no confirmation or evidence that Melville read Emerson’s work and created his novel as a direct response. However, it is still part of a broader national conversation. A conversation between two individuals could be organized into two columns, weaving and bouncing between them to form a larger whole. However, because the two scholars are part of a bigger discussion on the essence of America, it didn’t make sense to have one column represent Melville and the other Emerson. Instead, their quotes are interwoven and braided to form a larger message, just as their prospective works function together. 

There are distinct similarities between Emerson’s call and Melville’s various messages throughout his novel, particularly in Emerson’s transcendentalist perspective on nature, Melville’s emphasis on bodily experience over academic structures, and the overarching value placed on self-reflection. Just as Emerson calls for “man thinking,” Melville not only thinks for himself on how to contribute to the larger American identity, but writes a central narrator who prioritizes deep, critical thought for over 600 pages (Emerson, “The American Scholar”). Similarly, as Emerson tells his audience to trust themselves, Melville writes a character who trusts himself so bodily in his mission to catch the whale that it wholly consumes him, leading to his downfall. Ahab’s character demonstrates a critical point for the broader construction of American identity: the ability for scholars to think for themselves, work with one another, and disagree. Though Melville presents a character who touches on Emerson’s call to “trust yourself,” he cautions against too much trust, thus allowing his novel to embody his own individual representation of American identity. Like Emerson warns, thinking as everyone else makes you “a cog in the machine,” stripping away any uniqueness (Emerson, “The American Scholar”). Ahab’s character exemplifies scholarly dialogue, though indirectly. In terms of citations, Moby Dick’s footnote and citation style are unclear and wholly unique, part of the novel’s larger puzzle. In my creative attempt, the citations are purposely not clearly cited. This was part of an effort to address the fluidity between the two messages: both authors are independent American scholars, yet their work blends to form something larger than themselves. Both Emerson and Melville work to break down barriers of the classified and unclassified, the known and unknown, the singular and collective. I attempt to outline the shared overlap between the two others, the overlap that paints the field of American literature today.

And because my poem does not have an actual works cited, here is my works cited:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Essays: First Series, 1841. Norton Critical Edition, edited by Joel Porte, W. W. Norton, 1982, pp. 3-21.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Penguin Classics, edited with an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and notes by Tom Quirk, Penguin Classics, 2002.