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Emerson's Search for Literary Form: The Early Journals

That Emerson's literary career was a "search for form" is confirmed by both his temperament and style. Henry James first noted that "Emerson had his message, but he was a good while looking for his form." Subsequent commentary on Emerson's life has put into perspective the social and biographical details which informed that search for a life-style and literary form commensurate with his ambitions and abilities.1 It has not been fully appreciated, however, that the form, method, and thematic preoccupations of Emerson's earliest journals allowed for discovery of a literary technique which shaped the very substance of his later message. Inevitably, the practice of journal keeping lent itself to a private, preliminary, and experimental art. As a reflection of Emerson's growing ambition to be a moral writer, his journal experiments involved coming to terms with two issues he would formally reconcile in "Quotation and Originality" (1859). The journals from 1818 to 1824 clearly reveal his earliest investigation of the relationship of originality, quotation, and the ends of written art.