"O Sister of my Song!": Caroline Sturgis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Poems (1847)

Abstract

This thesis examines the friendship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Caroline Sturgis and the influence this relationship exec on Emerson' s first volume of poetry, Poems (1847). Sturgis can be recognized as the model and intended audience for select pieces of Emerson's verse-she becomes, in his words, the "sister of [his] song"-within the context of Emerson's journals, letters, and poetry notebooks, the intersection of these texts with Sturgis's own letters and manuscripts, and Emerson' s larger social and professional project of establishing a haven for high culture in Concord. Emerson's burgeoning sense of the Bet's cultural role-at a time when he is composing, compiling, and editing material for a volume of poetry and when his cadre of independent and energetic artists, mature beyond the need for his professional and intellectual tutelage, desert the confines of Concord-becomes intertwined in Poems with his (increasingly ideal) vision for the group he entices to Concord. Upon publication of Poems, Sturgis, who witnesses and participates in the intertextual discussions and dialogs-on friendship, love, poetry, community, and other themes-which animate Emerson and his coterie, discerns vestiges of herself and her relationship to Emerson in a number of the pieces. This thesis, starting with a recovery of Sturgis' narrative, seeks to untangle the discursive "indirections" and heteroglossic bricolage Emerson employs in Poems as he attempts to fulfill a socio-literary role akin to that set forth in his essay "The Poet."