American Heralds of the Spirit

American Heralds of the Spirit — Melville, Whitman, and Emerson

The Founding Fathers are well known for building the economic and political foundations of the United States. But who founded cultural and spiritual America? For John Fentress Gardner, it was not until the following generation that the revolutionary principles of American spiritual life were laid down — by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

These three iconic heralds spoke powerfully, eloquently, for the spirit as it lives in America. They were, with uncanny directness, prophets of America today. In this illuminating book, their words become meditations that enable us to think their ideas anew.

Melville’s epic vision is of the conflict between Love and Power. “I stand for the power of the heart,” he wrote — foreseeing, in prescient detail, “what must happen to a people who advance in both intellectuality and power, but who fail to develop the heart.” Whitman, the bard of the spiritual will flowering in conscious love, answers him: his compassionate identification with the new world was unique and complete, and self-determination, he held, was his country’s special task — a compass for the “new moral American continent.” And in three brilliant closing chapters on Emerson, Gardner gives a crystalline framework for understanding the deepest spiritual, philosophical, and practical implications of what these heralds proposed for their country.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. American Heralds of the Spirit
2. The Idea of Man in America
3. Melville’s Vision of America
4. Walt Whitman: The Poet of Death and Life
5. Walt Whitman: The New Columbus
6. Emerson’s Christianity
7. Emerson’s Goal: A Science of the Spirit
8. Radical Individualism and Social Reform

Epilogue
Appendices

About the Author

John Fentress Gardner (b. 1912) was an American writer and educator, and a leading figure in the Waldorf school movement in the United States, long associated as headmaster with the Waldorf School of Garden City, New York. His books — among them Education in Search of the Spirit, Youth Longs to Know, and American Heralds of the Spirit — explore the spiritual dimensions of American education and culture.