“Within That Unity Which We Call a Nation”: The Ideology of Nationalism in Literature and Culture

As the idea of nationalism begins to appear in literary criticism starting around the early to mid-1800s, what nationalism means to various writers such as Emerson and Arnold alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé each generate their own specific legacies. All four share notions of nationalism that seep into the inner workings of their literary criticisms with Emerson and Arnold’s inflated sense of their own country’s importance and impact on the literary world. Baudelaire and Mallarmé, on the other hand, are more focused on the ideas of what is important in art. Although Baudelaire’s essay “From The Painter of Modern Life” is obviously about painting, his work and views can be applied to all art forms, including literature and specifically poetry. Like Mallarmé, Baudelaire places less importance on where their art comes from while both Emerson and Arnold, who are American and English respectively, seem to be focused on the location where writing or art is being created. That is what drives their conclusions.

Emerson is most widely known as the father of Transcendentalism, a movement that placed importance on literature from the United States. Seeing how young the country was, it did not have much of a history when it came to literature. The main goal of Transcendentalism was to create that history; Emerson, and those who followed in his footsteps, wanted an American literary tradition. In that same vein, Emerson’s “The Poet” discusses the value and, as he describes, the great urgency of writing about the natural world. To him, the best thing someone could write about would be nature. That being said, the difference between how he defines what nature is versus the definitions of many other writers or critics— who would often likely describe it as only including the things that Mother Nature herself created— is that Emerson believes that what is man-made is just as beautiful and meaningful, if not more than, that which is already there.

Emerson writes “it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God [the strictly natural world] that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole— re-attaching even artificial things and violation of nature, to nature” showing how he believes that “the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all thing in their right series and procession” (pg. 626-627). This implies that poetic literature not only has a moral need to include the natural world in its work but almost goes as far as to say that poetry is creating something more important than nature. This is further shown when he goes on to say “poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally... our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the integrated nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers” (pg. 629). He believes that poetry is not only not an imitation of nature but superior to nature so much so that he is insinuating that poetry actually creates nature. When Emerson says that “imagination is a very high sort of seeing,” (629) he is directly opposing the traditional European idea that imagination is a negative thing. This is part of his attempt at creating a distinctly American literary aesthetic. The legacy of Transcendentalism, and therefore Emerson, can be chalked up to a sense of intense Nationalism that many modern-day Americans hold; the idea that America is superior in every aspect, including that of writing, and specifically poetry, to all other nations.

While the connection of nationalism to the Transcendentalist movement is a clear, straight line, it is also interesting to look at a similar connection that Matthew Arnold brings to the table when discussing English literature. When we look at Arnold’s views, his sense of superiority is evident. Despite being English, Arnold is akin to Emerson’s ideals in a multitude of ways, having rooted his sense of cultural superiority in his nationalistic ideals. It is worth noting that Arnold does hold some differing views to Emerson; he believes that “the grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery... it must find itself amidst the order of ideas” meaning that he opposes the idea that poetry, or rather literature in general, has the purpose of creating anything at all (pg. 697).

His essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” puts a heavy emphasis on the idea of order, something that we see going as far back as in Aristotle’s “Poetics” when he says, “for fineness lies in magnitude and order” (pg. 94). It is an intriguing concept that Arnold connects the idea of nationalism to his idea of order, inherently implying that the English way of life is better due to the order that it follows. He imagines an English history that does not accurately reflect the realities of the time that came before him. Due to this imagined history, he believes that older, and in his opinions better and canonical, English “poet[s] lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power... and this state of things is the true basis for the creative power’s exercise” (pg. 698). Even more intriguing to think that he says that poetry is not about “analysis and discovery” but is also inventing a past that did not exist and therefore attempting to discover a new potential future that may come, one that he is attempting to create. His view of English literature being the most prestigious of the lot eventually, and perhaps inevitably, led to a ripple effect in the Western hemisphere to this day. Even now, the works we study in schools are so often written by a man from a Western country, with the most assigned to students being Shakespearean literature, an example of an English writer. Apart from the effect that Arnold’s essay had and still has on literature, it has also immensely affected the way that students learn in their English classes consequent of, but not limited to, the quote “to see the object as in itself it really is” one day leading to close reading (pg. 695).

Arnold’s views come in complete contempt with that of Baudelaire’s, seen clearly when he writes “the truth that the stir of the French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from movements as these” having “looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the practical character” with “practical” being easily replaced with the word “social” here (pg. 699). Arnold views the French as being emotional which he discerns as a weakness and as second-class to his English, more logical views. Baudelaire, on the other hand, maintains that “for any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it” with “modernity [meaning] the ephemeral... the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (pg. 684-685). Obviously, he is interested in creating, which is something that Arnold clearly concludes is not only not an important part of literature but that it should not be a part of it whatsoever.

To Baudelaire, one of the most impactful parts of being an artist in any capacity is creating, especially with the goal in mind of becoming a timeless component of whatever your respective field of art is. In this sense, Baudelaire is more strongly associated with Emerson’s belief poets’ creations are of monumental significance. Emerson and Baudelaire's beliefs on nationalism seem to group together more easily. The very idea of nationalism having been created in France during the period that Baudelaire writes “Dandies are becoming rarer and rarer in our country [that being France]” casts a crucial perspective on his mindset whilst writing this essay; he describes “Dandyism” as “the last spark of heroism amid decadence... a sunset, like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and hill of melancholy” (pg. 687).

Baudelaire and Mallarmé are both occupied with creating a sense of French tradition, whether that be regarding a French culture or a French literary tradition. Both of their essays have affected the way that people both in and outside of France perceive French culture, art, and literature. Mallarmé is almost entirely focused on bringing about a new tradition of French poetry. Arguably, he is not so engrossed in keeping these ideas concentrated in only his country’s poetry production but is maybe more focused on generating a new way of writing poetic literature in a more general sense. He believes that “literature here is undergoing an exquisite crisis, a fundamental crisis,” (pg. 734). Whether he means that the “here” is in France or not is debatable. Regardless, his point in the “Crisis in Poetry” is to say that “poetry... makes up for the failure of language, proving an extra tension” which is not something that many other writers or critics before him believed (pg. 737). Mallarmé’s sentiments about poetry go further into this unexplored realm of experimentations; he wants to disconnect poetry from the idea of order and form and instead find ways to supply “willful infractions or deliberate dissonances” through imagery, word usage, and, most notably, form (pg. 736). This is clear when looking at his own poetry. His pieces pioneer the concept of concrete poetry, a medium of poetry in which the way that the piece is placed on the page is just as important as the words that make them up. One of the many ways that Mallarmé contributes to modern poetry is his ideas about making the familiar unfamiliar. This is easily seen when he writes “the line of several words which creates a total word... causes you that surprise at not having heard before a certain ordinary fragment of speech, at the same time as the memory of the named object bathes in a new atmosphere” (pg. 740). To this day, in creative writing classes all around the states, people are taught to write in a way that feels new instead of constantly attempting to recreate the classic canonical literary works. While it is unclear if Mallarmé’s motivations for writing this essay and his poetry in the way he does stem from a nationalistic perspective, it’s undeniable that they led to modern day teachings and practices. We write with the goal of evoking “the unquestionable charm of the incorrect line” that Mallarmé speaks so fondly of (pg. 735).

Emerson, Arnold, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé have left an enduring and enormous footprint on the foundation that is Modern Literature in a legion of manners. Whether it be on the attitudes of writers and readers, pedagogical approaches, writing techniques, or even political standpoints, these men wound up being exceedingly influential. Much of the incentive that pushed them to write these essays can be attributed to nationalistic ideology for each of their respective countries.

“Within that unity which we call a Nation, the various professions and classes

and the passing centuries all introduce variety, not only in manners and gesture,

but even in the actual form of the face.”  - Baudelaire (pg. 685)

Works cited

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” Essays, Second Series, Cosimo Classics, New York, NY, 1844.

Arnold, Matthew. Function of Criticism at the Present Time. Nabu Press, 2010.

Baudelaire, Charles, and P. E. Charvet. The Painter of Modern Life. Penguin, 2010.

Hutton, James. Aristotle’s Poetics. W.W. Norton, 1982.

Cohn, Robert Greer, and Gerald Gillespie. Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.