All photos courtesy Concord Free Public Library
Channing’s home on Main Street
Ellery Channing:
The Most Lonely Transcendentalist
I
BY VICTOR CURRAN
In the early spring of 1862, as the first buds began to appear, two men made their way along Main Street. Concord knew this pair well; over the last twenty years, these “knights of the umbrella and bundle”1 had rambled together from the Walden Woods to Montreal, from Cape Cod to the Catskills. Henry Thoreau had been the more vigorous of the two, but today the poet Ellery Channing offered Henry an arm to lean on as he paused to catch his breath. His tuberculosis was growing worse, and his faithful friend Ellery had come to walk this familiar path with him for what might be the last time. Ellery Channing’s great gift was friendship. His Concord compatriots stood by him through good times and bad. There were plenty of bad times, often of Ellery’s own making, but his conversation flowed with thoughtful insights, rowdy humor, and disarming candor. His writing was never more than passable—and he vehemently 40
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refused any editor’s efforts to improve it— but the writers in his circle swore that his companionship fueled their creativity. So why did biographer Robert Hudspeth call him “the most lonely Transcendentalist”?2 What secret alienation did he conceal beneath his engaging manner and ready wit? His life had an auspicious start. He was born in Boston in 1817, the son of the dean of the Harvard medical faculty. He was named after his uncle, William Ellery Channing, an influential Unitarian clergyman whom Waldo Emerson called the “Star of the American Church,”3 and the family called him “Ellery” to avoid confusion with his celebrated namesake. The path to wealth and comfort seemed laid out before him, but when he was only five, his mother died. The traumatic loss that haunted the child grew into a sense of betrayal in the man, and he condemned all the solid Yankee values that his family
cherished— progress, Ellery Channing prosperity, piety—often to his own detriment. He grew up brilliant but unfocused. He enrolled at Harvard but dropped out after fourteen weeks. On his own, he read Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Goethe and tried his hand at writing, even getting a few poems published in Boston periodicals. But for him, Boston embodied the bourgeois life he despised, so at age 22 he headed west. He ended up in Cincinnati, writing poetry and doing occasional newspaper work. A school friend sent a bundle of Ellery’s poems to Waldo Emerson, who was preparing to launch a new magazine, The Dial. Waldo took note of Ellery’s shortcomings—“[He] defies a little too disdainfully his dictionary and logic”—but
