Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

194The Poetry of Robert Lowellwhile addicted to the sublime altitudes of jet airplanes is a simplification.His comment inspired by the Fugitive Slave Law, a law passeda decade before the Civil War to appease disgruntled Southerners,exemplifies his ambiguous position: “My own quarrel with America, ofcourse, was, that the geography is sublime, but the men are not.” 15 LikeLowell, Emerson combined idealistic and realistic views.2It took Lowell a long time to recognize the complexity of Emerson’sattitudes toward America, religious enthusiasm, and sublime idealism,and to realize that Emerson’s ambivalence reflected his own. In hisearly poetry Lowell generally expressed the same sort of sardoniccontempt for his precursor found in Warren’s poem—understandably,since Warren was one of his early teachers. His other like-mindedteacher, Tate, was even more contemptuous of Emerson. Tate’s harshappraisal no doubt appealed to a young Lowell determined to puthis Boston heritage behind him. In a discussion of the breakup ofPuritanism in New England, which he implicitly compares to heaven,Tate lambasts Emerson as a befuddled, starry-eyed devil: “At thisjuncture Emerson came upon the scene: the Lucifer of Concord, hehad better be called hereafter, for he was the light-bearer who couldsee nothing but light, and was fearfully blind. He looked around andsaw the uniformity of life, and called it the routine of tradition, thetyranny of the theological idea.” Rapidly switching epic analogies, Tatecompares Emerson to a Greek destroying Troy (Northerners wereusually Greeks in his imagination, the South being another Troy forthem to burn). By rebutting Puritan theology and tradition, “Emersonunwittingly became the prophet of a piratical industrialism, a consequenceof his own transcendental individualism that he could notforesee.” 16 Lowell was similarly piratical, individualistic, and iconoclastic.In his reminiscence ‘‘Visiting the Tates,” he describes how onhis way to study with his mentor in 1937 he “crashed the civilizationof the South” by smashing Tate’s mailbox, casting himself in the roleof a piratical Lucifer with “sublime ambition.” “My head was full ofMiltonic, vaguely piratical ambitions,” he says. 17 He might as well havesaid his head was full of piratical Emersonian ambitions, and that likeone of his Northern Civil War heroes he planned once again to invadeand overthrow the aristocratic powers of the South.