Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Robert Lowell 197most pressing compulsions. To his sympathetic imagination, Emersonis both ally and enemy. Another of Lowell’s multifaceted personaewith iconoclastic ideals (like Lucifer and Ahab), Emerson exemplifiesthe vices and virtues of the American sublime.3For Emerson as well as for Lowell and other theorists of the sublime,the ancient aesthetic term has multifarious significance. Emersonscholars, however, tend to focus on one or two of his many referencesto the sublime, and usually cite as the quintessential instanceof sublimity in his work the famous passage at the beginning of“Nature”: “I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. Thecurrents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part orparticle of God” (CW, 1:10). The lines resonate with Wordsworth’ssimilar description in “Tintern Abbey” of “a sense sublime”:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. 23For Emerson the sublime influx depends on a contemplative askesis, asensory deprivation common to most mystical exercises that preparesthe way for communion with the divine. Claiming that “[t]he mindof Emerson is the mind of America,” Bloom dwells on Emerson’sexperience while crossing the bare common as a sublime confrontationbetween the self-reliant ego and the fertile abyss:Emersonian transparency is . . . a sublime crossing of the gulfof solipsism, but not into a communion with others. . . . Asecond -century Gnostic would have understood Emerson’s “Iam nothing; I see all” as the mode of negation through whichthe knower again could stand in the Abyss, the place of originalfullness, before the Creation. . . . A transparent eyeball is theemblem of the Primal Abyss regarding itself. 24In his essay “Whitman and the American Sublime,” JosephKronick more convincingly traces Emerson’s use of the term “abyss”to Jacob Boehme. Kronick quotes from a November 1845 journal