Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Robert Lowell 199infinite spaces, mysterious origins, and overwhelming events as the textof a supreme being whose greatest creation was the mind that couldinterpret it with sublime serenity rather than superstitious terror. Bothshrugged off Calvinist bogeys and aspired to a higher reason.Emerson’s determination to shed his culture’s Puritan past, andindeed to shed history and tradition altogether, has obvious politicalramifications. In his provocative study of American Renaissancewriters, Donald Pease ferrets out the paradox inherent in Emerson’spolitical program: “Cultural legitimation becomes a problem whencitizens base their personal identity as well as their nation’s identity ona refusal to acknowledge the authority of institutions inherited fromthe nation’s past. Without a past to inform their present lives, individualshave no basis for present history.” 27 However, when Emersondeclaims that “[o]ur age is retrospective,” that it “builds the sepulchresof the fathers,” and when he asks, “[W]hy should we grope among thedry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masqueradeout of its faded wardrobe?” (CW, 1:7), he too is returning, albeit carefullycamouflaged, to the revolutionary moment of the FoundingFathers in a history he supposedly wants to abolish. According toPease, “At a time in which politicians compromised on founding principlesfor the sake of expediency, Emerson . . . returned to the scene ofthe nation’s founding to recover integrity for the principles of libertyand equality and make them available as motives for the actions ofall Americans.” 28 Emerson’s “visionary compact” images an Americawhere all citizens could gather together in a spiritual democracy. Witha self-reliant revolutionary vision, they could realize their freedomfrom the hierarchical burdens of Europe. Cast the hoary scales oftradition from your eyes; experience the transcendental sublime inunmediated communion with nature and God, he seems to exhort.“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we,through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relationto the universe?” Emerson asks (CW, 1:7). But he is obviouslyromanticizing the past, dressing it up with his own “faded wardrobe”of noble savages and mystical naturalists even while consigning allsuch mythical wardrobes to the dump.Emerson’s belief in a divine light that nature dispenses likegrace to every human without the intermediary help of priest, ritual,symbol, or tradition, a light that convinces each soul of its transcendentorigin prior to and superior to nature, has obvious precedents