Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

200The Poetry of Robert Lowellin Protestant ideology. For Bloom, Emerson’s exhortation to getbeyond tradition and nature derives from a compulsion to represseverything that Emerson calls “the NOT ME” (CW, 1:8). Such anall-encompassing repression recuperates the primordial abyss in theself. “The glory of repression,” Bloom remarks, “is that memory anddesire, driven down, have no place to go in language except up ontothe heights of sublimity, the ego’s exultation in its own operations.” 29Emerson’s solitary ego exults because it has managed to repress itsprecursors and through its revolutionary iconoclasm hollow out anabyss in which it can entertain the sublime illusion of originality.The rebellious son has abandoned “the sepulchres of the fathers” andin Oedipal fashion usurped their engendering powers to become, inturn, his own father—the author of a countersublime founded ondemocratic as opposed to aristocratic principles.In his essay “Sublime Politics,” Pease reveals the social impactof this transcendental repression of nature and culture in Americanhistory and offers a critique of Emersonian self-reliance that issurprisingly close to Lowell’s and his neoclassic cohorts. Like Tate andWinters, Pease argues that “Emerson does not condone or corroboratethese ideological uses of the sublime” to justify ecological despoliationand cultural provincialism. 30 Nevertheless, he underwrites themwilly-nilly. According to Pease, Emerson’s belief that the soul shouldfly beyond nature and enjoy a sublime sense of transcendence gotmistranslated into a doctrine of human superiority over nature, arepudiation of nature, and was finally turned to ecological plunder forindustrial gain. Western expansionism and the simultaneous destructionof indigenous cultures and their natural habitats were the unintendedpolitical consequences of Emerson’s high-flown ideals:Through the subtle turns of the American sublime, the liberal intaking axe and hammer to the virgin land could, with childlikeinnocence, proclaim that only through destruction of Nature’sbounty could he feel by doing what nature commanded as if hewere truly in touch with nature’s will.Put simply, the sublime enabled the nineteenth-centuryAmerican to create a second scene, a veritable world elsewherewhere he could rewrite and reread national policies ofcommercialism and expansionism in quite ideal terms. 31