Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Robert Lowell 205As Lowell’s career progressed his attacks on Emerson subsided,no doubt because he realized that his ambivalent attitudes toward thepast were just as paradoxical as his precursor’s. Tradition for Emersonand for Lowell, as for most writers, was a hairshirt that goaded theminto spectacular attempts to wriggle free. They realized the necessityof history but spent much of their time damning and sublimating it.In their similarly antagonistic stances toward the hallowed past, theyritually repeated its revolutionary or modernist moments of transformation.Rob Wilson’s American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genreprovides an incisive analysis of Emerson’s contradictory quest forrevolutionary origins of power as well as Lowell’s despairing critiqueof that quest’s results. Scrutinizing Emerson’s peculiarly Americanobsessions with self-reliance and its various abysses, Wilson argues:[T] he will to American sublimity is read as the ego-questto inaugurate origins of sublime power, which is to say toevacuate some self-authenticating ground out of which thewildness/newness of power can emerge. Such a struggle forstrong selfhood must take place, as the Emersonian scenariomandates, whether this I-threatening “abyss” is imagined tocomprise some ahistorical vacancy or gnostic nothingness;some natural immensity in which the entrepreneurial ego canlose and find itself as in an ocean or prairie; or, nowadays, thevast intertextuality of language which codes any lyric of selfintuitionwith traces of otherness. 35If an influx of sublime power depends on a mystical or pathologicalbreakdown of the ego, a purgatorial clearing away of natural impedimentsto industrial progress, or a radical sloughing off of burdensomeintertextual influences and historical forefathers, then Emerson differsfrom Lowell in mood rather than maneuver. Both are particularlyAmerican in their endorsements of iconoclastic power, althoughEmerson tends to assault the gods of tradition with a blithe indifferenceto the aftereffects, so confident is he in the moral underpinningsof those self-reliant Americans who will fill the void withtheir new creations. Coming later, Lowell is more wary. He knowsthat America’s addiction to grandeur and novelty, like his own selfaggrandizingtendencies, is ultimately destructive. Emerson, however,can also be wary and downright contemptuous, as his many protests