Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

210The Poetry of Robert Lowellcommon to all individual men,” and adds, “Of the works of this mindhistory is the record” (CW, 2:3). If “the whole of history is in one man,it is all to be explained from individual experience” (CW, 2:3), he says,as if forecasting Lowell’s method of projecting his personal experienceonto a large cast of historical personae. Mulling over the great livesof history, Lowell consistently punctures their affectations, wittilyjuxtaposing the sublime and the ridiculous. In his own way he is asdismissive of grandiosity as Emerson. Just as Emerson democratizeshistory, contending for instance that “[a]ll that Shakespeare says of theking, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner, feels to be true ofhimself,” and that everyman “must sit solidly at home, and not sufferhimself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greaterthan all the geography and all the government of the world” (CW, 2:5,6), Lowell satirizes history, deconstructing the hierarchical values thatsupport it.Lowell’s brief sketch of Emerson in History deploys Emersonianstrategies of deflation to prick his charismatic bubble. The ordinaryPuritan lies beneath the great rebel’s mask. To show that Emerson’sflights toward sublimity depend on a wearisome rejection of commonpleasures, Lowell organizes his life study around images of coldness,winter, ice, and poison, asserting:Emerson is New England’s Montaigne or Goethe,cold ginger, poison to Don Giovanni—see him on winter lecture-tours with Thoreau,red flannels, one bowl of broken ice for shaving;few lives contained such humdrum renunciations.(H, 85)The image of Emerson shaving in his red flannel pajamas is a batheticriposte to the first line in which he appears among European luminaries.It is the sort of double exposure, ridiculousness superimposedon sublimity, that Lowell practices most noticeably in Life Studies butin all his other volumes as well.For Lowell, Emerson could be a cold, prudent, prudish Christianas well as a Promethean or Luciferian revolutionary who stole firefrom European gods to kindle a native sublime. Like Prometheusbound to his crag, Emerson could also suffer second thoughts abouthis zealotry. If Lowell attacked Emerson as his mentors did, he also