Chapter 1: The Beginnings

The Puritan tradition in American literature, and culture in general, is indeed a

surprising phenomenon. It is the arrival of the Mayflower on the American shore
(1620), and the creation, by its one hundred and two passengers, of the Plymouth
Plantation that has come to signify the beginning of modern America.
The Puritans were English Protestants, who followed the teachings of Martin
Luther, but who were particularly influenced by the ideas formulated by John Calvin.
Luther claimed that men were all wicked and God was all-powerful, so man cannot be
considered, in any sense of the term, “an equal partner,” who through his good deeds
can earn redemption. The Puritans had no quarrel with this, but they were even more
attracted by Calvin’s furthering of the concept in his doctrine of “predestination” which
became the cornerstone of their ontology. The doctrine of predestination held that at
the beginning of time God had chosen some people for salvation, while others were
headed for eternal damnation. It was also assumed that there were to be only a few
“elects,” while most people were “preterites,” as the doomed came to be called.
Needless to say, such design rendered all human attempts at earning salvation totally
meaningless.

The Puritans were proud of being a part of God’s extraordinary enterprise. They
could cherish it without a concept of a “trade-off” in which good deeds are rewarded
while bad ones are punished. It was also generally assumed that “the elect” will in their
earthly life show signs of their special role, that they will be pious as well as successful
in business
All members strove to be the most pious, the most prosperous of all. Puritan
ethics influenced the American moral code:

Succeeding in life has come to characterize the American culture and the theme
of success has been predominant in American literature

It is the puritans` duty to make certain that the Christian faith is not distorted by
anything not warranted by the Scripture. In the second part of the 16th century they set
forth on their mission to “purify” the Church of England.
They wanted to abolish not only the episcopal hierarchy and the prayer book,
but also, for instance, the

The Puritan scrutiny of the Bible resulted in their disagreement concerning the
organization of the earthly church. The majority believed in imitating Calvin’s system
which substituted the hierarchy of clergy (from the pope to a parish-priest) with a

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hierarchy of ruling bodies (from the national assembly to the council of elders in a
parish church), while maintaining the principle of the pyramidal model with a broad
base and only one element at the top.
This view was vehemently opposed by a very vocal minority, called
Congregationalists, and since the original American Puritans came from this group,
their views are of a particular interest to us. The Congregationalists fully endorsed such
basic concepts as the doctrine of predestination, but they differed from the rest of the
Puritans, called Presbyterians, in their idea of church organization and church
membership. First of all, they rejected all structures higher than individual churches –
in their view, the national church was a work of Antichrist. Even more importantly,
each of these churches was to be independent not only in administrative matters, but
also in matters of faith, and each was to be individually founded on a separate covenant
entered into by its members.
The term “covenant” describes a relationship between God and Christians.
The term was used to describe agreements offered by God to man in the Bible
(the Covenant of Works, based on obedience, and entered by God with Adam, who
failed it; or the Covenant of Grace, extending from Abraham, in which God offered not
to rule against the human concept of justice, subsequently supplemented by the
Covenant of Redemption, made with Christ), but it also came to denote the principle
on which individual churches of Puritan Congregationalists were related directly to
God. In turn, they offered church membership only to those who had the power to make
a public confession of their faith (frequently referred to as conversion), and swear to
the covenant.
A false confession of faith could do a man no good but only bring about God’s
increased wrath. Membership in the church was thus a sign of God’s blessing yet if it
was based on an insincere testimony it guaranteed damnation.
The Congregationalists were thus the most exacting of Puritans, but even more
important is the fact that because of their opposition to any national church they were
contradicting broader political goals of the whole Puritan movement. The double
pressure exerted by Presbyterians as well as by the government frequently led to
outright persecution and some of the Congregationalists, rather than risk beheading,
chose to leave England for the Netherlands. In 1620 one such group decided to go on
from there to America. Out of 102 people aboard the Mayflower only one-third were
“Saints,” while others were a separate group referred to as “Strangers.” On arrival,
however, almost all of them jointly signed the so-called “Mayflower Compact,” which
established the foundations of their life in the Plymouth Plantation. Later on, all
Mayflower settlers came to be referred to as “Pilgrims” or “Forefathers.” In 1630 a
much larger expedition of over four hundred people, led by John Winthrop on his
flagship Arbella, arrived in Massachusetts Bay, and during the Great Migration (which

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began in 1630 and lasted till the outbreak of the Revolution in 1642) almost twenty
thousand people settled around the Bay. The Puritan colonization of New England
became a fact.
While, however, the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims in America was a result
of their flight from – from persecution, intolerance, and the domination of political
enemies, John Winthrop’s group, and many subsequent ones, embarked on a journey
towards: towards the land not yet dominated by any hostile faction, towards new
economic possibilities, but also towards the New World in the original, religious sense
of the term. This element of the myth of America is crucial for understanding not only
the reasons for the early migration, but also numerous literary realizations of the myth
of America as the Promised Land.

Terms such as apocalypse or chiliasm came to denote the ultimate end of the
world.
When this world is destroyed, and the sinners have been punished, a New World
of perfect happiness will appear in which the virtuous (or, in Puritan terminology, “the
elect”) will enjoy eternal bliss. The Bible does not specify the location of this land.
Puritan theologians quickly provided “evidence” that the New World will be
created in America.
After the failure of the Jews, the Puritans are now cast in the role of the chosen
people.

Hope for the New World was invigorating, but it was frequently marred by
everyday’s tragedies and difficulties: unreliable climate, Indian wars, and the colonists’
lack of experience decimated then. Willpower, faith, and unrelenting self-discipline
were their best defense, which left very little room for enjoyment, sense of humor, and
occasional intemperance. This, at least, is the popular image of the Puritan life.

The urge to succeed and exceed, the belief that hard work is a necessary
ingredient of happiness, the cult of money as the status indicator, and perhaps even a
conviction that they are the chosen (or at least very special) people, all these can be
said to be among specific features of Americans
The artistic legacy of the 17th- and 18th-century America is almost limited at
best. It is studied for historical reasons

In the 17th century we can speak of three American poets who were of more
than a fleeting importance. They were: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Michael
Wigglesworth (1631-1705), and Edward Taylor (1645?-1729).

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 In the case of Anne Bradstreet we can talk about a pure poetic talent who in her
own times was widely praised in England, where her poetry was published, as well as
in America. As the contemporary poet and feminist Adrienne Rich remarked,
Bradstreet’s “individualism lies in her choice of material rather than in her style”.
She wrote about two realms which coexisted for her on almost equal terms: the
reality surrounding her and the world of the Bible. Like Emily Dickinson much later,
Anne Bradstreet knew how to notice little things around her and turn them into poetry;
unlike Dickinson, however, she never endowed them with a metaphysical quality. She
was a poet of daily life, of all those little acts that filled her own days as a housewife:
she is described as providing artistic records of domestic chores. Her style was plain
and unadorned.
The Puritans may not have been great book-lovers, but they did appreciate
knowledge and education. The foundation of the Harvard College as early as in 1636
followed between 1693 and 1764 by the creation of William and Mary, Yale, Princeton,
Pennsylvania, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Brown. One of Harvard’s first graduates was
William Wigglesworth.
Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom, published in 1622 became the first
American bestseller.
The Day of Doom seems to us a cruel work.
Wigglesworth’s belief, expressed in the poem is that those who are prepared for
the End have nothing to worry about.
Christ appears in The Day of Doom while “the Earth is rent and torn,” and his
coming causes terror and panic:
The wild Beast flee to the Sea,
so soon as he draws near ...
Amazeth Nature, and every Creature
doth more than terrify.

Wigglesworth even suggests that the saints will derive pleasure from witnessing the
sinners’ punishment and their pain;
The Saints behold with courage bold,
and thankful wonderment,
To see all those that were their foes
thus sent to punishment.
The joylessness of its descriptions was hardly made less repulsive by its
monotonous reliance on the ballad meter and doggerel rhymes.

Edward Taylor is certainly the most accomplished poet of his times, He is, as
Donald E. Stanford, his editor, says, “the last important representative of the

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metaphysical school.” His poetry is full of conceits, his literary taste exquisite, his
poetic talent beyond any doubt. Yet he knew better than anybody else how non-Puritan
his poetry was
What Taylor was known for in his own time were his elaborate sermons
It is also the sermon-writing that became a form of art performed by accomplished
preachers (John Cotton, Thomas Shepard)

Apart from offering new arguments in ongoing theological debates, sermons

were, for instance, a part of the political process of the colonies (“Election Day
sermons”), and they played a crucial role in attempts to scare the congregation back
into the religious life (“jeremiads”). Their pattern, however, did not vary much: they
consisted of the explanation of the chosen Biblical quotation, its interpretation, and
finally its application to the life of the colony.
Apart from sermons, it is from various diaries and chronicles that we derive our
sense of what life in the 17th century America was like. Chronicles may be quite
valuable for that purpose, but in the period under consideration they were perhaps too
biased to be considered fully reliable.
American journals, diaries, and histories were inaccurate insofar as they tended
to see and describe the earthly in terms of the eternal.
The first, and perhaps most widely known such chronicle is William Bradford’s
Of Plymouth Plantation.
His history was written between 1630 and 1650, and it provides us with two
elements that were to become so typical of the New World writing: one was his
conviction that America had been chosen as the place for a very special experiment in
man’s spiritual history, and the other was his growing fear that evil in the man can
bring that experiment to ruin.
John Winthrop’s Journal was never reworked into a formal history comparable
with that by Bradford, yet its value is immense – not only because of the information
provided by irregular though always deadly serious entries, but first of all because it
came from the pen of the leader of the Great Migration, “the chosen Moses of a new,
and even mightier Exodus,” as Perry Miller calls him.
Perhaps the most important historical account of the first period of Puritan
colonization of America was produced by Cotton Mather. In his Magnalia Christi
Americana (The Great Achievements of Christ in America, 1702) he collected
numerous stories, narratives, and testimonies meant to prove America’s special place
in God’s design. At the same time Mather’s opus provided future readers with a well
of information, biographies of outstanding citizens.
Samuel Sewall’s Diary which covered the years 1673-1729, the crucial half-
century when life in the colonies was becoming increasingly secularized. It is also

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worth remembering that Sewall was a member of the special court which pronounced
“the witches of Salem” guilty.
Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, published in 1654 is not
reliable as an historical source.
What is interesting about it is that Johnson was not a clergyman, and he did not
study at the university; instead, he expressed the views held by less sophisticated,
average colonists. His main concern was to portray America as the place of the final
battle between Christ and Satan
Histories of American literature tend to glide over the eighteenth century, rarely
devoting more than the shortest chapter of all to that epoch. There is, of course, a very
good reason for it: lack of literary works of significance until the very end of that
century. There were, however, philosophical, religious, and political tracts which are
important to us not as literary works but as a record of events that marked the end of
the domination of Puritanism and the arrival of the Age of Reason.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706 – 1790)

The story of Franklin`s life is indeed the American success story from rags to
riches from obscurity to local and then national and finally world fame. For one who
as a Deist, did not believe in miracles, Franklin`s career is miraculous. We see an
archetypal American come into being. Benjamin Franklin`s has been emulated ever
since by success driven Americans. He was the author of one literary masterpiece, his
Autobiography. If he was a representative American he was in Emerson`s meaning a
supreme example of his species. He was an eminently practical man, and, intellectually
he was a pragmatist. The basic tenet of pragmatism is that truth is something to be
tested by concrete experience and with regard to the benefit of society.

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 Born in Boston in 1706, Franklin was, after little schooling apprenticed to his
older brother as a printer`s assistant; but the age of 17, he broke free and made his way
south to Philadelphia. Arriving there as a ragamuffin, he managed chiefly by printing,
but also by selling a great variety of commodities to amass a fortune sufficient to enable
him to retire from business by the time he was 41. Franklin`s several carriers business
municipal and national intermingled in the autobiography he suggested that these
carriers were successive phases in the happy dream of his life. As a municipal leader,
in Philadelphia he helped found the American Philosophical society and the University
of Pennsylvania; helped establish a fire company and a police force; looked into the
matter of street – paving; invented stove, bifocal spectacle lenses made remarkable
experiments in electricity; became deputy general for the colonies; wrote on a vast
assortment of subjects – offering many of his thoughts in Poor Richard`s Almanac.

Franklin embarked on more than two decades of lofty national service among
other things as the agent of the province of Pennsylvania in London where he lobbed
against the Stamp Act; as a delegate to the second continental congress and a member
of the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence; as a United States minister
plenipotentiary to France; and finally as delegate to the constitutional convention in
1787. He is also an imposing figure in American Literary History. No few of his letters,
his speeches and his articles retain a certain vitality and hefty charm but he is authentic
masterpiece in his Autobiography, the famous project for moral improvement. The
chief features of that age, has been described in the general introduction. Despite its
continental origins and its detestation of the theocratic mind, the Age of Reason did
draw from the Puritan epoch.

The Puritan idea of the covenant it will be recalled, declared that God`s
government of the world and men his plans and promises, could be understood by
human reason. The power of man`s intellect came to be seen as exalted because man
was now regarded as an enlightened and rational being inhabiting a rational universe
created by a reasonable God.

Franklin`s autobiographical narrative in its good humored way makes his rise
to wealth, authority and influence sounds much easier that it must have been. In his
Philadelphia days he had to contend with mediocrity, provincialism and incompetence
with hostility and broken promises. The happy life consisted in leisure read he had,

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meditation, investigation of physical universe, and above all in plans for the
improvement of human lot. He was concerned with the bettering of men`s physical
condition (stoves and bifocal lenses), his mental condition (as by universities and
learned societies) his social condition. Regarding the latter it may simply take as one
major example Franklin`s vehement opposition to racial prejudices in general and to
negro slavery in particular.

Devotion to human welfare was for Franklin what strict obedience to God`s will
had been for the puritans. In the Autobiography he also gives a definition of the Deist
creed: “I early absented myself from the public assemblies of the sect. Sunday being
my studying day, I never was without some religious principles, I never doubted, for
instance, the existence of the Deity, that he made the world and governed it by his
providence, that the most acceptable service of God is the doing of good to man that
our souls are immortal and that all crimes will be punished and virtue rewarded either
here or hereafter”.

Franklin`s persona narrative can be identified as a series of conversions from

penniless youth to wealthy entrepreneur and businessman to municipal leader from his
city`s first citizen to minister for national and international affairs.

What is at issue here is Franklin`s consciousness of self. We recall the puritan

insistence of self-inquiry the need of each man to make scrupulous examination of his
own spiritual nature.

Like his fellow Deists Franklin had entirely discarded the notion of original sin;
he had indeed, little if any notion of sin itself. He saw himself in the Lockeian and
deistic manner as a creature advancing into the world making himself up as he went.
His story is the story of the growth and development of a self. But what gives the
autobiography its special quality is that Franklin envisaged the process of self creation
as the conscious playing of a series of calculated roles. The various “Franklins” – the
adolescent and the young Franklin, the maturing and middle aged and elderly Franklin
all consciously assumed one role after another. The presiding figure in the first section,
as Robert F Sayre as pointed out in his study “The Examined Self; is the cultivated
elderly gentleman expecting a week`s leisure in the English countryside. Gazing
backward this old gentleman brings himself into focus in representative roles at key
moments. There is the seventeen year – old ragamuffin who arrives in Philadelphia, the

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young man whose energy and industry began to be the talk of the town – the youth who
was careful to be seen working late at night in the printer`s shop.

In the second section there appears the maturing person dedicated to the project
of moral perfection. In the third section we meet the civic leader. So the process
continues, as the ageing world citizen plays like a comic dramatist in narrative with his
own successive self – dramatization.

Herman Melville discerned Franklin`s histrionic genius in his portrait of

Franklin in Israel Potter.

By nature turned to knowledge, Benjamin Franklin is shown in his variety of

pursuits. Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, statesman,
humorist, philosopher, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador,
projector – Jack of all trades, Franklin was everything but a poet.

In calling Franklin a projector Melville was referring to the elaborate program

for moral improvement outlined in his second section of the Autobiography. It called
for daily exercise in such virtues as temperance, frugality, and chastity.

Franklin, as Melville observed, was not a poet, he was a diplomat.

Franklin could be found in England debating the Stamp Act before the House
of Commons. He had been a leading opponent in this most unpopular piece of
legislation. Franklin clung to the conviction that the interest of both the colonies and
the mother country were best served by maintaining the Union. If England was the
scene of Franklin`s greatest diplomatic defeat, France was the scene of his most
brilliant triumphs. He was send there in 1776 as one of three American commissioners
to arrange the treaty of alliance with the French. He had helped Jefferson draft the
Declaration of Independence.

The surrender of General Burgoyne and his entire army at Saratoga in

December 1777 marked the great turn in America`s military fortunes; but with the
treaty of “amity and commerce” that Franklin concluded only a few weeks later he had
(in the words of the best of biographers, Carl Van Doren) “won a diplomatic campaign
equal in results to Saratoga”.

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 Congress`s reply was to appoint him, with John Adams and John Jay, to a
committee to seek terms for peace with England. The formal imperialist was now the
staunchest advocate of American independence.

If Franklin was not a poet he did perhaps more then any other single American
to help create a national – state in which literature and arts could take seed.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Debts in All Directions

Emerson`s writings reveal a compact and unified movement of thought, which makes
originality and coherence entirely irrelevant. .Emerson appears to be greatly indebted
to: - Greek philosophy He read Plato and Plutarh Emerson also responded to the
teachings of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists; of them Plotinus appealed to him the most
strongly through the importance which he attached to Plato`s idea about the universal
creative intelligence as the source of all things.

German philosophy

Emerson had access to German ideas via English channels. Prominent among them
were the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle whose Sartor Resartus relied extensively
upon the ideas of German transcendentalism.

Orientalism

He was acquainted with the teachings of Confucius and Zoraster.

Emerson has the great merit of harmonizing "the modern spirit with the noblest
teaching of Ancient times” and of giving the most beautiful, accurate and powerful
expression to the idea of unity of Being in his poem "Brahma”- (1857),

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The writings of Swedenborg. came to him through secondary sources especially
through J J Garth Wilkinson's articles and his translation of Swedenborg's The
Economy of the Animal Kingdom. Native influences.

Two of them, deserve notices: that of the Quakers (George Fox and John Woolman).
Quaker beliefs that love is an active mediator between man and God find embodiment
in his doctrine of the Over-Soul, Sampson Reed's Growth of the Mind supplied him
with the idea that “the mind must grow, not from external accretion, but from an
internal principle"

Nature as a foothold of truth

A bipolar universe.

From Plato and German philosophy he retained the idea of cosmological dualism.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the soul, both
nature and art, all other men and human body must be ranked under the name nature.
He viewed nature as a counterpart of the soul. Emerson emphasized this correlation of
nature and the soul in most of his essays.It is the human mind to which the basic
dichotomy, nature and the soul are referred. There are three relationships, nature / the
soul (Emerson will replace the soul by the all – encompassing term the Over Soul) ,
man / the soul, man / nature. Over-Soul is regarded as the unifying principle of the
universe. The relationship man/nature makes the universe meaningful to man. Starting
from the assumption that nature is the projection of the the Over-Soul in the
unconscious, man is the projection of the same unifying principle in the conscious,
Emerson sets nature before man as the most important object worthy of his
contemplation.

What made nature so instrumental was its capacity to reveal “the unity in variety” In
Emerson`s view, the particular was always related to the general.

A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole. Each particle is a
microcosm and faithfully renders the likeness of the world (E, 96)

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Despite his great indebtedness to Plato in acknowledging the primacy of the spirit over
nature, he was emphatic about taking nature as the foothold of truth Nature was highly
rewarding because when it was made an object of right contemplation, it appeared to
the seeing eye both as sensible phenomena and projections of the universal mind. He
was interested in the eye as in its functions thanks to which nature could be both felt
in its physical fragmentation and intuited in its unity or oneness.

Two ways of seeing were distinguished by Ortega Y. Gasset, when discussing point
of view in the arts : the distant vision and the proximate vision,

Distant vision

The eye sees nature in terms of wholeness and unity; the parts are harmonized and
distinctions blurred. This democratic mode of vision is characteristic of country life.

The proximate way is qualified as feudal; associated with the city, it perceives nature
as a mass of discontinuous objects. Emerson advocates the distant vision. "The eye is
the best of the artists", (E, 79) The unbroken horizon provides the best focal distance
in his opinion. Such a mode of seeing also requires a passive eye: a transparent eyeball
(E, 76);

Sight as insight was possible to the extent the eye kept its freshness intact. For one
thing, the emphasis upon the naive eye helped Emerson find an answer to the question
he asked at the beginning of “Nature” “The philosophy of insight” he was offering was
entirely built upon a repudiation of tradition. Man was called, to see the world afresh
as for the first time, and nothing was allowed to interpose between it and man` eye.

Capable of enjoying the closest intimacy with nature, the child `s eye was most favored;
and the freshness of his perception could be shared only by the idiot and the Indian.

In "Self-Reliance" Emerson started from the assumption that intuition was the way to
truth. The break with the past is possible by discarding tuitions", in favor of “intuition”
(E, 131), He places the entire responsibility of achieving the original relation to the
universe upon the individual mind The individual is the focus of his interest. Emerson`s

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self-reliance appears as a vindication of individualism. He equally affirmed the
boundless possibilities of man. He who has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is
himself the creator in the finite" (E, I08).

The Repudiation of the Past

Self -Reliance gives further support to the conviction that man is the ultimate goal of
Emerson`s philosophy. More importantly, it is man's involvement with the present. The
act of seeing can be contained only in the-moment NOW - it also contributes to
dispelling the enchantment with the past, that is, of Europe

Americans no longer needed to look to Europe. They had better stay at home and trust
themselves and confront with there own world. The call was for the discovery of their
own visual resources.

A Lofty Conception of Man

Self-reliance turned into an important ethical doctrine. Emerson sensed the forces at
work in American society. These forces in turn adopted Self-reliance as their moral
imperative, using it to vindicate aggressiveness and rapaciousness in social behavior.
Quoted out of context, Emerson's pronouncements were read as the exaltation of the
individual. In short, they supplied the tycoon or the financial magnate with an ethic.

Moral Consistency

Self-reliance is not lacking in moral consistency, An important assumption behind

Emerson's Self-reliance was his notion of the "higher self”. It is that part of the self in
which the Over-Soul was believed to abide; it was the higher self that informed man's
moral conduct with the Platonic virtues of Justice, Goodness, and Beauty. Thus, the
self-surrender preached by his doctrine was understood to be full dependence upon the
dictates of the higher self."Emerson entertained a lofty conception of man. He was
reluctant to accept evil as essentially of man's inner constitution, and he denied it an all
encompassing power in nature.

"Union with things Known"

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As Sherman Paul remarks in Emerson`s Angle of Vision, the transparent eyeball is but
one pole of a twofold process. The other pole implies a return to the world of things.
In the mind`s act of grasping it “Intellect Receptive and Intellect Constructive” point
in fact to a dualism of the mind which corresponds to the dualism of the universe.

Vision or the inner seeing “is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with things
known. There are two forms in which Intellect Constructive, in Emerson's terms, union,
with things known, expresses itself: words and action.

Words

Words (Expression) is needed to complete the process of the mind. Without it, seeing,
leads nowhere. From Coleridge Emerson learned the most precious lesson. He
praised the fresh perceptions of the child or of the idiot, but he definitely valued the
poet as superior to both. The poet is superior for, apart from wholeness of vision, he
possesses the inspiration by which he can give precise expression to his vision. "By
virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or language-maker” (E, 237).

The poet has the largest power to receive and to impart" (E, 228). What gives the poet
such a lofty status, is his huge capacity of accommodating, both Intellect Receptive and
Intellect Constructive. Of the two classes of poets which he distinguishes in his preface
to Parnassus (a poetic anthology that appeared in 1874), the poets by education and
practice whose best representative was Pope, and the poets by nature (Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Burns, Wordsworth) it was the latter that exemplified the poet as
Emerson defined him.

Poet – A seer and namer

In view of Emerson's philosophy of "insight” to be a namer, the poet had first to be a

seer.

Imagination, the highest poetic faculty, is defined as "the use which the Reason makes
of the material world" (E, 101).

In his twofold-capacity as seer and sayer, the poet is a creator of meaning which
emerges as the result, of the fusion between nature and mind.

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The poetic act facilitates in the famous phrase borrowed from Coleridge and
Wordsworth "the marriage of thought and things"

The poet is "the complete man". He represents man as animal symbolicum. The
symbolizing activity in which he is involved is expressed in his use of language. Nature
appears to him a "vehicle of thought" (E 85) because it teaches man the use of words
as signs of natural facts. "

The Language of the Common Man

Emerson has the conviction that action is the great power behind language. This
pragmatic view made him keenly alert to the possibilities of the vernacular. He claimed
attention for the language of the ordinary man. The ordinary man is akin to the poet
for he too stands in close relation to the world of things; while the poet reaches it by
imagination, the ordinary man is involved with it in more physical sense.

Emerson's that keeps its ordinary man is capable of speaking a language freshness
unimpaired.

Action

Emerson considers action an important influence in the making of the American

scholar.

"Life is our dictionary wrote Emerson”

He as eagerly proclaims the equality of all the fields of human endeavor. Traditional
hierarchies of facts into high and low are rejected just as there are, the corresponding
classification of words into high and low. The critical role which Emerson played in
American fiction, had much to do with a new perspective he had opened: prosaic,
everyday life came to be seen as deserving serious literary treatment.

His influence in American Literature cannot be separated from the great prestige which
he bestowed upon facts.

A Masterful Prose Writer

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Ihab Hassan considers Emerson's Essays as a good sample of what he chooses to call
ecstatic criticism. Their power is mainly of emotional nature.

The impulse towards freedom is counterbalanced by the concentration of effect.

They find their final shape in the rhythmical unfolding of an idea. The tendency of the
idea to find expression in a more or less general statement is checked by the opposite
drift towards maximum concentration It is the latter impulse which accounts for the
aphoristic quality of Emerson's writings, as well as for his wide use of the particular
instance.

The Essays achieved their final form as a result of a long process of comprising two
distinct stages. The first of them was The Journal which served him to keep a close
contact with his favorite authors. His practice of keeping a Journal was also, a means
of training himself in the use of words.

He used successfully both pulpit and lecture platform; his being first a preacher
certainly told upon his profession as lecturer,

Emerson`s lectures aimed at an immediate and powerful impact upon the audience, it
was natural that they should have recourse to the rhetoric of persuasion as had been
developed by the New England tradition. The persuasive ring continues to be heard in
the Essays apart from their highly oral character they owe to the previous stage the
striking presence of aphorism and homely detail.

Proverbs and aphorisms

Speaking about polarity, or action and reaction as a law of the universe Emerson
illustrates it with a catalogue of proverbs:

“measure for measure”; “love for love”. – “Give and it shall be given you.”- “Who
doth not work shall not eat”- “Harm watch, harm catch.” -

Emerson was drawn to exploit the rhetorical resources of aphorism. Winters qualified
him as "the most widely read and most pungent aphorist to appear in America since
Benjamin Franklin.

16
Emerson never lost sight of the wisdom of experience of the prudential level of
existence. This comes from his belief that macrocosm repeats itself in the microcosm,
he constantly approaches universal laws by way of the particular.

Such a strategy was not uncommon in the oratorical tradition of New England. The
puritans too, it should be remembered, had been biased towards an allegorical reading
of everyday life. Apart from vindicating truth, experience offers itself to Emerson as a
vehicle of ideas; and it is this use of the particular fact which lends concreteness, to his
language.

When towards the end of The Poet Emerson voices his belief that America “will not
wait long for metres”, that it will not be long before the American poet emerges on the
world literary scene, he offers for contemplation a small Catalogue of American facts:
Our-log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians,
our boats, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and
Texas" which "are yet unsung" (E, 246) Enumeration of this sort tends to put all the
items on equal footing.

As Tony Tanner points out, Emerson's frequent appeal to the particular instance within
one and the same paragraph lends his style a highly marked paratactic quality. The long
career which paratactic style made in American literature can in no way be divorce
from the fact that it found in Emerson its first mouthpiece.

Emerson appeals to literature whenever he deals with life from a moral perspective.
Shakespeare appears to him the most resourceful of all writers. This explains why the
Essays abound in quotations from the plays and Sonnets.

Owing, like Shakespeare, “debts in all directions” (R M, 483) he became himself an

important influence not only in American thought and literature where his role was
crucial indeed, but also in European culture. Tolstoy and Nietzsche paid tribute to
Emerson. In England where his friendship with Thomas Carlyle contributed to
establish his reputation almost from the start, Emerson`s work turned out to be
especially seminal. Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Thomas Huxley thought highly of
Emerson and made known their admiration for his work.

The Poems

17
Matthew Arnold revered Emerson as the best prose writer of his century, strongly
doubted whether he was a legitimate poet. What made him reluctant to accept him as
such might have been easily suggested by James Russell Lowell's satirical poem on his
contemporaries, A Fable for Critics (1848):

Emerson is here the target of a twofold attack: first, his disregard of a conventional
pattern second, his failure to achieve unity of tone, For this reason, as well as for what
he acknowledged to be a disposition to generalization, he did not lay great store by his
poetical work. This explains why in his lifetime only two collections of poems came
out: Poems (1846) and May-Day and Other Pieces (1867). But the discovery of
Emerson the poet was a more complex process that finally led to a revaluation by
twentieth-century standards. The critical effort
made by Hyatt H. Waggoner whose
American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968) sets forth the thesis that
"Emerson is the central figure in American poetry, essential both as spokesman and as
catalyst not only the founder of the chief line in our poetry, but essential for an
understanding of those not numbered among his poetic sons.

Scarlet Letter

18
 1. Introduction

Hawthorne was proclaimed the finest American romancer. The historical period which
Hawthorne evocated in his romances and tales was the colonial past and his interest in the history of
New England may be due to his family background.

In Geta Dimitriu’s opinion Puritanism was for Hawthorne only a point of view to be further
employed a means not an end. Henry James pointed out that “Hawthorne’s relation to the puritan
heritage was intellectual and not moral and theological and “the sense of sin, seems to exist morally
for artistic and literary purpose” (4, p. 25). The exploration of the nature of sin is the core of
Hawthorne’s writings. Perhaps the most important structural characteristic of both his tales and
romances is the close relation in which character stands to imagery.

The allegorical status of his characters is in accordance with some recurrent images such as:
the scarlet letter, Hilda’s doves Zenobia’s flower also fall under the heading of allegory.

They are also allegorical in another sense. All of them pass over the traditional allegorical
image and are turned into the most important way of “investigation the truth of the human heart (1
p.203). The Scarlet Letter stands proof to this.

The House of the Seven Gables, a more “realistic” book is dominated by “figures rather than
characters”, “pictures rather than persons” (4, p.29). In his review of Twice Told Tales, Edgar Allan
Poe reproaches Hawthorne with too marked a pendant for allegory. Some of his subtitles of his tales
indicate his allegorical intentions.

Feathertop – a moralized legend. The Minister’s Black Vail - a parable, Fancy’s Show box –
a morality.

In Geta Dimitriu’s opinion, in Scarlet Letter, character and image “seem to stand on the same
footing each partakes of the nature of the other” (1 p. 201). The characters are “highly stylized” they
exist in terms of a “limited moral attitude and states. They are dominated by one idea and resemble
the agents in allegory”. (1 p.201)

James considers that the faults of The Scarlet Letter are “a want of reality” and “an abuse of
a certain superficial symbolism”. (4, p. 30)

“The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesque arranged, of
a single state of mind”. (4, p. 30)

2. The recurrent images in the Scarlet Letter

Any movement in the book is due to the image of the letter A and the ideas it rises within the
main characters.

19
 Another picturesque image is the scaffold which functions as the setting where the form
characters are grouped together.

The scaffold as a static image

The first scaffold scene shows Hester an adulteress exposed in front of the puritan community.
The other characters are presented in strong connection with Hester.

Dimmesdale the clergyman asked her for the name of her fellow sinner and Chillingworth,
her husband who signaled to her not to show she had recognized him.

The relation to the her husband and to her daughter Pearl occupies the next chapter of the
book

The second scaffold scene. During the night the minister mounts the steps of the scaffold
joined by Hester and Pearl, being closely examined by Roger Chillingworth.

The final scaffold scene brings together the main characters and the puritan community. In
full daylight the minister ascends the steps of the scaffold supported by Hester’s arm and clasping
the Pearl’s little hand “Old Roger Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the
drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors [...]” (3, p. 225)

The Scarlet letter an image with various interpretation

Whereas the scaffold stands for the sin openly acknowledged, the letter generates a numerous
meanings and interpretations.

Worn by Hester, the letter makes explicit the concept of sin in its Puritan acceptation.

The isolation to which Hester was condemned deepened her understanding for the suffering
of the others.

Hester Prynne finds in her acts of devotions to other people, helpfulness and power to
sympathize which make many people interpret the scarlet token as being Able, loosing its original
puritan meaning. Hawthorne operates significant changes at the level of the concept, by adding
further ideas.” Sin is more than puritans thought of it, they refusing what might develop from it and
becomes a moral attitude Hawthorne’s concept “emerges richer suggesting alternative possibilities
<<the device of multiple choice>>”. (1 p.204)

Dimmesdale has also a special relation to “the scarlet letter” The consequences of his sin
work at a deeper level the awareness of his sin makes life hardly possible for him.

20
 The significance of his gesture of keeping his hand over his chest is similar to Hester’s scarlet
letter. Hester’s sin was openly recognized, Dimmesdale’s remained hidden. The concealment of his
adultery increases his sense of guilt.

For this reason it becomes a matter of heart (1 p. 208). The minister is torn between two
conflicting tendencies: the moral impulse to confess his sin and the intention to hide it. His public
image is dear to the minister. The central image reveals the truth about the Dimmesdale’s torment.
The context in which it appears is an example of the allegorical use of the puritan belief in God’s
providence.

In the puritan past people interpreted God’s will in any natural phenomenon. So is
Dimmesdale when standing on the Scaffold at night, he sees the meteor like an “A” flashing on the
sky. It expressed God’s wrath at his moral guilt.

Doomed to a permanent self – examination the minister develops an insight into human guilt.
The priest receives not only the knowledge of the “sinful” brotherhood of mankind” (3 p.126), but
also the power to awake in people the reverence for moral truth with great impact on his congregation.
The consequences of his sin put the moral concept in a totally different light.

In this respect Roy Male draws attention to a new meaning of the image. It is suggested they
an analogy with the “tongues of flame” (5, p.125) which at Pentecost descended upon the Apostles
and filled them with the Holy Ghost, empowered them with the power of speech in foreign and
unknown languages. To Dimmesdale was given the power of addressing the “whole human
brotherhood in the heart’s native language. (3, p.126)

The tongue of flames resembles to the Scarlet Letter and it gives Dimmesdale the power to
communicate with his fellows. The priest was able not only to obtain a deeper moral truth but also to
make it known to others.

3. The Roger Chillingworth’s relation with the scaffold and scarlet letter

Roger Chillingworth is an embodiment of the qualms of conscience torturing Dimmesdale

and a character in his own right. He wants to take revenge on the man who wronged him.

Roger Chillingworth illustrates a manifestation of evil. The idea is supported by many

allegorical devices. He is called Black Man, the glare of red light out of his eyes, his misshapen body.

The evil which Chillingworth personifies takes its substance from laying the burden of sin on
the others. His relation with Scarlet letter and scaffold is different. He is the only main character who
does not mount the scaffold of publicly acknowledged sin and concerning the letter he is obsessed to
imprint it in Dimmesdale’s flesh.

Lacking in human tolerance, Chillingworth devotes to experimenting on Dimmesdale

physical condition. His intellect is totally separated from his heart. “Employing his intellectual
21
resources to manipulate people according to a pre-established plan Chillingworth is in Hawthorn’s
view the worst sinner of all” (1, p 213).

4. Conclusions

Despite different opinions as to the part played by Hawthorn’s use of allegory in obtaining
moral and psychological investigations, there is a general critical agreement on the writer deep inside
into psychological and moral matters.

James acknowledges that “the fine thing in Hawthorn is the deeper psychology” and the way
“he tried to become familiar with it.” (3, p. 32)

There had already been many novels set in Puritan New England, and many more followed, but
The Scarlet Letter remains the single classic of the group, appealing to tastes of changing generations
in different ways.

The Scarlet Letter was considered a literary sensation in the United States (2, p. 1922).

The most powerful appeal is the evocation of emotional sympathy for the heroine.

References:

1. Dumitriu, G. American Literature – The Nineteenth Century - , Bucuresti, 1985

2. Franklin, W., Holland, L., The Norton Anthology of American Literature Fifth Edition volume
I W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1998
3. Hawthorne N, The Scarlet Letter, in Classic American Novels, New American Library, New
York and Scarborough, Ontario, 1969
4. James, H. Hawthorne, ed. Tony Tanner, Macmillan, London, 1967.
5. Male, R. Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, the Norton Literary, New York, 1964; Terence Martin,
New York, 1965.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Poe's Status; a Controversial Issue.

Poe holds a singular place in American literary history. This is partly the result of a critical disagreement.

Whereas his reputation has always been at its highest in Europe (especially in France), in his own country and
England his status as a serious writer has often been questioned.

Basic assumptions of Poe`s Poetics

22
Of the bulk of his critical writings, particular notice should be taken of his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told
Tales (also known as The short Story 1842, as well as of "The Philosophy of Composition", 1846 and "The
Poetic Principle"

All these critical writings, help to outline his theory of poetry and that of short story.

The, kind of effect it produces, defines the poem or the short story as genre. It was Poe`s

belief that literary genres should be kept distinct from one another.

Effect, or rather unity of effect is a key term in Poe`s aesthetics. The raison d'etre of each

province of writing lies in its capacity to arouse in the reader a certain emotional response.

Poe followed Kant (his mediators were Coleridge and A.W. Schlegel -Dramatic Lectures) - in the belief, that
the world of the mind is divided into pure intellect, taste, and moral sense. The poetic sentiment is referred to
taste. Intellect concerns itself with Truth while the moral sense is regardful of Duty," (PP, 572)

Poe sets the poetic sentiment in opposition to passion which is the excitement of the heart”. Passion is at
variance with, the poetic sentiment, and as such it should be forbidden access to the province of writing ruled
by poetry. The effect associated with that province is the pleasurable elevation of the, soul which is found in
"the contemplation of the Beautiful" (PP, 575). Passion, like truth, is congenial to the short story. Not only
truth and passion fall within the boundaries of the abort story, but horror and terror as well.

Not only Poetry is productive of the poetic sentiment but other arts are apt to generate it: painting, sculpture,
dance, and above all, music. The alliance between words and music appears to him as most promising for the
poetic development. The next step is to define “the poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty with
Taste as its sole arbiter” (PP, 574). Poe considers that pleasure is the “immediate object “ of both poetry and
fiction (romance) but whereas the latter is concerned with definite pleasure, a poem, aims a creating "indefinite
pleasure".

Poe places the short story next to the poem. The impression on the reader can be destroyed unless unity or
totality is ensured. The effect upon the reader can be only sustained for a short interval so the act of reading
should be consumed in a limited and uninterrupted span of time. Poe praised only those genres which can well
agree with a certain length. He would find the novel objectionable. For the same reason, he rejects the long
poem.

The effect can be deliberately conceived;

In Poe`s opinion craftsmanship is a matter of lucid control. He positively takes an anti-romantic more
specifically anti-Emersonian stand. In his view the artist is first and foremost a maker (in 1844 Emerson had
defined the poet as seer and a namer).

23
The making of a poem involves measure in the first place. "The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of
identity of repetition" (PP, 555). Poe promoted a metre based on feet of unvaried time. In his "Rationale of
Verse" (1848), he even attempted a classification of syllables dependent on “accent”.

Just as the poem is discussed in terms of measure so the short story is approached in terms of plot.

Poe considers that all the elements of composition should be conductive to the preconceived effect; it is plot
and tone that mostly interest him. The pre-established design in the short story involves the invention and
combination of incidents and events, just as the making of poems concentrates upon the control of measure.
This is to say that only when plot has been elaborated to the minutest detail, can the act of composition enter
its stage of execution.

The concept of the imagination

The concept of the imagination had little in common with romantic poetics. To Poe the imagination is hardly
creative in the Coleridgian sense. Although beauty may afford "but
brief and indeterminate glimpses of "those divine rapturous joys" (or of what he calls elsewhere "supernal
Beauty" PP, 574) it is it self the result of a combinatory process “a multiform combination among the things
and thoughts of time” (pp, 573).

Poetic achievement Poe started his career as poet with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), apparently in
imitation of Byron. Al Aaraaf followed two years later. Poems, the edition of 1831, containing many of his
revised poems, included, too, new pieces as "The City in the Sea", "To Hellen", "Israfel", now considered
among his best poetic achievements. Poe's Anglo-American critics commonly rate them better than Ulalume"
(1847) or "The Raven" (1845), Poe's favorite, and his masterpiece in the opinion of his European admirers.

The City in the Sea

The city where “the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone" (1.4) is a place of annihilation.

Life is completely extinguished. Death reigns over the city, frozen in a kind of immobility. Water and air have
come to a standstill. There is no sign of the human, nor of the vegetable either, the mineral instead has spread
its dominion all over place, the precious stone lending it a sinister glitter.

If the human is entirely missing except for the dead, the man-made reality, is ostensibly present. Towers,
turrets, pinnacles, domes, spires, kindly halls, fanes, Babylon-like halls linked to worldly power and ambition.
Art, another form, of the human artefact is part of it, too

Even light has reversed its course, instead of falling from above, the rays "out of the lurid sea" (1, 14) stream
-up the stone edifices "While from a proud tower in the town/Death looks gigantically down (121, 28-29).
This seems to be the only movement in the city.

Throughout the poem, an image of death in life, the city in the sea meets in the end with its final collapse; the
descent into the void.

If water has strong associations with death, the downward movement through a watery medium points not
exactly to death, but rather to its ultimate stage when annihilation, also a form of life, is carried to its almost
limit.

24
As for Poe`s typical poems "The Raven", "The Bells", "Ulalume", Anglo-American criticism found them
deficient.

Poe`s preoccupation with musical effects let him to disregard the demand that “sound and sense must
cooperate''. In Auden`s view Ulalume" is about something which never quite gets said because the sense is
sacrificed to the vowel sounds". The objection which Eliot raises against 'Poe's incantatory poems refers to
the too heavy price which their author pays for creating their effect, or “the impunity" with which he disregards
sense for the sake of sound.

A mere glance at "The Raven" sufficed Eliot to draw the conclusion that "several words in the poem seem to
be inserted either merely to fill out the line to the required measure, or for the sake of a rhyme”.

Auden remarks that the metre Poe chose, with its feminine rhymes, is rare in English. In Hyatt Waggoner`s
view "The Raven" was meant to induce sadness, but its clumsy diction, inappropriate (often unintentionally
funny), rhymes, and its mechanical form that overrides the content make it seem only grotesque.

The Tales A Study in the Disintegration of personality

The Penchant for burlesque

The classification of his short stories preserved the broad distinction between tales of horror and terror, on
the one hand, and tales of truth or ratiocination, on the other. But the range of effects peculiar to Poe's
shorter fiction is wider than the two classes might suggest, a place in the general classification is claimed,
by his numerous satiric pieces.

As is known Poe's first attempt at story telling was an undisguised burlesque. Tales of the Folio Club was
meant as a framed collection of tales; the identity of the tellers, members of the Folio Club, highly
suggestive of periodicals and places associated with the Gothic, makes clear that the stories were
intentionally satiric.

Among them was "MS Found in a bottle“ which has lost the satiric effect and is now perceived as a mere
tale of terror.

A couple of stories conceived as burlesques ("Berenice" and “Morella”) ended up by engaging Poe`s
attention along a different line of interest.

There is no doubt that such stories as “Berenice" (1835), “Morella" (1835) and even “Ligeia” (1838) may be
read as satirical distortions of Gothic stock devices, or the preference for transcendental ideas.

In "Ligeia" the protagonist - narrator's relationships with the two women are interpreted as two succesive
stages of his initiation into German philosophy: he (standing for American Transcendentalism), is put,
through Ligeia, into direct touch with genuine German learning, whereas in the second, through Lady
Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine, he is brought into contemplating its reflection in English Romanticism.

His gradual rediscovery of Ligeia's features in Rowena, eventually leading to the dead woman's taking over
the body of the latter, might signify the ever-increasing hold which German philosophy was having upon
American Transcendentalism, especially after it exposed itself to the influence of English Romanticism.

25
His gradual rediscovery of Ligeia's features in Rowena, eventually leading to the dead woman's taking over
the body of the latter, might signify the ever-increasing hold which German philosophy was having upon
American Transcendentalism, especially after it exposed itself to the influence of English Romanticism.

Poe's familiarity with Gothic devices made him aware of their resources in relation to a new line of
investigation. Following his interest in the Gothic, the grotesque came to engage his attention in its own
right. His first collection of shorter fiction was significantly entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840)

“William Wilson” (1839) a great favorite of Anglo-American critics and “The Fall of the House of Usher”
(1839) were part of the collection. Most of Poe's great achievements were to follow in the next decade:
The Tall-Tale Heart (1843), The Black Cat (1843), The Pit and the Pendulum (1843), The Man of the Crowd
(1839), alongside the tales of ratiocination : The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), the Mystery of Marie
Roget (1842/1843), the Purloined Letter (1845), the Gold Bug (1843). His only novel was the Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).

The Hypertrophy of Will, Intellect and Feeling

Poe considers terror resides in the human psyche. Terror appears by no means to be a mere effect
obtained by manipulating a number of devices. Poe can hardly fail to arouse in the reader the terror effect.
Quite often Poe`s narrators reveal in varying degrees, symptoms of deranged mind and their mental
condition may provide a plausible explanation to the nightmarish experience. Some times like in The Tell-
tale Heart and The Black Cat, the impulses dictating the characters` acts would place them in the category
of the insane. Their account cast in the modern form of monologue may be read as a record of abominable
deeds.

What Poe's protagonists have in common is there inability to assert themselves as complete personalities.
The failure resulted in a hypertrophy of the three classical faculties: feeling, will and intellect.

In the tales of ratiocination, Dupin appears as the embodiment of sheer intellect or pure reason who is able
to represent to him self and to others the true relationships in which people and objects exist. In the horror
tales, on the other hand, Poe`s most heroines, Ligeia, Morella, Madeline exist as feeling, but there will and
intellect are also hypertrophied.

What they appear to strive for is the complete spiritual possession of the beloved.

In Allen Tate`s view, the hero tries in self love to turn the soul of the heroine into something like a physical
object which he can know in direct cognition and then possess. It stands to reason that this kind of
relationship can only lead to mutual destruction.

The Fall of the House of Usher

26
Of all the tales, The Fall of the House of Usher gives perhaps most complete version of the process of
dissolution. In the twins, Roderick Usher and Madeline, dissociation of sensibility has resulted in the
characteristic hypertrophy of feeling and will. Especially in Roderick, it has assumed overwhelming
proportions, and his case can easily fall under the rubric "abnormal" or "neurotic". Feeling in Roderick
turns into mere sensation ("He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses”) (PP, 251), and it is
this most acute hyperesthesia that increasingly makes him feed upon the disintegration of its objects and
absorb them into "the void of the ego”

The same strong impulse is at work in Madeline. Her strange illness is a passionate attempt to take
absolute possession of her inner being. Madeline's death comes of itself when she has lost her own
otherness. Whether she was entombed alive or not, there still remains the fact that, spiritually, there was
little life in her. Her final gesture of breaking out of her tomb may be well interpreted as a last effort of will,
to get entire possession of her brother. Their firm embrace, or rather fierce struggle leaves no doubt to the
fulfillment of their wish that has now wholly consumed their inner beings. They have been finally
swallowed and completely annihilated in "the void of the ego".

"The Locale" The effect of disintegration or annihilation is largely a matter of space relations and imagery.
The characteristic décor, which abounding in tapestries, hangings and rich furniture, suggests an oppres-
sive and stifling atmosphere. It conveys a claustrophobic effect.

The movement of the Poe`s hero is often suggestive of a maze. William Wilson's flight takes him to the
most important capitals of Europe, and the itinerary he covers is irregular. Obviously labyrinthine is the
walk of the man of the crowd, the anonymous man simply makes over and over again the round of the
same places in London. It appears evident that he feels ease only amidst the crowd. In his case disinte-
gration has resulted in depersonalization. His only way to survive is to assume the look of the crowd; by
getting lost in it.

The great weight which closing space carries in Poe is attested by his sea stories and Arthur Gordon Pym.
The immensity of the ocean is invariably set at naught by the stronger force of attraction exerted by some
vortex or maelstrom; and Poe's heroes end in the immersion in the depth.

The tendency towards contraction evinced by Poe`s space expresses the movement towards the ultimate
annihilation. "The Fall of the House of Usher" has its climax in the silence following the final collapse.

Every word concurs to express the sense of dissolution and decay pervading the whole. There is much
oppressive gloom in the atmosphere hanging about the mansion and domain

Inside, the characteristic decor closes in upon the inhabitants.

The claustrophobic effect conveyed by the architecture of the house is reinforced by a high incidence of
the vault image, a recurrent one in Poe's imagery. As it often happens in his tales (see "The Black Cat", "The
Cask of Amontillado”, "The Tell-tale Heart") characters are entombed, dead or alive.

27
Like in "the City in the Sea", water also functions as a reflecting medium. In the "black and lurid tarn" (PP,
245) the house and the domain are reduplicated in inverted images that enhance their ghastly appearance.
The reflection gives sharper outline to dissolution and disintegration.

Conclusions

Whereas Anglo-American criticism viewed Poe at best with reserve, Europe looked upon him as an artist of
the highest distinction.

As is known, French symbolism claimed him as a forerunner Baudelaire, Mailer me, and Valery wrote
admiringly of him. Unlike the English and American critics who read Poe analytically, the French responded
to his work as a whole.

What they especially valued in Poe was: first, the emphasis laid upon indefiniteness and suggestiveness as
attributes through which the poem partakes of the nature of music; second, the assumption that the
making of a poem or of a short story is a matter of calculated effects. "Spreading from France" in many
European countries, -Romania turned out-to be particularly hospitable to Poe`s creation

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.--The literature and thought of New England

were profoundly modified by the transcendental philosophy. Ralph Waldo
Emerson (p. 178) was the most celebrated expounder of this school of
thought. The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual
action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician,
Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which are not due to the activity of
any of the senses: that every one has an idea of time and space although no
one has ever felt, tasted, seen, eaten, or smelled time or space. He called
such an idea an intuition or transcendental form.

there
are two great classes of fact confronting every human being. There are the
ordinary phenomena of life, which are apparent to the senses and which are
the only things perceived by the majority of human beings. But behind all
these appearances are forces and realities which the senses do not
perceive. One with the bodily eye can see the living forms moving around
him, but not the meaning of life. It is something more than the bodily hand
that gropes in the darkness and touches God's hand. To commune with a
Divine Power, we must transcend the experience of the senses. We are now
prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Thoreau means when he
says:--

"I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the range of sight."

28
The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to
pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. It should be noted that in this period the
term "transcendentalist" is
extended beyond its usual meaning and loosely applied to those thinkers who
(1) preferred to rely on their own intuitions rather than on the authority
of any one, (2) exalted individuality, (3) frowned on imitation and
repetition, (4) broke with the past, (5) believed that a new social and
spiritual renaissance was necessary and forthcoming, (6) insisted on the
importance of culture, on "plain living and high thinking," and (7) loved
isolation and solitude. An excellent original exposition of much of this
philosophy may be found in Emerson's _Nature_ (1836) and in his lecture on
_The Transcendentalist_ (1842).

THE ECSTASY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS.--Any age that accomplishes great

things is necessarily enthusiastic. According to Emerson, one of the
articles of the transcendental creed was a belief "in inspiration and
ecstasy." With this went an overmastering consciousness of newly discovered
power. The feeling of ecstasy, due to the belief that he was really a part of an
infinite Divine Power, made Emerson say:--

"I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house,
from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The
long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light.
From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to
partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my
dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind."

The greatest of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850),

a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that
when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for
the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony of the spheres
would ensue."

The transcendentalist, while voicing his ecstasy over life, has put himself
on record as not wishing to do anything more than once. For him God has
enough new experiences, so that repetition is unnecessary. He dislikes
routine. "Everything," Emerson says, "admonishes us how needlessly long
life is," that is, if we walk with heroes and do not repeat. Let a machine
add figures while the soul moves on. He dislikes seeing any part of a
universe that he does not use. The extreme philosophy of the intangible was soon
called "transcendental moonshine." The tenets of Bronson Alcott's
transcendental philosophy required him to believe that human nature is
saturated with divinity.

THE NEW VIEW OF NATURE.--To the old Puritan, nature seemed to groan under
the weight of sin and to bear the primal curse. To the transcendentalist,
nature was a part of divinity. The question was sometimes asked whether
nature had any real existence outside of God, whether it was not God's
29
thoughts. The majority of the writers did not press this idealistic conception of
nature, but much of the nature literature of this group shows a belief in
the soul's mystic companionship with the bird, the flower, the cloud, the
ocean, and the stars. Emerson says:--

"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the
suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not
alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them."

Hawthorne exclaims:--

"O, that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put myself into a true
relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial
elements."

Thoreau (p. 194) often enters Nature's mystic shrine and dilates with a
sense of her companionship. Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:--

"Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring.

Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates
of heaven are not shut against him.... It changes all hours to an eternal
morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion,
makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This
minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the
village can be contemporary."

One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the
companionship that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the
literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic. Flowers,
trees, birds, domestic animals, and helpless human beings have received
more sympathetic treatment as a result.]

THE DIAL.--Transcendentalism had for its organ a magazine called _The

Dial_, which was published quarterly for four years, from 1840 to 1844.
Margaret Fuller, its first editor, was a woman of wide reading and varied
culture, and she had all the enthusiasm of the Elizabethans. She was
determined to do her part in ushering in a new social and spiritual world,
and it seemed to her that _The Dial_ would be a mighty lever in
accomplishing this result. She struggled for two years to make the magazine
a success. Then ill health and poverty compelled her to turn the editorship
over to Emerson, who continued the struggle for two years longer.

Some of Emerson's best poems were first published in _The Dial_, as were
his lecture on _The Transcendentalist_ and many other articles by him.
Thoreau wrote for almost every number.

While turning the pages of _The Dial_, we shall often meet with sentiments
as full of meaning to us as to the people of that time.

30
The prose in _The Dial_ reflects the new spirit. In the first volume we may
note such expressions of imaginative enthusiasm as:--

_The Dial_ afforded an outlet for the enthusiasms, the aspirations, the
ideals of life, during a critical period in New England's renaissance. No
other periodical during an equal time has exerted more influence on the
trend of American literature.

BROOK FARM.--In 1841 a number of people, headed by GEORGE RIPLEY

(1802-1880), a Unitarian clergyman, purchased a tract of land of about two
hundred acres at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. This was known as
Brook Farm, and it became the home of a group who wished to exemplify in
real life some of the principles that _The Dial_ and other agencies of
reform were advocating.

In _The Dial_ for January, 1842, we may find a statement of the aims of the
Brook Farm community. The members especially wanted "_leisure to live in
all the faculties of the soul_" and they determined to combine manual and
mental labor in such a way as to achieve this result. Probably the majority
of Americans are in sympathy with such an aim. Many have striven to find
sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them
to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane.

The Brook Farm settlement included such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York _Sun_, George
Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York
_Tribune_, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known
essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that
could not be
measured by the number of its inmates. In one year more than four thousand
visitors came to see this new social settlement.

An important building, on which there was no insurance, burned

in 1846, and the next year the association was forced for financial reasons
to disband. This was probably the most ideal of a series of social
settlements, every one of which failed. The problem of securing sufficient
leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul has not yet been solved,
but attempts toward a satisfactory solution have not yet been abandoned.

The influence of Brook Farm on our literature survives in Hawthorne's

_Blithedale Romance_ (p. 219), in his _American Note Books_, in Emerson's
miscellaneous writings, and in many books and hundreds of articles by less
well-known people. IDEALS OF THE NEW ENGLAND AUTHORS.--When we examine with
closest scrutiny
the lives of the chief New England authors, of Emerson and Thoreau,
Longfellow and Whittier, Holmes and Lowell, we find that all were men of
the highest ideals and character. Not one could be accused of double
dealing and intentional misrepresentation.The mission of all the great New England writers of this
age was to make
31
individuals freer, more cultivated, more self-reliant, more kindly, more
spiritual. An infusion of new ideals. Some of these ideals were illusions, but a noble
illusion has frequently led humanity upward. The transcendentalists could
not fathom the unknowable, but their attempts in this direction enabled
them to penetrate deeper into spiritual realities.

The New Englander demanded a cultivated intellect as the servant of the

spirit. He still looked at the world from the moral point of view. For the
most part he did not aim to produce a literature of pleasure, but of
spiritual power, which he knew would incidentally bring pleasure of the
highest type. THE INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY.--The question of human slavery profoundly
modified the thought and literature of the nation. In these days we often
opposition to slavery developed naturally as a result of the new spirit in
religion and human philosophy. This distinctly affirmed the right of the
individual to develop free from any trammels. _The Dial_ and Brook Farm
were both steps toward fuller individuality and more varied life and both
were really protests against all kinds of slavery. This new feeling in the
air speedily passed beyond the color line. One of the earliest to advocate the abolition of slavery
was WILLIAM LLOYD
GARRISON (1805-1879), a printer at Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1831 he
founded _The Liberator_, which became the official organ of the New England
abolitionists. He influenced the Quaker poet Whittier to devote the best
years of his life to furthering the cause of abolition. Emerson and Thoreau
spoke forcibly against slavery. Lowell attacked it with his keenest poetic
shafts.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1817-1862

LIFE.--Henry David Thoreau, America's poet-naturalist, was born in 1817 at

Concord, Massachusetts.
He was a lifelong student of nature, and he loved the district around
Concord. As a boy he knew its woods and streams. After his graduation from Harvard in 1837, he
substituted
for the fishing rod and gun, the spyglass, microscope, measuring tape, and
surveying instruments, and continued his out-of-door investigations.

[He taught school with his brother and lectured, but in order to add to his
slender income also did work unusual for a Harvard graduate, such as odd
jobs of carpentering, planting trees, and surveying. He also assisted his
father in his business of pencil making, and together they made the best
pencils in New England. Exact workmanship was part of
his religion. "Drive a nail home," he writes in _Walden_, "and clinch it so
faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with
satisfaction."

Like so many of the transcendentalists, Thoreau desired to surround his

life with a "wide margin of leisure" in order that he might live in his
32
higher faculties and not be continuously dwarfed with the mere drudgery of
earning his sustenance. He determined to divest himself of as many of the
burdens of civilization as possible, to lead the simple life. The leisure thus
secured, he spent in studying birds, plants, trees, fish, and other objects
of nature, in jotting down a record of his experiences, and in writing
books.

Since he did not marry and incur responsibilities for others, he was free
to choose his own manner of life. His regular habit was to reserve half of
every day for walking in the woods; but for two years and two months he
lived alone in the forest, in a small house that he himself built upon a
piece of Emerson's property beside Walden Pond, about a mile south of
Concord.. He thus acquired the
leisure to write books that are each year read with increasing interest.
The record of his life at Walden forms the basis for his best known work. A
few people practice the return to nature for a short time, but Thoreau
spent his available life with nature.

He was a pronounced individualist, carrying out Emerson's doctrine by

becoming independent of others' opinions. What he thought right, he said or
did. He disapproved, for example, of slavery, and consequently refused to
pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery.

His intense individualism made him angular, and his transcendental love of
isolation caused him to declare that he had never found "the companion that
was so companionable as solitude"; but he was, nevertheless, spicy,
original, loyal to friends, a man of deep family affection, stoical in his
ability to stand privations, and Puritanic in his conviction about the
moral aim of life. His last illness, induced by exposure to cold, confined
him for months away from the out of doors that he loved. He was buried not far from Emerson's lot
in the
famous Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord.

WORKS.--Only two of his books were published during his lifetime. These
were _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ (1849) and _Walden_
(1854). The first of these, usually referred to as _The Week_, is the
record of a week spent in a rowboat on the rivers mentioned in the title.
The clearness and exactness of the descriptions are remarkable. Whenever he
investigated nature, he took faithful notes so that when he came to write a
more extended description or a book, he might have something more definite
. When he describes in _The
Week_ a mere patch of the river bank, this definiteness of observation is
manifest:--

"The dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned by the
climbing milkania, _Milkania scandens_, which filled every
crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark
of its supporter and the balls of the button-bush."
33
_Walden_ is the book by which Thoreau is best known. It is crisper,
livelier, more concise and humorous, and less given to introspective
philosophizing than _The Week_. _Walden_, New England's _Utopia_, is the
record of Thoreau's experiment in endeavoring to live an ideal life in the
forest.. He thus states the reason why he withdrew to the
forest:--

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front

only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what
it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear."

His food during his twenty-six months of residence there cost him
twenty-seven cents a week. "I learned," he says, "from my two years'
experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's
necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet
as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.... " This book has, directly or indirectly, caused
more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other work
in American literature.

In _Walden_ he speaks of himself as a "self-appointed inspector of

snowstorms and rainstorms." His companionship with nature became so
intimate as to cause him to say, "Every little pine needle expanded and
swelled with sympathy and befriended me." When a sparrow alighted upon his
shoulder, he exclaimed, "I felt that I was more distinguished by that
circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."
When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking
them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped
eight or ten miles "to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a
yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines." It is amusing to
read how on such a walk he disturbed the daytime slumbers of a large owl,
how the bird opened its eyes wide, "but their lids soon fell again, and he
began to nod," and how a sympathetic hypnotization began to take effect on
Thoreau. "I too," he says, "felt a slumberous influence after watching him
half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged
brother of the cat."

In spite of some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the

self-sufficiency of the individual, _Walden_ has proved a regenerative
force in the lives of many readers.
The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like
poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. _Walden_ is Thoreau's most
vital combination of his poetic apprehension of wild nature with his
philosophy and aggressive individualism.

Almost all of his work is autobiographical, a record of actual experience.

34
_The Maine Woods_ (1864), _Cape Cod_ (1865), and _A Yankee in Canada_
(1866) are records of his tramps in the places named in the titles-, but
these works do not possess the interest of _Walden_.

His voluminous manuscript _Journal_ is an almost daily record of his

observations of nature, mingled with his thoughts, from the time when he
left college until his last sickness. He differs from
the majority of writers because the interest in his work increases with the
passing of the years.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Thoreau's object was to discover how to live a

rich, full life with a broad margin of leisure. Intimate companionship with
nature brought this secret to him, and he has taught others to increase the
joys of life from sympathetic observation of everyday occurrences.

Thoreau regarded nature

with the eyes of a poet. His ear was thrilled with the vesper song of the
whippoorwill, the lisping of the chickadee among the evergreens, and the
slumber call of the toads. For him the bluebird "carries the sky on its
back." The linnets come to him "bearing summer in their natures."

He is not only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the

influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of
Thoreau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to
discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the
philosophy which his life at Walden taught him:--

"I learned this at least by my experiment--that if one advances

confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours.... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not
be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under
them."

The reason why he left Walden shows one of his pronounced transcendental
characteristics, a dread of repetition. He gives an account of only his
first year of life there, and adds, "the second year was similar to it." He
says:--

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed
to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more
time for that one

He does not demand that other human beings shall imitate him in devoting
their lives to a study of nature. He says, "Follow your genius closely
enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour." His insistence on the necessity
of a moral basis for a happy life is a
characteristic that he shared in common with the great authors of the New
35
England group, but he had his own individual way of impressing this truth.
He thought life too earnest a quest to tolerate the frivolous or the
dilettante, and he issued his famous warning that no one can "kill time
without injuring eternity." His aim in studying nature was not so much
scientific discovery as the revelation of nature's joyous moral message to
the spiritual life of man. He may have been unable to distinguish between
the song of the wood thrush and the hermit thrush. To him the most
important fact was that the thrush is a rare poet, singing of "the immortal
wealth and vigor that is in the forest." "The thrush sings," says Thoreau,
in his _Journal_, "to make men take higher and truer views of things."

The sterling honesty and directness of Thoreau's character are reflected in

his style. He says, "The one great rule of composition--and if I were a
professor of rhetoric I should insist on this--is to _speak the truth_."
This was his aim in presenting the results of the experience of his soul,
as well as of his senses.. His style has a peculiar flavor,
difficult to describe. Lowell's characterization of Thoreau's style has
hardly been surpassed. "His range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a
master. There are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language,
and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always
fresh from the soil."

Thoreau's style shows remarkable power of description. No American has

surpassed him in unique description of the most varied incidents in the
procession of all the seasons. We note
three of his characteristics: his images "fresh from the soil," adding
vigor to his style; his mystic and poetic communion with nature; and the
peculiar transcendental desire to pass beyond human experience and to
supplement it with new revelations of the gospel of nature.

EMILY DICKINSON

1. INTRODUCTION

Emily Dickinson’s poetry took into account the remoteness from social turbulence and the historical
development at both superficial and deeper levels. She was more innovative than Walt Whitman,
experimenting with language: resurrecting old words, coining new ones, employing familiar terms in
unfamiliar contexts. Conventional syntax and conventional rhyming gave way before her imagination. She
shared the Romantic ideal of the poet as hero and the relation between consciousness and nature. Her
intellectual wit and her ability to express different meanings using individual metaphors, her diverse
vocabulary, paradox, ambiguity and irony belong to the seventeenth century metaphysical poetry.

36
 Emily Dickinson also experimented modern and contemporary devices as the shifting psychic state,
the theme of identity (I felt a Funeral in my Brain) and the determination to leave open options for example
between the religious faith and skepticism.

She was also a poet of her time. Her poetry reflects the cultural tradition into which she was born:
New England Calvinist Christianity. In The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune she confessed she sang of the
American robin rather than the English cuckoo. She sang New Englandly depicting her family and friends,
Amherst, her native town, the progress in science and technology (the laboratory, the railroad train), the
literary achievements.

In fact, her poetry blends the past, the present and future of her country and culture.

Allen Tate wrote in 1932 that All pity of Miss Dickinson’s starved life is misdirected. Her life was one
of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent. (6, p. 25) These statements are concerned to the high
intensity of the poet’s inward life, in spite of her external life which was so scarce that arouse both pity and
astonishment.

Her life and poetry followed the precepts of Emerson and Whitman. She experienced the greatest
richness, beauty and terror in the familiar and the near at hand, in a bobolink, a bat, a cricket, in a sermon,
a shadow on the grass, the slanting light of a winter afternoon; in a buzzing fly, a traveling circus, the look on
a dying man’s face.

She described a whole range of expressive human natures in the members of her family, in the small
circle of friends, in Reverend Charles Wadsworth she didn’t encounter more than three times in 25 years,
but it is fairly established that he is the source of her greatest flood of imaginative energy and her most
clearly erotic verses.

Thomas H. Johnson, her biographer considered that Charles Wadsworth as a muse made her a poet
(4, p. 6). In fact his absence produces the poetic eruption.

During a quarter of a century, one hears in her poems, the same voice, the same wit, the same
mixture of skepticism and ardor the same strategy punctuation and syntax. In exception is the year 1962 and
the Charles Wadsworth transferred from east coast to west coast.

It was Emily Dickinson’s most productive phase. She had experienced the emotion of grief before,
but now grief becomes a house of pain (2, p. 156). Grief deepened into anguish, into despair, into psychic
numbness After a great pain, a formal felling comes.

37
 Her verses weren’t printed as long as she lived. Only eight poems were published during her lifetime.
It was not until 1961 when Thomas H. Johnson published Final Harvest, containing six hundred of Emily
Dickinson’s poems. As a style, there is something provocative about her: the system of dashes, her
capitalizations, her interchanging of the parts of speech, her inventions.

What kind of poet was she? One critic identifies her as a mystic, another, a viewer of beauties from
afar, another as a supreme artist in the handling of delicate description.

Yvor Winters speaks of the desert of her crudities (7, p. 47).

R. P. Blackmur says: It sometimes seems as in her work a cat came at us speaking English (1, p.2)

Younger and later critics in Sewell’s volume discover in the alleged crudity often superbly worked
out and creative efforts and significant originality.

Renouncing, the possibility of publication and fame, she could exercise the varieties of technical
freedom and experimentation. Renouncing membership in the church she could allow her religious
imagination to play over a larger range of spiritual topics than the formal doctrines. Renouncing the marriage
she retained intact the beloved image and lived on in the hope of a marriage in the field of immorality.

The poems have been grouped thematically not, chronologically Emily Dickinson’s poems don’t fall
into life stages as Whitman’s do. Emily Dickinson work used to be divided into such categories as: The
Religious Poetry, The Nature of Poetry, Wit, Love, Nature, Death.

2. RELIGIOUS POETRY

Emily Dickinson was first and foremost a religious poet. There was a sustained and fertile ambiguity
in her religious attitude she was not a member of the church in the terms of her day. By the late fifties, she
didn’t attend church service and wrote in a poem of 1860.

Some Keep the Sabbath going to Church

I Keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome – (3, p. 58)

38
 The most important ingredients of her poetry are based on the common rituals of the church:
sermons, marriages, funerals; being transformed into metaphors:

I felt a funeral in my brain (3, p. 62)

The stanzic and metrical structures of her poems are varied versions of the Protestant hymn
structure.

Poetry was Emily Dickinson’s mode of prayer (2, p. 135). She found herself in the situation of a devout
skeptic confronting a powerful technological tradition. The grand consideration for Emily Dickinson were
supplied her by that vocabulary: God, heaven, hell, sin, redemption, immortality but they did not carry with
them the meanings of established doctrine; they are considered “things to be experienced”. She describes
“Faith” as slipping and a rellying and observes that, for all the Hallelujahs that might be shouted.

- Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul – (3, p. 42)

There are whole series of poems addressed to God. An eight line poem begins with a description of
the stars coming out and the moon rising expressed in a delicately language, but is in fact a parody of lushness
which concludes instantly:

Father I observed to Heaven

You are punctual (3, p. 75).

God is a distant – stately lover who woos mankind through the Son. The original sin tortured her,
and made her resentful:

Though to trust us seem to us

More respectful We are Dust

We apologize to thee

For thine own Duplicity (3, p. 89).

The poet is also bound to things of this world. She like Emerson explored those things to find out the
miraculous within them. In the poem Of Bronze and Blaze she resisted the temptation toward
transcendence. After describing how, aurora borealis had infected her to describe its transcendent grandeur

39
she came down to earth and admits that her splendors are Menagerie, a traveling circus, in comparison with
remote wonders of the sky.

3. THE NATURE OF POETRY

She is much concerned with the nature of poetry itself as the medium in which the awareness of the
human condition can be best expressed. The poem This was a Poet attributes to the poet the capacity (which
Emerson considered wisdom) of discovering the miraculous in common.

This was a Poet – It is That

Distills amazing sense

From ordinary Meanings

And Attar so immense (3, p. 58)

Of Bronze and Blaze pairs to some extent with This was a Poet in contrasting her own limited
splendors with the spectacular display of the skies.

My Splendors are Menagerie –

But their Competeless show

Will entertain the Centuries

When I, am long ago (3, p. 46).

Emily Dickinson was never wittier the in I cannot Dance upon My Toes.

The techniques of classical ballet stand for the techniques of Victorian poetry. In saying she cannot
perform as a ballerina, Emily Dickinson is saying that she can’t write poetry in Longfellow’s manner.

I cannot dance upon my Toes

No man instructed me

But oftentimes, among my mind

A Glee possesseth me (3, p. 105).

40
 Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant contains the fundamental principle of Emily Dickinson's poetry:

Tell all the Truth but tell in slant –

Success in Circuit lies[...]

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind (3, p.158)

The “He” of the poem He Fumbles at Your Soul is a preacher. He is compared first with a piano player,
than with a carpenter, then with an Olympian figure hurling thunderbolt, and finally with an Indian Warrior.

“He” seems to become a devastating force swooping down on the human spirit. But it was of poetry
and its capacity to stun that Emily Dickinson spoke about in 1879 when she remarked: If I read a book and it
makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever worm, I know it is poetry (5, p. 86).

In This is Me Letter to the World we witness Emily Dickinson’s contradictory attitude toward
publication and fame.

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see

For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen

Judge tenderly of Me (3, p. 53)

4. Wit

Wit is perhaps the most amazing feature of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, the unexpected word, turn of
phrase, the uncommon combination of terms, a juxtaposition of desperate elements. A number of her poems
are witty in the most familiar sense of joining delight to verbal and intellectual surprise.

She enjoyed herself in poetry she had fun. The opening of the Amherst and Belchertown railway
provided the basis for the poem I Like to See It Lap the Miles.

The basic device – to speak of what used to be called The iron horse is a range of infinitives following
a single verbal phrase. I like and some attractions and puzzles.

41
 I like to see it lap the miles

And lick the Valleys up

And stop to feed itself at Tanks

And than prodigious step. (3, p. 76)

Bee! I’m expecting you reminds as that along with the hymn book, nursery rhymes were the main
sources of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

Bee I’m expecting you

Was saying yesterday

To somebody you know

That you were due (3, p. 29).

The Grass So Little Has to Do is the poem whose last two words shook any grammatical rules

The Grass so little has to do

I wish I were a Hay (3, p. 56).

I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed is a parody of Emerson’s Bacchus in which Emily Dickinson announced
her preference for strong beer against the Dionysiac wine of inspiration called for by Emerson.

I taste a liquor never brewed

In vats upon the Rhyne;

No tankard ever held a draught

Of alcohol like mine (3, p. 123).

A Little Madness in the Spring is an example of the “incomplete” quality of most of Emily Dickinson’s
poems. The worksheet of this poem lists a number of alternative adjectives and nouns:

Gay bright

Quick whole – swift – fleet – sweet

Fair Apocalypse – (green) whole

42
 This whole apocalypse

Of green (3, p. 158).

The reader is invited to play a stimulating game completing the poem.

What Soft Cherubic Creatures is a kind of erotic hilarity provoked by the genteel ladies of Amherst.
(2, p. 159). They have horror of human nature prone to sin. They consider that redemption should be for the
few. They are ashamed that it is available to fishermen (like St. Mathew). The poem ends with an irony:
redemption will be ashamed of them.

Redemption – Brittle Lady

Be so – ashamed of Thee – (3, p. 250)

5. LOVE

5.1. The Experience of Loss

Emily Dickinson wrote many love poems. Love for her is a kind of crucification of the heart and it was
associated with feelings of loss (2, p. 253).

The central figure in the poem My Life Had Stood – a Loaded Gun is shocking. The woman in love, as
a loaded gun initiated into life by huntsman owner in a violation of the Freudian theory according to which
a gun is always a phallic symbol.

Wild Nights – Wild Nights is the most candidly erotic of Emily Dickinson poems. It expresses a physical
passion for what the calls “luxury”.

Freudian Symbolism is again violated. Man is the sea in which woman symbolically dives herself.

Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor – Tonight –

In Thee!. (3, p. 232)

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 In Renunciation Is a Piercing Virtue, Emily Dickinson is for the precise image by which the act of
renunciation can be identified and made tolerable. Renunciation is a virtue but it is a virtue that wounds and
must be explained to the soul. How can renunciation – the choosing against one’s inmost desire be the
supreme human gesture?

Expectation – perhaps of a life hereafter, suggested that Emily Dickinson may to some extent be
drawing upon the Protestant doctrine of renunciation, the turning away from everything which belongs to
this world. For a visionary poet no more torturing image could be described that:

The putting out of Eyes –

Just sunrise –

Lest Day – (3, p. 258)

The poem I Dreaded That First Robin, So can be compared with Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d as experimenting the sense of loss with the rebirth of nature in the spring. Where
Whitman reconciles the conflicting elements (lilacs, star, bird and poet) Emily Dickinson faces up to the
indifference of nature.

They’re here, though, not a creature failed

No Blossom stayed away

In gentle deference to me –

The Queen of Calvary (3, p. 216)

5.2. The Experience of Extreme Pain.

The preceding poems spring from an experience of loss, but the next ones explore the experience of
extreme pain.

In The Heart Asks Pleasure – First, Denied pleasure, the heart asks to be excused of pain. First it asks
for drugs to relieve the suffering. God, applying different tortures as punishment for sin, – is finally begged
to allow the soul the privilege to die.

I felt a Funeral, in My Brain is Emily Dickinson’s the most appalling use of the Protestant funeral
service to dramatize the slow death of personality, mind, reason, senses, and spirit.

44
 The brain is the setting of the drama. It is the little church where mourners mill about and the service
is held; and the path to the cemetery where the coffin is carried. Under the throbbing of pain the soul shreds
and is reduced so the booming deathknell of its being.

The funeral service is again explored to enact the ravaging of the spirit by pain in “After Great Pain,
a Formal Feeling Comes”. There is a loss of identity. Emily Dickenson believes intense suffering destroys it.

6. NATURE POEMS

Emily Dickinson’s nature poems are poems wherein the observation of some natural phenomenon
produces feelings and reflection to the point of revelation.

Further in Summer Than the Birds is a mixture of rituals; natural, Christian, and pagan. The cricket’s
song speaks about the passing of summer in the middle of it, he is “further in summer than the birds”, being
aware of autumn’s coming. He is further into the secret of natural cycle Christian liturgy suggests that after
death, nature will be reborn. The pagan elements separate the human observer from the natural
phenomena, transmitting a feeling of isolation.

In There’s a certain Slant of Light, the observation of the slant of light observed on winter afternoons
oppresses the soul

Like the heft / of Cathedral Tunes (3, p. 231)

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass – the snake “her most exact metaphor” makes her feel “a zero at the
bone”.

7. THE POEMS OF DEATH

For Emily Dickinson death was a mortal aspiration always countered by the hope of immortality. She
considers that man is condemned to death.

I read my sentence – steadily –

Reviewed it with my eyes (3, p. 246)

45
 In I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died, The one’s death is seen as the most trivial event.

There is no grand final words, no heavenly music or angels, no vision of God, but only a buzzing of
fly showing the loss of physical vision.

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz

Between the light – and me –

And then the Windows failed – and then

I could not see to see – (3, p. 199)

There’s Been a Death, in the Opposite House is a description of the death of someone in a nearby
house; the numb look of the house, the window opening like a pod, the arrival of the self – important
minister, the children’s speculations, the funeral procession. In this way the poem conveys how death is
deprived of dignity and significance.

If in I heard a Fly Buzz – when I died Emily Dickinson insinuated that death was simple the loss of
consciousness in Mine – By the Right of White Election, she was convinced that immortality awaited her:
freedom from the grave, a white soul, and eternal life are claimed. The human world is a prison against the
white election.

The eternal life is received at the cost of earthly desire.

Behind Me – Dips Eternity presents the precise nature of Christ ruling the heavenly Kingdom.

Tis Kingdoms – afternoon – they say –

In perfect – pauseless Monarchy –

Whose Prince – is Son of None –

Himself – His Dateless Dynasty –

Himself – himself diversify –

In Duplicate divine – (3, p. 200)

This World Is Not Conclusion begins with the confidence that there is a world beyond this world, and
than slips into uncertainty. Faith is seen with a comical desperation. Although ministers show many gestures
from the pulpit and choirs sing Hallelujahs, the soul is nibbled by doubt.
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 8. CONCLUSION

Having a minimal experience with the world spending almost every day of her life in Amherst Emily
Dickinson’s poetry displays a range of perception and emotion that few poets have reached. She might be
called a miniaturist since most of her poems have fewer that 30 lines, yet she deals with the profoundest
subjects in poetry: Relations to God, The Nature of Poetry, Wit, Love, Nature, and Death.

Her poetry impresses by its freshness and vitality. Not only her approach to the subjects is unique,
but her use of language is amazing. Her images are unexpected. For her death can be courteous. (Because I
could not stop for death), or terrifying (I felt a Funeral in my Brain) or full of trivial details (I heard a Fly Buzz
when I died). Nature has its terrors (The Snake in A Narrow Fellow in the Grass) as well as its glories and
sensual delights (I taste a liquor).

Her dramatic monologues convey rich complexities of human emotion and depression, faith and
doubt, hope and despair.

Her unusual word usages and oblique approaches to a subject call for multiple readings and multiple
interpretations. Her imaginativeness draw back to the metaphysical poets of the 17 th century, while her play
with language and her psychological and philosophical insights very unusual for the conservatives readers of
her time brought her a wide popularity posthumously.

References

1. Blackmur, R.P. "Emily Dickinson's Notation." In Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Ed. Richard B. Sewall. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963
2. Brooks, Cleanth, American Literature, The Makers and the Making, St. Martin’s Press, New York,
1973.
3. Dickinson, Emily, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition, Harvard University Press,
Boston, 2005
4. Johnson, H., Thomas eds. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, Belknap P, 1955
5. Johnson, H., Thomas, and Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge:
Harvard UP, Belknap P ,1958
6. Tate, Allan, Collected Essays, Nashville, 1959.
47
 7. Winters, Yvor, Poets of the Pacific Second Series, Books for Libraries Press, Hardcover Edition,
New York, 1968

WALT WHITMAN

A Poetics in Emersonian Terms.

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Walden was not the only work of the eighteen fifties that looked to the year cycle for a principle of formal
organization. The fifty-two sections of "Song of Myself", corresponding to as many weeks of the year, might
suggest that Whitman intended a similar time scheme for his poem. For Whitman, the analogy with the year
cycle practically lost in importance and only survived in the number of the sections. "Song of Myself" "starts"
in summer as the reference to "a spear of summer grass" The poem is little controlled formally by the year-
cycle analogy.' In fact, such a control would have been hardly in harmony with the tendency of the poem to
grow in exploration of space, as boundless cosmos.

Walden and “Song of Myself“ are akin in their emphasis upon the first person standpoint. they both strike
the confident note when asserting the belief in the self. They both appear as the apex of a trend of thought to
which Emerson had given full expression in "Self-Reliance".

Moreover the response to the idea of oneness, of unity in diversity inspired much of Whitman’s
early work.

A convincing proof in Whitman’s connection with Emerson is supplied by the "Preface" to the first edition
of Leaves of Grass.

Among the desiderata reaching back to Emerson, to which the "Preface" lends programmatic point and force,
is the claim that in order to fulfill his mission the poet should let himself fully open to his country's spirit".

He indicates the whole of the United States as his true province, amplifying a similar catalogue as Emerson
Whitman envisaged himself as precisely the poet Emerson had in mind when writing his essays

'Simplicity" is another important item in Whitman poetics.

In urging the poet to emulate nature as the only means by which simplicity is attained, Whitman starts for
the assumption that the poem is an act of growth in keeping with nature's laws. What he means by it is
something very similar to the organic principle as understood by Emerson. Whitman sees no way in which
the poet can write his poem other than by giving free and full expression to his own self; the command in
Emerson's essay "The Poet: "It is in me, and shall out”. In the sense in which it validates only experiential
knowledge, poetry is autobiography. In this Whitman meets an common ground with Thoreau. There is, then,
another sense in which the poem implies growth, since the Self constantly opens to experience, the poem is
bound to grow according to it.

That is precisely what happened to Leaves of Grass.

The volume literally grew from one hundred pages in the first edition to more than 450 pages in the ninth
and final edition of 1891/1892. However, Leaves of Grass grew not only by accretion but also by a steady and
complex process of revision involving graphical arrangement, punctuation, division into larger sections and
stanzas, as changes in the wording and rhythm of the longer poems

The Cosmic Vision

The Confident Voice

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The poet of “The Leaves of Grass” wanted to be identified with "one of the roughs". An uneducated
vernacular speaker is announced, especially in "Song of Myself". The way of looking upon the world has
little in common with received knowledge:

No shutter'd room or school can commune with me,

But roughs and little children better than they. (47,11.1255-56)

The harmony with the surrounding world contains a double reward. First the world is discovered as if for the
first time both as particular item and revelation of oneness; second the contemplating self emerges fully
distinct, though no less aware of itself as "but a part". (45, 1. 1195)

The drift of the whole poem is towards the glorification of cosmic oneness. The concluding sections (from
section 44 to the end) sound as an apotheosis. The poet who in section 1 introduced himself as loafing at
"observing a spear of summer grass" (1, 1. 5) has developed now an awareness that makes his self
coextensive with the cosmos. The cosmos is boundless in time and space.

Any system in it turns out to be but part of a larger system, and so on, endlessly.

Infinity appears to be thoroughly invigorating to Whitman. The explanation lies in the notion that the impulse
towards perfection resides in all things. “Form, union, plan (50, 1318) are declared to be the all informing
principle of Whitman cosmos.

When referred to it, all experience, pleasure and pain alike, is justified. Life is not only accepted, but
celebrated; it is the note on which the poem opens: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, (1, 1. 1) Whitman's
celebration of cosmic oneness renews thus a tradition that reaches down to Blake. Rooted in Emerson's
conception of the Over-Soul, his belief in the orderly plan of the universe was also nourished by influences
coming from various quarters. The cosmic perspective for instance may well have been adopted under the
impact of the possibilities opened up by science. Envisioning science as a releaser of energies that make for
"form, union, plan", Whitman could see no contradiction between it and nature.

In relation to nature, science as well as art, play, only a subservient, part: And the narrowest hinge in
my hand puts to scorn all machinery, /And the cow crouching with depress'd head surpasses any statue. (31,
11. 667-668) Nature’s superiority rests upon an inner impulse that makes for its upward movement.
Whitman's belief in "those winged purposes" (3, 1. 239) recalls Thoreau once more. However, he often
envisages them in terms of universal love. The creed that "all the men ever born are also my brothers, and
the women my sisters and lovers \ and that a kelson of the creation is love” seems to be tributary to the
influences coming from his family background: the Qakerish faith of the mother (one more he meets on
common ground with Emerson who was open to the spirit of Qakerism); and the equalitarian views of his
father. The poet too was to respond to Elias Hicks, the quaker orator, especially to the latter's urge that the
soul should be regarded as the most important foundation of the self.

He would rather consider "that the soul is not more than the body" and "that the body is not more than the
soul". (48, 11. 1269-7oTo understand the principle of oneness in terms of the procreative impulse is also to
make of it something positively different from Emerson's Over-Soul. The poet's awareness that

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex

50
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a bred of life (3. 11. 46-47) shifts the interest onto the
body in a way that renders it more fully expressive of the self. There is a reverence which Whitman shows
for the naked body. He celebrates the Adamic stance chiefly for its association with the health of the senses.

The life of the senses which Whitman celebrates is not radically different from sensuality. Animality may be
just another word for it, that is the vital energies biding man to cosmic oneness. The poem is rich in animal
imagery that conveys an impression of vitality and force. Whitman celebration of the senses might invite
another comparison with Thoreau. Whitman never made of the senses a way towards self-discipline; his
glorification of the senses required of him to fully surrender to their power.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. (24 11. 522-24)

Thoreau cultivated the sense of touch, but his devotion to it could hardly equal Whitman's.

The eye too might have been of crucial important to Whitman, as Tanner argues.

The Poet’s attributes

In Song of Myself Whitman attaches extraordinary importance to the sense of touch. It becomes in fact the
vehicle for his belief in universal love (the procreative instinct) as the foundation of cosmic oneness. There
are certain attributes with which Whitman’s poet is endowed: primarily a great capacity to feel as a result of
his direct, almost physical relationship with the surrounding word, second, the distinctive quality of the
imagery. Without underrating the power of naming things (“Speech is to twin of my vision”) (25 1 566),
Whitman most often views himself as the caresser of life (12, 1 232). He appears to have instant
conductors all over him. Such an unusually great sensitivity lends utmost intensity to the poet’s contact with
another human being: “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand” (27, 1 618).

The Song of Myself is also a poem about America.

More importantly it is an expression of America becoming aware of itself; of the vast possibilities that were
open up; of its huge energies. The sense of boundless space and quality of American life are rendered by
means two closely related devices: the catalogue – the mere enumeration of mere particularized items and
juxtaposition. A good example of a such catalogue is supplied by Section 10. The marriage of the trapper with
the red girl is seen as one of union rendered as a statuesque seen. Another dramatic instance is the runaway
slave who is given shelter and assistance by the poet.

Closer to Outer-World

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Having adopted a stance of man of the road, homo viator in the words of Hyatt H. Waggoner – Whitman’s
poet has the tendency to come closer to outer world. It manifests itself in varying degrees from the impulse to
establish a palpable contact with it, to being identified with it through a process of absorption.

Universe is particularized as ones country and this makes it possible for the poet to discover and celebrate his
self simultaneously with the discovery and celebration of America. The poems “An American” and “There
was a Child Went Forth” from the second edition made Thoreau qualify Whitman as “very brave and
American”.

Whitman’s belief that the poet should be open to of all inclusive range of experience let him to ignore the
barriers delimiting the sphere of the poetic material. Whitman’s poet aspires to absorb all life. Much as he is
drawn to beauty, so he is to ugliness. “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of
wickedness also” (22,1 463).

Similarly the poet celebrated the city as the countryside. “The heavy omnibus” (8,1 155) “the express
wagon” (15,1 281), “the machinist” (15,1 279), “the paving man” are part of the same world as the spear of
summer grass.

Characteristic imagery

Whitman’s tendency to absorb the world and let himself to be absorbed by it generated his characteristic
imagery. Song of Myself is rich in erotic images. Central to the poem remains, the image of the leaves of
grass. A spear of summer grass stands for a fact of life, a minute particular, but when rightly observed it
becomes a metonymic expression of cosmic oneness.

The grass discloses itself as a cosmos only after it has helped the poet understand life at various levels: it
makes him accept the principle of equality among men irrespective of race and nation. The ideal of democracy,
much cherished by Whitman, appears to be deep rooted in his conception of cosmic oneness. As both “the
produced babe of vegetation” and “the beautiful uncut hairs of graves”, (5,1 110) the grass is a token of the
fecundity of nature as well as of the power of life to renew itself through death. The believe in life as cyclical
progression made him accept death all too readily.

The identity between “I” and “you”

The poet feels inclined to let himself open to experience so too he feels bound to share it with the reader. In
following Emerson’s conception of the poet as “the larger power to receive and to impart Whitman tended to
view the role of the poet as more depended upon his capacity to share with the other. His desire is to
communicate his experience to the other in such a way to make the latter accept it as truly his own. “And what

52
I assume, you shall assume”. The identity, between “I” and “you”, is affirmed from the beginning, in the name
of the principle of oneness. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” (1,1.3) The reader
envisioned by the poet is by no means passive. The truth imparted by the poet should not be accepted as such
unless it were converted into experience.

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, no look

through the eyes of the death, nor feed on the specters in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self” (2,11 34-37)

The best the poet can do for the reader is to show him a way that might lead to both self and the world.
The role of the poet is that of the guide. In “Song of Myself” the relation of proximity develops in one of
intimacy. What the poet is keen on imparting is primarily the awareness he has developed. Triggered off by
the contemplation of the spear of summer grass, the poet’s consciousness has expended to envelop the cosmos.
His final identification with “the grass I love”, makes the process comes full circle. He is one with the grass
in the sense that he fully realizes what it signifies: his vision embraces now both cosmos and leaf of grass.

Whereas “Song of Myself” takes its shape from “the perpetual journey”, the poet “tramps” (46,1. 1202) poems
such as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859,1881) and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom`d”
(1865, 1867) are organized round an emotional centre.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” displays a more balanced structure in the interplay of the several voices
whose discord is resolved in the poets understanding of the act of poetic perception. The poem recapitulates
the making of the poet. The bareheaded, barefoot, child has been initiated into love, loss, pain and death. The
crucial May experience of childhood is acted out once more in the grown-up man’s consciousness: the boy
“peering, absorbing, translating” (1.31) the love song of the mocking-birds from Alabama, a song to be shortly
followed be the male bird’s lament for the loss of his mate. The singer’s sense of bereavement is sharpened
by the landscape, “the Paumanok`s grey beach” where “madly the sea pushes upon the land with love. The
moon too “is heavy with love” (1.76). Deprived of his mate, the male bird can only express his anguish in
threnodic accents. On hearing them, the boy has his first initiation into pain brought about by loss.

The voice of the sea will immerge him deeper into it. It is out of those notes that the “outsetting bard” will
make his song. It is not mere conversion of pain into song this time, but that is something of which only the
mature poet becomes aware; the trio-the bird lamenting his mate, “the savage old mother incessantly crying”
(1,141) and “the boy ecstatic” (1,136) – is brought back to life as an act of memory.

Distanced in time, the poet is now able to see his childhood experience, as crucial for what he has become.
The voice of the bird and the song of the sea yield now a full meaning to him as they failed with the boy.

It is to the poet that the two voices, the bird’s and the sea’s convey of full massage enabling him to reach a
self definition for, just as the birds sings of loss and pain, so too the poet finds a voice when trying to give
expression to “the cries of unsatisfied love”
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Symbols

Whitman’s mocking-bird from Alabama may well appear as the American counterpart of Philomela. His bird
symbol helps him to articulate the romantic creed that “eternal passion, eternal pain is the main spring behind
the poetic act”.(23)

The poet song is far from being a mere lament like the bird’s. What it makes it significantly different from the
latter is the awareness belonging to the poet which is brought to bear upon individual loss and individual pain.
At its root the acceptance of loss and death as part of the order of things; love and loss, life and death are
inseparably bound up with each other. “The clew” in the poem should come from the sea. It is only the mature
poet that makes out the final word which the sea is whispering. To be aware of death and to accept immersion
in it as the poet lets himself be laved by the sea waves.

It was made possible for the boy to have become the fully articulated poet. The several voices have all
increasingly into the focus that structurally grants the poem coherence. The blending of the past and present
in the interplay of voices is controlled by the mature poet’s voice. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is
depended of its meaning upon the sea imagery. There are at least two distinct images associated with the
seashore: the sea pushing upon the land with love and the fierce old mother. As the tideline, the point of
conjunction between water and land, the sea has strong sexual associations; as savage old mother speaking
ceaselessly of death, the sea comes to be identified with death.

Style

The sea supplied the poet with some of the rhythms of nature upon which his verse was to be modeled.
Whitman justifies his rejection of traditional rhyme and rhythmic pattern by the aspiration to absorb,
structurally speaking, the very rhythms of nature. It accounts both for the line that tends to dilate, even to the
point as merging into prose, and the short line counter balancing it like in a tidal movement.

When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom`d

The poem asserts its force in the way public grief caused by the assassination of the President Lincoln in April
1865 becomes an intimate part of the poet’s awareness. The elegy depends for its effect on the poet’s gift to
assert the power of life as against death and of joy as against grief. The song of the thrush, the poet recognizes
as his own. In one sense it celebrates the victory in war – a victory for which the price of death was paid; in
another sense it celebrates the joy that may abide in grief. To other images, the lilac and the star reinforce the

54
idea of the threnody which finds full expression in the thrush’s song. “The drooping star in the West” (1.5)
may be easily identified with the President: its western course parallels the itinerary of the funeral train
carrying Lincoln’s body to his home town, Springfield, Illinois.

The Spring of lilac offered by the poet is not merely a token of love for the President the “heart-shaped leaves
of rich green” (1,13), but in addition they imply the certitude of the power of life to renew itself with “ever
returning spring” (1.4). April the month of Lincoln’s death stands in significant contrast to the mourning cities.
Not only the lilac bush in bloom, but also the fields through which the coffin passes give ample prove of death
kinship with life. Meant “to adorn the burial – house of him I love“ the lilacs make of the celebration of life a
most appropriate form of mourning. Large enough to hold the whole America, Whitman’s picture are also rich
in national significance.

Style

Whitman’s verses develop outside traditional poetic schemes. Not only did he show little preference for fixed
poetic forms but most characteristically, his words evaded the formal control of rhyme and of metrical norm.

MOBY DICK

1. THE MAIN INFLUENCES

It is well known that a lot of influences worked upon Melville while he was writing Moby Dick.

The most important influences seem to be his meeting with Hawthorne and his reading of
Shakespeare and Thomas Carlyle. “Moses from an Old Manse” shows the impact that both Shakespeare and
Hawthorne had on Melville. Admiration for Hawthorne work was doubled with friendship for the writer.

Thomas Carlyle has also a great impact especially upon the focus of the new Melville’s novel. Moby
Dick was most obviously influenced by Sartor Resartus. Ethimology, extracts, and quotations from imaginary
authors stand as an evidence of Carlyle’s methods used by Melville.

More important than all these particular instances relating Moby Dick to Sartor Resartus is its
symbolic structure. Symbolism was also a part of a more general tendency of that age. The transcendentalists
cherished a type of symbolism, and Emerson’s theory of symbolic vision had been widely spread. Hawthorne
relied extensively on the resource of allegory and symbolism in his “multiple choice” device.
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 The most important thing about Sartor Resartus to which Melville responded was Carlyle’s theory of
symbolism. The tripartite structure of the Melville’s work implies a set of relationships derived from Carlyle’s
notion adapted from Coleridge that in the symbol “there is concealment and revelation”; in it “the infinite is
made to blend itself with the finite”.(3, p.165) The triad critic, author, book presented in Sartor derives from
Carlyle’s theory of symbols. The critic can find out the meaning of the book, which reveals and conceals its
author, only if he knows the writer’s life. The book performs as part of its relation to appearance (the finite)
and reality (the infinite). By focusing upon the world of things the book reveals them as projections of infinite.
In Carlyle’s opinion all things are projections of the infinite in the finite. Issues, to which his theory of symbols
tried to find a clue in Sartor, must have challenged Melville.

Moby Dick involves itself a re-examination of the questions raised by Sartor. The whale and whaling
ceased to interest Melville in their own right and became a symbol which absorbed most of Carlyle’s triad.
Melville’s symbol takes its vitality from the interplay of the mind and object, or the image it contemplates.
The whale has no significance apart from what crew make of him. The relation is not passive it is one of
interactions: “the mind acts upon the object and takes its consequences”.(4, p.231) The meaning is
discovered during a process in which self and object are mutually involved. This makes whaling as important
as whale “for the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea if his living contour, is by going
whaling yourself”. (7, p.279)

2. THE NARRATOR’S SYMBOLIC VISION

To discover the meaning of the whale you have first to encounter him. Melville endows Ishmael’s,
his narrator with a symbolic vision.

The author transferred upon his narrator a mode of seeing he considered rewarding. Pondering over
any newly discovered object, the narrator’s exploration has unlimited purpose. The particularity of his mind
induces him an ever-shifting point of view from which he contemplates reality. There is a strong impulse to
project a thing against one existential perspective, discovering further significance. Particulars of whaling are
projected against broader perspectives provided by intellectual history and setting them in relational
contexts, which will reveal new meanings.

Ishmael’s symbolic vision enables him to ask ontological and epistemological questions and to search
presumptive answers. In 20th century terms, the questioning makes his exploration meaningful rather than

56
a definite conclusion. His characteristic mode of thinking is the notation that “any human thing supposed to
be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty” (7, p.153). The encounter with reality or the whale
forced upon him this certitude derived not from the diversity of reality but from its depth that defies man’s
effort to grasp its wholeness. The Leviathan’s skeleton gives very little information of his general shape, so
the living whale “in his full majesty and significance” enjoys Ishmael’s attention. (7, p. 278) Ishmael’s voyage
is an ever renewed attempt to reach the living whale. He has a very flexible point of view “By adopting in
turn the biological, sociological, paleonthological, historical, anatomical and economic perspective, he is able
to approximate the object of his exploration, without assessing it in all its complexity”.(4, p.236)

The anatomy of the whale gives Ishmael the opportunity to understand the whale’s accessibility to
the knowing mind. Each part of his blubber, his head, tail, ambergris are accurately described. This positivist
approach doesn’t reward him with the mastery of the whale: “Dissect him how I may, I but go skin deep; I
know him not, and never will.” (7, p.389) The forehead “pleated with riddles” or the “wrinkled brow” are
representative for the whale’s inscrutability. The anatomical description of the head is seen taking into
account the relation between consciousness and reality seen from a platonic perspective.

The “pure, lumpid and odoriferous spermacety” put in danger Tashtego’s life when he falls into the
head of the leviathan. “So the highly – prized substance” may be as dangerous as it is sweet, as the sea may
be destructive is spite its serenity.

The peculiar position of eyes disposed on either side of the head affords the whales the possibility
to examine simultaneously “two distinct prospects” (7, p. 343)

The optical capacity of the whale to simultaneously embrace opposite things is more accurate than
man’s.

The anatomical parts of the Leviathan suggest many of his characteristics: “inscrutability,
formlessness, otherness in his relation to man, as well as a huge capacity to accommodate discordant
impulses and dichotomies of all kinds.” (4, p. 238) In fact polarity is an all governing principle in Moby Dick.
The whale may be seen as both death dealing and life giving.

Moby Dick can be destructive and beneficent. Spermaceti and ambergris are his gifts, but he is also
responsible for the disaster of the Pequod.

Another example of polarity is the coffin life buoy and its double association with life and death.
Built as a coffin for Queequeg it is turned into a life buy for Ishmael. In fact all things reveal two sides and
reality is something mixed “made up of different strands that are bound up in one chord”. (1, p.156) Two of

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them are relevant: one, followed up by Ishmael, in which reality is seen in terms of “dramatically, divided
opposites” (4, p. 240)

The other one is followed by Ahab focused upon one strand, making up “the chord of reality evil” (4,
p.240)

3. CHROMATIC SYMBOLISM

Ishmael’s view of reality without any hierarchy of significance is a result imposed upon him by the
contemplation of the whiteness of the whale.

Starting from the feeling of terror that whiteness stirs in man, the narrator enumerates a catalogue
of significations of the colour white from life asserting symbols to life denying ones.

The terror indicated by whiteness seems to be a result of its indefiniteness (the absence of any
meaning). “by its indefiniteness it shadows the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs
us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the milky way or is it
that as an essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, as at the some time the
concrete of all colours?” (7, p. 212)

In fact there is no finality in this reflection; it is only another tentative answer. Remembering
Ishmael’s interference in whaling, it is obvious that meaning should be a result of man’s interaction with his
environment. The Leviathan’s indefinite colour suggests that all his actions have no definite purpose.

Lacking any intentionality, the way in which whale acts, for the better or worse, is only a problem of
chance.

Ishmael considers chance the principle which governs the universe and emphasizes the superiority
of passivity over action. As a consequence he can detach from his involvement in whaling and make a lot of
intellectual, cultural, literary associations. The emphasising upon passivity is also responsible for not having
a full control on his narrative and for lacking of an articulated finish of the book.

Professor Geta Dimitriu pointed out that “The book is bound to remain a draft because reality resists
being captured in an overall image. Moreover to acknowledge supremacy of chance is also to deny the power
of will (including authorial will)” (4, p. 241)

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 Whiteness of the whale should be seen in opposition to black tacking into consideration the terms
of all the ambivalence present throughout the book. The pursuers, not only the harpooners Queequeg (a
New Zealander), Diego (a negro), and Tashtego (an Indian), but also the Pequod herself, strike the eye with
their dark hue. Ahab is sometimes called “black” (7, p.170) and Moby Dick’s colour is a reverse of black which
is the usual colour of a whale.

In fact there is not a clear distinction between black and white, for each is imbued with the other.

Whale is not only associated with whiteness but with blackness as well as in the description of the
oil painting seen by Ishmael in the Spouter Inn: “The long, limber, portentous, black, mass of something
hovering in the centre” (7, p. 40) The dark bulwarks of the Peqoud with are decorated with long rows of
white teeth, and the white skinned mates are counterparts of each dark harpooner. The “black terrific” (7,
p.170) Ahab is fighting against the white whale, so the two colours are so close. Ishmael’s vision of the all
governing passivity (Divine Inert) finds support in Ahab’s fighting against the white whale. The failure of the
strong willed man to win the whale is illustrative for the primacy of inertness over the human will. In Geta
Dimitriu’s opinion, Ahab “is the perfect embodiment of the consequences of Emersonian self reliance carried
to its utmost limit”. (4, p. 243)

Ahab is the Ishmael’s extreme counterpart with a boundless confidence in the power of self, with an
unflinching purpose, incapable of readjusting his vision.

For Ahab, whale is a symbol of the omnipresence of evil and this is the source of his determination
to struggle against it at all costs. In spite of his huge stature and the hypertrophy of his will Ahab is lack of
heroic dimension. He is in the “Howthornesque variant, the Unpardonable Sinner, who turns into a slave to
will or intellect or both and, in to doing nullifies his potential for fellow-feeling” (4, p.244) He considers his
crew instruments to fulfil his will.

To Maurice Friedman “he is the most through going example of the monological man. He can hear
no other human voice because his own is high lifted” (6, p. 118). Ahab’s obsession with evil is a form of
intimacy with it, and finally he himself becomes a part of it.

This may be easily observed in the recurrent images in which Ahab and Moby Dick’s similarities are
illustrated.

Both are humped and whale’s brow is “wrinkled” and Ahab’s “ribbed and dented”

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 Ishmael as a narrator identifies Ahab with the whale “he at least came to identify with him, not only
all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations” (7, p.201) he considers that whale is
evil to Ahab, because Ahab projects such a meaning upon him.

Evil as an all pervading force is also suggested by the imagery in the novel.

Crooked jaw is the most recurrent image. This metonymic image is associated with death. It “had
reaped away Ahab’s leg as a mower a blade of grass in the field” (7, p.201). The whale’s mouth is a terrible
image of the power of evil. Its ferocity and violence is implied in the act of dismembering the human body.
The crooked jaw finds its counterpart in the harpooner’s teeth and teeth of the Pequod. The teeth represent
an emblematic imagery as a result of which things are violently broken into fragments by them.

There are a lot of episodes centred round eating. The “Cabin Tale”, the “Stubbs’s Dinner”, the
“Spouter – Inn”, “Breakfast, “Chowder”. Stubbs’s eating a whale steak above is in full harmony with the
sharks bellow which “mingling their mumblings” (7, p.306)

An incredible ferocity is revealed in “the Shark Masacre”, when they start shapping
disembowelments at each other’s and biting their own entrails.

Ahab himself is a great eater, in fact a “monomaniac incarnation of all these malicious agencies” (7,
p.201)

4. THE HUMAN BOND

In Moby Dick there is one force that can stand in the way of evil: the human bond. The fellow feeling
can stop the disintegration of the psyche.

Contemplating Queeqeg at the Spouter – Inn, Ishmael realizes the emotion he feels with him is
generated by the presence of his new friend. The great value of their friendship is borne out by Queeqeg’s
power to relieve Ishmael’s suicidal state, and finally by Ishmael’s survival after the shipwrecked due to his
friend coffin used as a life buoy. The relationship between two men is evident in “the Monkey Rope”, where
they are in a mutual dependence.

Queeqeg can break ground in the whale’s back only attended by Ishmael.

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 A hempen cord fast to their belts helps the harpooner keep his poise on the whale’s back. The
hempen bound makes them dependent upon each other to such an extent that a wrong move of either of
them might have fatal consequences for both.

If for Emerson friendship consists in spiritual communication for Melville friendship requires
unreserved commitment.

The issue was important to Melville for he takes it up in “The Confidence – Man” followed by “Pierre,
or, the Ambiguities” and The “Piazza Tales”

Melville could hardly accept the terms in which Emerson viewed the dichotomy inherent in the
symbolic vision and in his work he proceeded to re-examine them in the ontological and epistemological
exploration.

References:

1. Bowen, Marlin, The Long Encounter, The University of Chigago Press, Chicago, 1960.
2. Brooks, Cleanth, R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren American Literature, the Makers and
the Making, volume II, New York, 1973
3. Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus, in Essays and Belles Lettres, Every-man’s Library
4. Dumitriu, Geta, American Literature – the nineteenth century, Editura Universitatii
Bucuresti, 1985
5. Franklin, Wayne, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, fifth edition, volume I,
New York, 1985.
6. Friedman, Maurice, Problematic Rebel, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970
7. Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, Penguin Popular Classics, A Penguin/Godfrey Cave Edition,
1994.

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