Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition PDF
Preview Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African American Anton Chekhov Langston Hughes Poets: G.K. Chesterton Zora Neale Hurston WheatleyÐTolson Kate Chopin Aldous Huxley African American Agatha Christie Henrik Ibsen Poets: Samuel Taylor John Irving HaydenÐDove Coleridge Henry James Edward Albee Joseph Conrad James Joyce Dante Alighieri Contemporary Poets Franz Kafka Isabel Allende Julio Cort‡zar John Keats American and Stephen Crane Jamaica Kincaid Canadian Women Daniel Defoe Stephen King Poets, Don DeLillo Rudyard Kipling 1930Ðpresent Charles Dickens Milan Kundera American Women Emily Dickinson Tony Kushner Poets, 1650Ð1950 E.L. Doctorow Ursula K. Le Guin Hans Christian John Donne and the Doris Lessing Andersen 17th-Century Poets C.S. Lewis Maya Angelou Fyodor Dostoevsky Sinclair Lewis Asian-American W.E.B. DuBois Norman Mailer Writers George Eliot Bernard Malamud Margaret Atwood T.S. Eliot David Mamet Jane Austen Ralph Ellison Christopher Marlowe Paul Auster Ralph Waldo Emerson Gabriel Garc’a James Baldwin William Faulkner M‡rquez HonorŽ de Balzac F. Scott Fitzgerald Cormac McCarthy Samuel Beckett Sigmund Freud Carson McCullers The Bible Robert Frost Herman Melville William Blake William Gaddis Arthur Miller Jorge Luis Borges Johann Wolfgang John Milton Ray Bradbury von Goethe Moli(cid:143)re The Bront‘s George Gordon, Toni Morrison Gwendolyn Brooks LordByron Native-American Elizabeth Barrett Graham Greene Writers Browning Thomas Hardy Joyce Carol Oates Robert Browning Nathaniel Hawthorne Flannery OÕConnor Italo Calvino RobertHayden George Orwell Albert Camus Ernest Hemingway Octavio Paz Truman Capote Hermann Hesse Sylvia Plath Lewis Carroll Hispanic-American Edgar Allan Poe Miguel de Cervantes Writers Katherine Anne Geoffrey Chaucer Homer Porter Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Marcel Proust John Steinbeck H.G. Wells Thomas Pynchon Jonathan Swift Eudora Welty Philip Roth Amy Tan Edith Wharton Salman Rushdie Alfred, Lord Tennyson Walt Whitman J. D. Salinger Henry David Thoreau Oscar Wilde JosŽ Saramago J.R.R. Tolkien Tennessee Williams Jean-Paul Sartre Leo Tolstoy Tom Wolfe William Shakespeare Ivan Turgenev Virginia Woolf William ShakespeareÕs Mark Twain William Wordsworth Romances John Updike Jay Wright George Bernard Shaw KurtVonnegut RichardWright Mary Wollstonecraft Derek Walcott William Butler Yeats Shelley Alice Walker ƒmile Zola Alexander Solzhenitsyn RobertPenn Warren Bloom’s Modern Critical Views RALPH WALDO EMERSON Updated Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Ralph Waldo Emerson,Updated Edition Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York, NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ralph Waldo Emerson / Harold Bloom, editor. p. cm—(Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9316-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-1340-1 (e-book) 1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. PS1638.R28 2006 814’.2—dc22 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © The New York Public Library Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic natureofthe web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents EditorÕs Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Question of Means 15 Stephen E. Whicher Emerson: The American Religion 33 Harold Bloom The Curse of Kehama 63 Barbara L. Packer Detachment and Transition 91 Julie Ellison Emerson and the Work of Melancholia 109 Mark Edmundson Emerson and the Ode to W.H. Channing 125 David Bromwich The Way of Life by Abandonment: EmersonÕs Impersonal 137 Sharon Cameron vi Contents Self-Reliance and the Life of the Mind 171 George Kateb EmersonÕs Constitutional Amending: Reading ÒFateÓ 205 Stanley Cavell Afterthought: Reßections in the Evening Land 227 Harold Bloom Chronology 235 Contributors 239 Bibliography 241 Acknowledgments 245 Index 247 Editor’s Note My introduction celebrates EmersonÕs American version of power as belonging always to transition, as such. Stephen E. Whicher, forerunner of the spirit of our current stances towards Emerson, emphasizes the Sage of ConcordÕs extraordinary independence, after which I argue that an American Gnosis was at the Emersonian center, and so made of the essayist himself the Central Man he prophesied. EmersonÕs greatest essay, ÒExperience,Ó is lovingly expounded by Barbara L. Packer, after which Julie Ellison illuminates the intricate Þgurations that constitute Emersonian rhetorical art. Mark Edmundson fuses Freud with Emerson so as to analyze the American prophetÕs Òmethods of self-recreation through crisis,Ó while David Bromwich performs a brilliant reading of EmersonÕs ÒChanning Ode.Ó Sharon Cameron incisively demonstrates a certain coldness in EmersonÕs reactions to suffering, whether his own or of others, while George Kateb subtly probes the social aspects of Emersonian Self-Reliance. The philosopher Stanley Cavell confronts the grand death-march of ÒFateÓ in The Conduct of Life, after which I ruefully conclude this volume by brooding upon EmersonÕs continual relevance in our Evening Land, where he had presided over what might be called the Death of Europe in America. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Emerson is an experiential critic and essayist, and not a Transcendental philosopher. This obvious truth always needs restating, perhaps now more than ever, when literary criticism is so overinfluenced by contemporary French heirs of the German tradition of Idealist or Transcendental philosophy. Emerson is the mind of our climate, the principal source of the American difference in poetry, criticism, and pragmatic post-philosophy. That is a less obvious truth, and it also needs restating, now and always. Emerson, by no means the greatest American writer, perhaps more an interior orator than a writer, is the inescapable theorist of all subsequent American writing. From his moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a counter-tradition originating in opposition to him. This continues even in a time when he is not much read, such as the period from 1945 to 1965 or so. During the last twenty years, Emerson has returned, burying his undertakers. “The essays of Emerson,” T.S. Eliot remarked, “are already an encumbrance,” one of those judicial observations that governed the literary academy during the Age of Eliot, but that now have faded into an antique charm. Other judicial critics, including Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, sensibly blamed Emerson for everything they disliked in American literature and even to some extent in American life. Our most distinguished living poet, 1
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