Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

270 Pages·2007·1.28 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (Editor)

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 [phone] or [phone].
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