LITERARY TRANSCENDENTALISM by LAWRENCE BUELL

Author:LAWRENCE BUELL
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2016-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Clearly there is a shape to this “arbitrary” list: syntactical parallelism, and the device of shortening the clauses to “a Mist” and then lengthening them again, into an all-inclusive assertion. The procession of images also has a sort of logic: the dancer and the rosary suggest stylized movement, unleashed in the next line by the torrent on which the boat floats and which turns to the mist that congeals into the spider’s web. To change the present order of the items would weaken the whole effect. This is not literary anarchy, though it looks so at first glance. It is a juxtaposition of images which, while arresting in themselves, are enhanced by the sense of relationship and totality, as well as by dissimilarity.

Not that Emerson’s lists are always so coherent. For fairness’ sake, we should not omit the rest of the journal passage.

There is nothing small or mean to the soul. It derives as grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his Universe under the form of a moth or gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. Must I call the heaven 8c the earth a maypole & country fair with booths or an anthill or an old coat in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears & the spirit leaps to the trope.

[JMN, VIII, 23]

There is still much to admire here: the fecundity of invention, the excited tone, the imaginative reach in connecting moth and gnat with Lord of Hosts; the modulations in the last sentence, with the blossom/rod flowering into the vegetable, then the shrub, and then the two birds—the link being the cock’s comb, no doubt. But the passage as a whole is not as coordinated as the sequence before. Not that I would press this criticism too far, for I expect that most readers will appreciate (or dislike) this half of the passage about as much as the first. As long as the catalogue moves a certain amount in the direction of unity upon close reading, that is all one should expect. If the quest for unity seems useless, or if it is too easy, then the catalogue fails. “A too rapid unity or unification and a too exclusive devotion to parts are the Scylla and Charybdis” (J, VII, 118), Emerson sums it up. His philosophy tended toward Scylla, his rhetoric toward Charybdis, but surprisingly often he steers between.

Whitman’s catalogue poetry, likewise, will reward a closer formal analysis than it has yet been given. A seemingly simple poem like “There Was a Child Went Forth” proves to be built around two quietly elaborated progressions in the imagery. The first (lines 4–11 of the 1855 edition)10 suggests seasonal advance and a corresponding growth in the boy:

The early lilacs became part of this child

. . . . .

And the March-born lambs . . .

And the field-sprouts of April and May .

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