“The
treatment of the Wordsworth-Coleridge-Emerson nexus throughout is so generous,
methodical, and insightful that it is hard to imagine it ever being
surpassed.”—Richard Gravil, author of Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American
Continuities, 1776–1862
Emerson,
Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason is a comparative study in
transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson’s part in the American
dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge,
German Idealist philosophy. The book’s guiding theme is the concept of
intuitive Reason, which Emerson derived from Coleridge’s distinction
between Understanding and Reason and which Emerson associated with that
“light of all our day” in his favorite stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality.” Intuitive Reason became the intellectual
and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism. That light
radiated out to illuminate Emerson’s life and work, as well as the
complex and often covert relationship of a writer who, however fiercely
“self-reliant” and “original,” was deeply indebted to his transatlantic
precursors.
The debt is
intellectual and personal. Emerson’s supposed indifference to, or
triumph over, repeated familial tragedy is often attributed to his
Idealism—a complacent optimism that blinded him to any vision of the
tragic. His “art of losing” may be better understood as a tribute to the
“healing power,” the consolation in distress, which Emerson considered
Wordsworth’s principal value. The second part of this book traces
Emerson’s struggle—with the help of the “benignant influence” shed by
that “light of all our day”—to confront and overcome personal tragedy,
to attain the equilibrium epitomized in Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas”:
“Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”
As a study in
what has been called “the paradox of originality,” the book should
appeal to those interested in the Anglo-American Romantic tradition and
the innovations of the individual talent—especially in the capacity of a
writer such as Emerson not only to absorb his precursors but also to use
them as a stimulus to his own creative power.
About the Author
Patrick J. Keane is Professor Emeritus of English at LeMoyne
College in Syracuse, New York. He is the author of numerous books,
including
Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner
and Robinson Crusoe (University of Missouri Press).
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