Getting as far as page 157 in Harold Bloom's /The Daemon Knows, /I read
his quote from Emerson's journals "Far the best part, I repeat, of every
mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams,
suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him. His firm recorded
knowledge soon loses all interest for him. But this dancing chorus of
thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility . . .
." That much sounds very like something I thought recently. Having had
a number of arguments with people who when I noticed a similarity
between something they said and the writings of some philosopher only to
have them claim vociferously that they had come to their views entirely
independently, I invariably take an opposite view, that is, I assume
that I have been influenced by such a writer even if I don't recall the
occasion of that influence.
After all I must have read quite a bit of Emerson in American lit
classes if not on my own. I have a vague distaste when I think of
Emerson and must have gotten that some place. On page 158 Bloom writes,
"Frost was an absolute Emersonian; Mark Twain had no overwhelming
American precursor. Of the other writers discussed here, Faulkner never
read Emerson, and Eliot scorned him: 'The Essays of Emerson are already
an encumbrance.' Melville read and annotated Emerson and attended his
lectures, while manifesting an acute ambivalence. Hawthorne was the
sage's walking companion in Concord but held out against him, yet Hester
Prynne, Ahab, and Ishmael are dark Emersonians. Henry James, linked to
Emerson by family traditions, resisted him, though Isabel Archer is
wholly a disciple of self-reliance. Walt Whitman, though later he
denied it, started from Emerson, just as Wallace Stevens subtly evaded
his vast dependence upon Whitman and satirized Emerson while repeating
him. Hart Crane, wholly Emersonian, clearly takes his Platonic
daemonization both from Concord and from Walter Pater."
How embarrassing for a writer (could he but know) to learn that despite
his certainty that he had (like Twain) no precursor, that he was "an
absolute Emersonian." I searched a bit in the Library of America
edition of Emerson's writings. Surely I read "Self Reliance" at some
point, and I recall his essay "the Over Soul" -- thinking him very like
Jung, or vice versa, but that was it. Perhaps I only read Emerson back
in the 50s during classes. I began reading his "The Conduct of Life"
and ran across, ". . . You may as well ask a loom which weaves
huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this
engineer . . ." Feeling temporarily outraged I shall perhaps scorn him
once again (perhaps that is why I never read him extensively) as Eliot did.
Lawrence
