American Transcendentalism

Chapter 1 American dreams and reality in literature

Despire the claims of some American linguists, the American language doesn't exist. So, from a theoretical
point of view, American literature shouldnt exist too. But the dilemma, whether a separate literature can exist
without a separate language and to what extent the state borders can determine to which literary tradition a writer
belongs, is present all around the world. For example, Samuel Beckett was born an Irishman, sometimes wrote
in English and sometimes in French, and later translated his works into English.
So, we have to admit that the idea of national literature is a rather nebulous notion and that the American
literature does exist as a set of influences, themes and literary solutions different from those in Europe. At the
end of the 1920s even the European cultural elite started to view American writing as separate from English
literature and in 1930 the Nobel Prize for literature went to an American writer for the first time.
Paradoxically, American writers who lived in Europe during the same period played a great role in the
recognition of American literary particularity. Through their creative works, writers like Henry James, Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot, changed European literary perceptions of American literature for ever. One of the first
expressions of this new European view of American literature appeared in interview by Andre Gide. He claims
that American literature is different, even bizarre when compared to the European.
The question appears what are the differences and what are main characteristics of American literature?
In order to answer the question, one has to return into the past, when the first traces of American literature
started to appear.
The first documents written on the new continent appeared in the first half of the 17th century, after the
first English settlers established habitations there. They wrote pamphlets advertising new colonies, or
theological arguments, but also poetry. Their creators (like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor) didn't see
themselves as American writers, although we study their poems as a part of the American literary tradition.
They saw tehmselves as English women and men writing in a distant colony. Still, in their writings we can see
touches of the new American reality and American colonial literature is important as a foundation for the
still unborn literary tradition. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is a representative in the sense that it does
contain some of the future literary specifications, although they are not conciously shaped.
Only towards the end of the 18 century (after the Declaration of Independence) the new voices
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were heard demanding not only the shaping of a new literature by rejection of the European models, but
even the surpassing the models themselves. But these were mostly slogans, put forward by politicians rather
than writers themselves.
The most eloquent and the best argued of these demands (although not the first) advocating the literary
secession from Europe was a speech The American Scholar, delivered to graduating students of
Harvard University in the 1837, by the American philosopher, essayist and the poet Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Emerson believed in a new beginning, without any former burden, in a triumph of a new
literature distinct from Europe in almost every aspect.
This belief is just one of the numerous products of a framework American conviction, a myth which is
often called the American dream. The American dream is the faith that in the pastoral ambience of the
virginal continent a truly fresh beginning is possible, that past is not important; that Americans the new
women and men are Adam and Eve who have not tasted the apple yet. All the works of American
literature till today contain some reference or attitude to this myth, whether a hope for its realization or
the prediction of the failure of the American dream.
The first literary embodiments of this theme appeared as a part of the Romantic literary movement, with
distinctly American characteristics. The most impressive is the defiant cry of Walt Whitman who challenged the
whole existing value system in his Leaves of Grass, in Song of Myself. He considers himself the true
representative of the humanity and he also proclaims that death is not really a death. This negation of death, the
faith in an almost Edenic status of men, is the culmination of American dreaming in Whitman. In his later
poetry, especially when the Civil World threatened awakening from the dream about America, he became much
softer and more restrained. Still, in his best poem When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed (an elegy devoted
to the death of president Abraham Lincoln) he keeps faith, continuing to believe that although their beloved
president was killed, the commonality of all Americans must overcome the moral, intellectual and physical
crisis in American history. The American spirit and the American dream must survive this trial,
according to Whitman.
Whitman is just a single representative of a whole line of Romantic literary visions of American dream,
born from the transcendental optimism, first formulated by Emerson in the middle of the 19 century. th

Later, in the 20 century, with capitalism and World War I, which undermined the faith in human
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possibilities, skepticism and disbelief in the American dream began. A novel by Theodore Dreiser, an
American Tragedy published in 1925 is a story of a weak young man who tries to satisfy both his ambitions and
his instincts. He becomes a representative of America and all its inhabitants. His failure is a measure for human
dreams, which lose their meaning in the reality.
A much more successful attempt at a similar topic is the greatest novel of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great
Gatsby, published in the same year as An American Tragedy. The hopes of the America in the beginning of
the 20 century are all condensed in the portrait of the millionaire Jay Gatsby, who, not so long ago, was
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the poor. He is almost a tragic hero. He tries to revive the past and he lives only in the memory. As a young
man, he desperately fell in love with a rich girl who seemed to reciprocate his feelings, but couldnt marry him.
Now when he is a millionaire, he believes that he can turn back the clock and abolish the years in which his
beloved Daisy married another rich man with whom she has a daughter. He didnt fail in the physical sense,
since Daisy agrees to leave her husband. But what Daisy is not able to do is to renounce all her previous
life, to deny her existence without Gatsby. And this is where the breakdown of Gatsbys great dream
begins.
It is only at the very end of the book that the narrator for the first time mentions the essential connection
between Gatsbys dream and the American dream in a touching epitaph to a man WHO ASKED TOO
MUCH FROM LIFE. In the Great Gatsby, at least, the defeat of a dream doesnt need that humanity
should stop dreaming too.
William Faulkner, the great southern novelist in his novel about the American dream, Absalom, Absalom!
depicts the material aspect of the American dream, demonstrating the impact of slavery on American
consciousness and discovers the destructive force of moral failure. The main character, Thomas Sutpen cant
realize his dream not because it is impossible to be realized, nor because he is too ambitious, but because
of his mistake in not adhering to basic moral laws. His dream cant be realized because he is not morally
pure(more about the content of the novel on the page 18).
The American dream appears in postmodern literature as well, but in a PARODIC form.
All the way from Emerson and Whitman the theme of the American dream permeates American
literature, connecting it with a sort of myth, dividing it further form Europe.
Another distinctively American trait that connects and defines American literature is also presented in
Emersons Scholar. He states that nature, tradition and action shape the mind of new American intellectuals.
According to Emerson, experience is a catalyst which brings true knowledge, and therefore is indispensable in
producing literature. The idea that the writer has to concern only with the truth and reality was the axiom that
can be only tolerated in America. Literature must be truthful, useful and instructible a kind of manual for
living. On the other hand, there is a wish and a need of the American writer to be different from
European models. In response to Emersons call, American writers started to produce works which at first
glance resemble attempts at literal transformations of REALITY INTO ART.
Many prominent writers of the 19th century followed this tendency: Henry David Thoreau in ''Walden'', Herman
Melville in the novel Moby Dick, Walt Whitman in ''the Song of myself''. All of them tried to include as many
realistic details as possible in their literary works.
But for these writes, reality in literature doesnt mean anything in itself. Nature has for them the weight of a
symbolic and moral sign. The spiritual leader of American 19 century literature, Emerson, points out that
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nature is a symbol of spirit. Thoreau also believed in the qualities of the natural facts used in literature.
Melville uses symbolic marks which find their realistic foundation in his personal experience.
So, American literature is founded on the experienced world, on natural facts but still it tends to
transcend them, to transform them into universal signs, into a language through which the new nation will
be able to speak.
The basic limitation of this approach to literature is a certain formal looseness. All of them, Thoreau, Melville
and Whitman, found inspiration for the shape of their works in the Coleridges famous definition of the organic
form. Coleridge claims that the form of a literary work should not be imposed from without; it should grow out
of the work itself, from its content. Led by such formal recommendations, all 3 of them tried to give to their
works some kind of natural time frame to keep their content together.( Thoreau used the circle of seasons,
Melville a 2 year voyage, and Whitman divided his poem into 52 stanzas, the number of weeks in a year). Their
organic form solutions hampered some of the greatest 19 century American writers.
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American Romanticists were not only who used organic form. Mark Twain in his best work The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn used it as well. His organic form could be called telescopic, since the novel
consists of a number of episodes connected through the protagonists. The journey of a homeless boy and a
runaway Negro became a symbolic journey into the heart of America, in which they meet various characteristics
of the American way of life. This novel shows a complicated and varied but convincing image of American
versatility.
The writers of the 20 century kept but modified the literary method of their predecessors. They also
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embedded their personal experiences in their writings, but they wanted to invent more radical, specifically
American, literary form.
Modernist American experiments start in the field of poetry in 1915, when Edgar Lee Masters published his
collection of poems Spoon River Anthology. Sherwood Andersen created a similar prose work, several
years later, called Winesburg, Ohio. It consists of 25 stories or chapters and Anderson succeeded to integrate
a collection of tonally and thematically connected stories. Both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner began
their literary careers as the followers of Sherwood Anderson. Both of them, following Anderson, tried to find
new ways of shaping experience to transform it into literature.
Hemingway presented small slices of reality trying to express the whole through a collage of fragments. Later,
as a mature writer, he created his own theory about the transformation of reality into art. His way of literary
shaping the reality is in the central stream of American literature.
The most essential characteristic of Faulkners approach to literature is permanent experiment. His best known
novel, the Sound and the Fury, is the first American attempt to use the stream of consciousness technique. But
his book, Go Down, Moses, is an example of typical American search for modifications in techniques. He uses
organic form, like Melville and Whitman.
There is no doubt that experimentation is one of the main characteristics of works of 20 century writers.
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When it comes to experimentation in fiction, John Dos Passoss trilogy USA should be mentioned. Through
different narrative techniques he tried to present varied but still unified mosaic of the whole country of America.
Despite the presence of formal experiments in contemporary literature, it can safely be said that
the last 3 decades of the 20 century have not produced such American masterpieces as those that
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appeared in the 1850s or 1920s. Still, many modern writers attempt to present their own country and the
world through their massive novels.
Of course, the characteristics of American literature are not limited to these several mentioned
aspects, or to American dream as a subject, and to attempt of creating literary worlds in a balance
between reality and artistic procedure modifying this reality. American literature is closer to wilderness
than that of Europe. It also has the presence of radical social engagement, which is not political but
moral. The great English novelist David Herbert Lawrence claims that great American writers succeeded
in what the Europeans could only wish for: in being extreme.
But regardless of which of these traits of American literature are the most characteristics, it is certain that this
literature, like all others, speaks in wide, common human language.
In the words of William Faulkner: It is the writers privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by
reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have
been the glory of his past. The poets voice need not only be record of the man, it can be one of the pillars to
help him endure and prevail.

Basic Ideas of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a religious, literary and philosophical movement that flourished in New England from
about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the religious
orthodoxy of New England Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own
faith centering on the divinity of man and nature. Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts
from romantic German, philosophy notably that of Immanuel Kant and from such English authors as Carlyle,
Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Its mystical aspects were partly influenced by Indian and Chinese religious
teachings. Although transcendentalism was never a rigorously systematic philosophy, it had some basic
principles that were shared by its adherents. The beliefs that God is imminent in man and nature and that
individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance,
and rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph
Waldo Emerson in such essays as "Nature"(1836), "Self-Reliance," and "The Over Soul" (both 1841) and by
Henry David Thoreau in his book "Walden" (1854). The movement began with the occasional meetings of a
group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature and religion. Originally calling
themselves Hedge Club, they were later dubbed the Transcendental Club by outsiders because of their discussion
of Kant's "transcendental" ideas. Besides Emerson and Thoreau, its most famous members were the feminist
and social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher Theodore Parker, philosopher William Ellery Channing, the
educator Bronson Alcott, Frederick Hedge, George Ripley and others. For several years much of their writing
was publishes in The Dial (1840-44), a journal edited by Margaret Fuller and Emerson. The cooperative
community Brook Farm (1841-47) grew out of their ideas on social reform, which also found expression in their
many individual actions against slavery. Nineteenth Century American Transcendentalism was not a religion; it
is a pragmatic philosophy, a state of mind, and a form of spirituality. It is not a religion because it does not
follow the three concepts common in all religions: a. a belief in God; b. a belief in an afterlife (dualism); c. a
belief that this life Have consequences on the next. Transcendentalism is monist; it does not reject an afterlife,
but its emphasis is on this life. Key statements of transcendentalist doctrines include Ralph Waldo Emerson's
essays, especially Nature (1836), "The American scholar" (1837), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), "The
Transcendentalist" (1842), and "Self- Reliance" and Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" (1854). In his 1841
address delivered at Boston's Masonic Temple, which was later reprinted in magazine The Dial, Ralph Waldo
Emerson attempted to define the philosophy in simple terms as "What is popularly called Transcendentalism
among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842." In reality it was far more complex collection of beliefs:
that the spark of divinity lies within man; that everything in the world is a microcosm of existence; that the
individual soul is identical to the world soul, or Over-Soul, as Emerson called it. This belief in the Inner Light
led to an emphasis on the authority of the Self--to Walt Whitman's I, to the Emersonian doctrine of Self-
Reliance, to Thoreau's civil disobedience, and to the Utopian communities at Brook Farm and Fruit lands. By
meditation, by communing with nature, through work and art, man could transcend his senses and attain an
understanding of beauty and goodness and truth. According to Paul P. Reuben in his "Chapter 4: Early
Nineteenth Century- American Transcendentalism: A Brief Introduction" on the internet research and reference
guide "Perspectives in American Literature" basic premises and principles of transcendentalism are:
Basic Premises
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe- and in an individual can be found the clue to nature,
history, and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain
an individual and the world in terms of an individual. 2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the
structure of the individual self- all knowledge, therefore, begins with self- knowledge. This is similar to
Aristotle's dictum know thyself." 3. Transcendentalists accepted the Neo-Platonic conception of nature as a
living mystery, full of signs- nature is symbolic. 4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon
self-realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of the two universal psychological tendencies: a. the
expansive or self- transcending tendency a desire to embrace the whole world to know and become one with
the world. b. the contracting or self- asserting tendency the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate
an egotistical existence.
Basic principles of American Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism, essentially, is a form of idealism.
2. The transcendentalist "transcends" or rises above the lower the lower animalistic impulses of life
(animal drives) and moves from the rational to a spiritual realm.
3. The human soul is part of the Oversoul or the universal spirit (or "float" for Whitman) to which it and
other souls return at death.
4. Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul (God).
5. This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere travel to holy places is, therefore, not
necessary.
6. God can be found in both nature and human nature ( Nature Emerson stated, has spiritual
manifestations)
7. Jesus also had a part of God in himself he was divine as everyone is divine - except in that he lived
a more exemplary and transcendental life than anyone else, and made the best use of that Power which
is within each one.
8. "Miracle is monster." The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as they were to
the people of the past. Miracles are all about us- The whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature
is one. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of infidels"- Whitman
9. More important than a concern about afterlife, should be a concern for this Life "the one thing in
the world of value is the active soul." Emerson
10. Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the oversoul.
11. Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. "Give me one world at a time." Thoreau
12. Evil is negative merely an absence of good. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray
of light penetrates the dark.
13. Power is to be obtained by defying fate or predestination, which seem to work against humans, by
exercising one's own strength. Emphasis on self- reliance.
14. Hence, the emphasis is placed on a human thinking.
15. The transcendentalists see the necessity of examples of great leaders, writers, philosophers, and
others, to show what an individual can become through thinking and action.
16. It is foolish to worry about consistency, because what an intelligent person believes tomorrow, if
he/she trust oneself, tomorrow may be completely different from what that person thinks and believes
today. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Emerson
17. The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship between all things.
18. One must have faith in intuition, for no church or creed can communicate truth.
19. Reform must not be emphasized true reform comes from within.
 EDGAR ALLAN POE IN THE NEW MILLENIUM

Poe was and still is one of the most controversial personalities in American literature. On the one hand he was
celebrated, especially by the French Symbolist poets as maybe the greatest poet of the 19 century, while on the
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other hand Poe antagonists, not less numerous, less famous and less dogmatic thought that he hardly deserved to
be talked about in the literary context. Despite the controversial judgments of Poes writing there is no doubt that
he, together with Whitman, is the best known American poet and writer outside the USA. He is also one of the
first authentic American literary voices, a singular poetic and fictional phenomenon. He was a poet, a writer of
different kinds of fiction, and a critic.
Like his contemporaries, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, he also tried to portray in his work the
evils of material obsession as a trait of his age.
Poe considered himself primarily and predominantly a poet, while the writing of tales and literary criticism
served as his only, more or less steady although insecure, source of income. From the contemporary critical
viewpoint, however, poetry is not the most important part of his literary opus, although it was primarily because
The raven and Annabel Lee the main source of popularity. The first 3 books published by Poe were
collections of poems. As often with Romantic poets, almost all his poetry is woven around a single theme or at
least a single worldview. Every following poem was for him another attempt at perfection perfection in
expressing his basic theme.
A tone of sadness for something long gone, or unreachable, appears in one of his best poems, To Helen, for
which there are claims that it might have been inspired by the mother of a school friend, but its atmosphere and
its images point towards Helen of Troy, a symbol of the utmost beauty and challenge in a woman hidden in mists
of a distant past. For Poe the deathof a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the
world, which as a archetype represents the final human loss: this is the reason why a large number of his poems
such as Lenore, The Sleeper, Ulalume, For Anne, Annabel Lee and The Raven have this theme.
Poes raven is an embodiment of human existential verdict, but it is at the same time a traditional symbol of
trouble, the bearer of ill news. It is interesting and illustrative for an American poet of the first part of the 19th

century who, according to his own statements, searched primarily for originality that most poetic images and
symbols in his poetry are extremely traditional: winged seraphs, knights searching for Eldorado, Psyche, the
river Styx, Naiads, as well as a bust of Pallas Athene. Poes poetic diction is also traditional, and in most of its
forms and expressions comes from the 18 century arsenal. Critics often praise Poe for his perfect command of
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prosody (prosodija-nauka o duzini i kratkoci sloga), unusual for American literature, but sometimes, precisely
because of the rhythmic schemes perfection, his poetry can sound like mechanical poetizing. Sound is for Poe
perhaps more important than the content of a poem; since he aims at The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.
Although poetry for Poe was passion, he simultaneously believed more in rational thinking than in poetic
inspiration, as he showed in The Philosophy of Composition.
Poes short stories, or tales, have similar themes to his poetry, but it should be stressed that his horror stories
developed from the parody of a literary fashion. In the 1830s Americans liked to read horror stories written or
inspired by German Romantic writers and Poe has often been accused of plagiarism.
He himself divided his tales into 2 groups: tales of horror and the tales of ratiocination. The latter ones are the
prototype of a new prose sub-genre in the formulaic fiction as critics sometimes call it, that of the detective
story. Poe is the founder of a genre which would at some point in 20 century become probably the most read
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form of popular literature, predecessor of writers like Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Arthur Conan Doyle etc.
Poes detective stories, of which the best seem to be The Murders in Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter,
manage to reach what one might call the level of perfection, and in his solutions they predict the future favorite
schemes. Poes detective is French, C. Auguste Dupin who is able to solve all problems through logical thinking.
The stories also contain not too bright police inspector, who is unable to interpret clues and therefore needs
Dupin to help him, although he hated to admit it. Poes masterfully shaped and very interesting detective stories
in the final analysis celebrate human intelligence and the ability of logical reasoning. The reader participates on
the wandering through this logical labyrinth, trying to solve the detectives dilemmas, and therefore takes part in
the final triumph of human reason over the chaos of evil and crime. Poe didnt want to create a harmonious
frame to human experience, which would not have been realistic: he wanted his tales to be seen not as a means
of giving imaginative order to earthly experience, but as a stimulus of unearthly visions. This is why all his
stories search for subterranean streams of meaning.
The main theme of Poes horror stories is, generally speaking, the clash between the poetic soul and the world
which failed the poets ideals. A sub-theme there is obviously the clash between body and soul. Poe stories
operate on several levels: in their surface layer they tell the Gothic story offering amusement, surprise and
frightfulness, while only a deeper layer contains the unexplored streams of meaning.One of the best Poes horror
stories is The Fall of the House of Usher we can see that on a deeper level the story has only one character, the
narrator, within whose mind happens the clash between outer and inner worlds. Usher is an allegorical
personage, the narrators alter ego, on whose fate he explores the possible outcomes of his own life. Madeline is
also one of the fatal possibilities of his own life: the feminine principle of spontaneity, impulsiveness, or passion
which is buried alive by the male principle of rationality. The tale hardly contains other characters, except dim
counters of a servant and a doctor. Seen from the stylistic or structural point of view the story is almost perfectly
shaped.
Poe also tried towards the end of his life to write a cosmological essay Eureka, which was at least partly the
product of his cooperation with certain professor Thomas Wyatt. Eureka for him was a prose poem in which he
attempts to reconsider the progressive dissolution of the universe in terms of his own aesthetic theories.
When Poe became in 1835 the general editor and critic of the Richmond, Virginia, magazine The Southern
Literary Messenger, he was forced to review almost a hundred books a year. Poes critical principles expressed
in these reviews, as well as in his later essays and critical writing for other magazines, are heterogeneous:
sometimes iconoclastic and sometimes very conventional.
The basis of his critical views can be found in 2 essays: The philosophy of Composition and The Poetic
Principle which connect the romantic ideals of poetic imagination and the pure, that is art for arts sake
aesthetics, with the neo-classical ideas of creative rationality. Poe claims, for instance that any poem should be
shorter than one hundred lines; that the poet should precisely determine his theme and his instruments of
expression beforehand, to male some kind of preliminary design and material specification before he starts
writing. The highest beauty is for him always melancholic and dispassionate.
Poe was among the first to recognize American literary achievements. Since he could not accept his
contemporary America as an ideal, due to his own artistic sensibility, he fled from its vulgar reality to an
imaginary world which implies ideas even higher: unrealizable maybe, but not unthinkable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson appeared at an exceptionally crucial moment in which the American culture was still oriented towards
European models and heavily derivative. He found his inspiration in German idealism, for which New England
was a very fertile ground. He and his followers introduced the spirit of romanticism, ideas of Kant, Fichte,
Schelling which reached them through the filter of romantic imagination of Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.Second
great influence on his writing came from the East. Due to strong commercial connections btw New Eng
and Far East, China, Japan, India Emerson was able to access recent translations of Oriental sacred and
profaned texts especially Bhagavad-Gita and Gjulistan. From this synthesis of romantic idealism and
Oriental mysticism with Yankee New England spirit and its puritan heritage arose a way of thinking
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named transcendentalism.He and his followers liked the name bcs it stressed transcending the sense by
intuition this was one of the main ideas of the age. Transcendentalism is actually the final reaction to
Puritanism, or Puritanism turned upside down. In stead of believing in the radical imperfection of human
nature which demanded steady compliance to strict laws, Emerson & friends considered man perfect, or at least
capable of perfection. Deity is for him the moral law; the phenomenal world is Gods emanation while every
man carries in himself a part of divinity and hence must be self-reliant, because trusting himself he performs
Gods will, and obeying his instincts he identifies with and submits to the Over-Soul whose part he is. Emerson
concludes that every man has 2 cognitive abilities: the intuitive, which feeds directly to divinity and the
world of ideas called Reason; and sensual which makes possible the knowledge of the material world, called
understanding.
His 1 work Nature pub. 1836. In 1820 began a journal which he kept till death. It doesnt only contain notes of
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daily happenings and his emotions, but also thoughts and formulations which dont have to b connected to a
particular day and which made the foundation to his later essays. The journal became a testimony of his mental
growth and a kind of a source-book. In Nature he developed his basic conviction that nature, that physical world,
is the unconscious projection of Divinity; that the spiritual world reveals itself to man sensually, through nature.
In Nature, he claims that human moods can be expressed in literature only through corresponding images taken
from nature, it is also natural symbols only that enable humans to present the abstract notions like lone, justice,
freedom, which are inexpressible in any other way. Emersons speech to Harvard branch of the national student
scholastic honor society at the commencement ceremonies 1837, pub in the same year as the essay The
American Scholar Perhaps even more important than Nature. In it he calls upon young American
intellectuals.And just graduating students of Harvard, pleading for a spiritual & literary independence from
Europe. Here Emerson reiterates with powerful intellectual arguments instead of political slogans, the old call
which could often be heard towards the end of 18 ct: that American literature should modify European models
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and surpass them, since the American literary material qualitatively & quantitatively was indeed superior.
According to Emerson these young men should find their basic inspiration for their difficult task of forming a
new supra-national culture and art in 3 major influences on their minds: nature, the mind of the past, and action.
With their help they can become Man Thinking a true intellectual, who must be human first and everything
else later, rather than mere thinkers or even parrots of other mens thinking. Nature should serve to them as
means of expression and the road towards truth. Tradition has to be used cautiously, only then when nature cant
temporarily inspire. [Not that much tradition its bad for u]. According to him one should not worship God,
but Gods presence in one self. Jesus was a true prophet who understood this and the name Son of God is
only a metaphor speaking of presence in every human being. Every organized religion is tyranny for
human soul.He thought he was a poet and hence he called himself a poet and his primary vocation was poetry (a

so one day in 1834 he wrote Rhodora where the protagonist is a wild flower growing in America only and in
sad man),

early spring it becomes surrounded by desert a symbol of beauty and art. The fact that it grows in early spring
and is the first to have leaves, represents the first artist in the cultural waste land of America. The sages who
ask where does the flower come from are obviously inadequate thinkers: they obviously dont recognize the
aesthetic value of the flower nor can they understand Man Thinking who knows that he is neither superior nor
inferior to nature but a part of it.
The second poetic model he uses in an intellectual image which then interpreted and represented through natural
images Days 1851; its about the poets dissatisfaction with his own and general human relationship with time.
He seems to be saying grab the day every day should be used to the utmost and in the best possible way and
the Day, in its Oriental guise, is ready to give everything, but human nature seems to be inadequate even poets
wishes are too small & inadequate.His Oriental images in this & other poems like in Brahma 1856, dealing with
human illusions or the difference between appearance and reality difficult for human to grasp are a product of
Emersons knowledge of recent translations of Hindu, Chinese & Persian literature. In Hamatreya Emerson
explores the human and especially American relation to nature. The title is a version of the name Matreya, a
character from a holy Hindu book Vishnu Purana who discusses the condition of man with Vishnu. It begins
with an enumeration of the first settlers to Concord.
Precisely because of his aspiration for combining the poetic and prophetic, Emerson is interested in not only
literary and cultural transformation of the USA, but also in social advancement, but in somewhat restrained
manner. Due to transcendentalist aspiration towards the ideal, the phenomenal world, with its social relations and
political issues, was for him always somewhat inadequate and incomplete.
Emerson was deeply skeptical of the possibility of a radical social change his reaction. His reaction to Brook
Farm, the utopian experiment aiming at fusing physical & intellectual labor in a collective, is characteristic: he
refused to join and in his journal he wrote I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little
larger. I wish to break all prisons. He was a prominent opponent of slavery in the South, and yet he stressed in
his journal that he had other slaves to face other than blacks intellectual slaves.
Chapter IV: LANGUAGE
Language also shows how nature is designed for humanity. Here Emerson makes 3 radical statements: "1. Words
are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the
symbol of spirit."
It's obviously true that "Words are signs of natural facts", but the use of metaphors like "crooked" for corrupt
shows how natural signs are symbols of spiritual facts too. Language reveals an analogy between nature and
spirit; it shows that nature mirrors spirit. Spirit and nature have the same structure.

Henry David Thoreau and Tradition

Tradition is one of the basic creative guidelines in literature and art in general. New literary works
grow out of it: clashing with it new literary movement arise, almost new traditions, to merge after a while with
the old ones creating the unified mankinds heritage. One of the most relevant criteria in the historical and
aesthetic evaluation of literary work is its relation and comparison with works of literature that came into being
before it. TS Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent said, Tradition cannot be inherited and if you want it
you must obtain it by great labor
Using tradition, writers are generally led by the affinity principle: they select bits and pieces from the
works that inspire them whose essence existed previously in their own minds, but not sharply contoured to be
expressed in words. The other aspects of writers reactions to tradition is partial rejection of it in an attempt to
create a new approach to literature, but even in this case the writer has to relate to the works of his predecessors
at the very point of rejection.
These can be illustrated by the attitude to tradition of Henry Thoreau. He inherited the romantic
rebellion against the empirical philosophy of John Locke and neoclassicism, and therefore sometimes equates
this part of tradition with tradition in general.
At least a part of Thoreaus rebellion against tradition, the old ways of thinking and doing, springs from
his position of an American writer who precisely because he does not have a national literary heritage to build
upon, rejects all heritage and sees the beginning in himself, or tries to find his material and his inspiration in the
sparse legends and historical facts about the new continent.
In connection with A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: In spite of this typically American
enthusiasm for American history and barely existing tradition, Thoreau, s this essay will try to prove, built a
great part oh his intellectual and imaginative world on other non-American traditions. After all, his aim is the
creation of a personal imaginative world, his vision.
Tradition acts on Thoreau in two major ways. One, from the literary heritage he finds the kind of
inspiration, which in his own works, gains a central place, on which he builds his imaginative world. Homers
Iliad helped Thoreau in the articulation of his vision of nature, by suggesting to him the utmost simplicity and
directness in expression.
The second way in which tradition acts on Thoreaus mind was hidden in the echoes of some
formulations of his predecessors, which Thoreau built into his work to give it plasticity, to universalize his own
experience. Literature of the past according to him an impulse towards new creativity, and in the moment of
inspiration one should take all that tradition has to offer, which rings in same harmony.
One of the examples of his technique is Thoreaus use of quotation from Shakespeare. He used
Shakespeares quotes in Walden. What he did was to take images and metaphors from Shakespeare and use them
freely in his work, adapting them to his own purposes, regardless of the Shakespearean context. The first quote
from Shakespeare in Walden if from Richard III, the second is from Julius Caesar and the last quote in Walden is
from Hamlet, speaking of his visitors at Walden Pond Thoreau remarked that they seemed to be amazed he could
love in such isolation, with no direct contact with civilization.
Another use of Shakespearean canon is the striking analogy, unnoticed up to now, between
Apemantuss Grace from Timon of Athens and Thoreaus poem Great God I ask thee for no Meaner Pelf.
Thoreaus exceptional sophistication, obvious in his use of Shakespearean material, made it possible for
him to use a widest possible range of quotations and literary echoes in his work. The totality of these literary
articulations of human experience gave to Thoreaus writing the density and temporal depth which no other work
by an American possessed before.
Accordingly, tradition is the material on which Thoreau builds, while his artistic product has to be
based on direct experience, gathering during his wanderings through the small town Concord in Massachusetts
and its surroundings. For it is tradition that enables Thoreau to see Concord as a microcosm containing the whole
world, and his own life as a condensation of all human experience. In Walden, Thoreau combines his typically
American Adamic vision of nature with a condensed tradition.
His message, the rebellion of against society, conceived by his observation of Concords citizens; life
and nature in its vicinity, used tradition as a lever which gives force to his own statements and in this ways
transcends America and the 19 century. Merging literary tradition with the vision of nature as an ideal world,
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Walden becomes a universal document of the human search for ones own possibilities, actual in every place and
at any time.
Thoreaus literary method, which to the 19 century critics seemed strange and imitative, produced
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undreamed-of reverberations in the 20 century. Two prominent American-born poets and critics, Ezra Pond and
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TS Eliot come in their critical musing very close to Thoreaus conception of the creative use of tradition.
Tradition for Pond, Eliot and Thoreau was an instrument and its use a method by which they adjusted it to the
demands of their own poetic imagination.
The use of tradition as the building blocks of ones own imaginative world does not originate with
Thoreau although some of his formulations show that he is one of the first American writers to use this method
consciously. But it is certain that he was the first American writer who succeeds in refracting his own experience
and ideas through the prism and the accumulated wealth of European and Oriental tradition, combining this
aspect of his style with symbolic use of realistic natural details.

Henry David Thoreau's Definition of America

Nathaniel Hawthorne in his preface to his novel, or romances as he called them, The Blithedale Romance
(1852) and The Marble Faun (1860) stressed the peripheral place that fiction has in the American mind and
described his dear land as one where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery Hawthornes
conclusion is a commonplace prosperity; in broad and simple is to write fiction about such country, unless he
himself tries to do it. Most other writers of his rime were trying to fulfill Emersons dream of American
literatures independence from Europe, in order to meet, in Emersons word, the postponed expectations of the
world.
Henry David Thoreau, well known for his contrariness and nay-saying, thought differently from Emerson.
He was not very much impressed by the world or America, which he called a comparatively free country,
making thus a qualification which probably gave considerable offense to his more patriotically inclined and
politically pious compatriots. In the essay with the paradoxical title of Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) in
which he claimed that there were at least a million slaves in the nominally free state, he preached to his
countrymen that they are to be men first and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.Although he never
wrote fiction, but tried to express himself in the hard-to-define form of the transcendental book-length essay
ruled by the loose laws of organic form, his work contains more reflections of the contemporary American scene,
more echoes of the problems of US in the 1840s and 1850s.
One could say that Thoreau invented two ingenious tactics to catch American experience in his literary net.
The first dealt with his keen sense of history coupled with his love of nature, while the second is his critique of
the American way of life. In his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) T. tries to tell
the story of America, as a part of his prose elegy for his late brother John. American rebel, as he was, preferred
unofficial and local history to the official version which he reviews at the beginning, compelled his
geographical point of departure, the Concord Bridge. American history for him for him did not consist of George
Washington and his role in the Revolution, the 1812 war against England, etc., but the smallest events: local
stories of the hostilities and friendship between the white settlers and the Native Americans. The most sticking is
the story of the captivity and self-deliverance of Hannah Duston, which took place one 142 years before Ts
aquatic excursion with John, in 1697. Ts retelling of the old account is vivid, precise and realistic: it includes a
description of the clothes of the prisoners, two of which were women, while the third was an English boy. The
Native Americans attacked the settlement and Hannah Duston.
There are, no doubt, many comparative Europeans, especially Balkan stories of the sort, but none of them
ends quite like this American kidnapping of a defenseless woman. Hannah had heard that she and her nurse
would have to run naked, and therefore she persuaded the English boy to learn the wisdom of the enemy. The
boy reported to her everything he had learned, she made plans and, quite appropriately, they arose before
daybreak, took tomahawks, and killed all ten Native Americans, escaping then in their canoe.
Thoreau wanted to express a vision quite differently from the standard one his democratic or anarchic
point of view. He did not see history as a succession of great men, romantic as he might have been a line of kings
and presidents who make it.
It is interesting to note how native speech patterns and rhythms start cropping up in the form of an
incantation as T. contrasts two views in history: civil and uncivil, European an American, with kings and
presidents in a kind of theater on the one side, and common people writing on another.Thoreau did not believed
in the manifest destiny, understanding, for instance, that the primeval forest is to the white man a dreary and
howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home adapted to his nature and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.
As we learn from elsewhere, T. would have liked to be an Indian. But he stayed a Yankee, not able to help his
Yankee spirit.
Reinforced by irony which is its prevalent tone, this democratic view of American history appears in Walden
(1854) as well. History in this book definitely takes form of natural history, at least on a metaphorical level.
Thus, describing the battle between the red and black ants the red republican on the one hand and the black
imperialistic on the other Thoreau comes to the conclusion that there is no fight recorded in Concord history.
In Ts view, the possibilities of common man, the American, were far greater than the accomplishments of
the so-called great men, Americans or others. Close to the end of the Walden he evoked the other brand of
manifest destiny for the individual, calling upon his reader to be a Columbus to the whole continents and worlds
within you.
The only actual history T. seemed to be interested in Walden was the history of his native town Concord, in
the chapter Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors, where the woods are filled with names like Cato and
Scipio and Zilpha, all belonging to poor Negroes. This ironic equation between heroes of ancient history and
cabin-dwellers, like himself, ultimately confirms his rejection of official history. And yet, one can never be
sure with the likes of T.: after all he himself started twice that he started his Walden experiment in solitary living
on the fourth of July, accidentally.
From its very beginning Walden is addresses to New Englanders, T.s townsmen, fellow-Yankees.
Although he described his native state of Massachusetts in Civil Disobedience as a strange place in which
prison was the only free place, The only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor, he
was equally relentless to the country as a whole. For him slavery was not only a phenomenon connected with the
South only. He saw slavery as an intellectual category and claimed that there are so many keen and subtle
masters that enslave both north and south.
Thoreau in Walden attacks the foremost sacred cows of the 19 century America, the inventions which stood for
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the very idea of progress. One of the inventions which he saw and heard every day during his stay at Walden was
a railroad. Ts transcendental joke about it was that it was too slow; it was much quicker for him to walk and in
that way avoid the waste of time of making money to pay the fare. But his sluggishness was only one of its
faults. The main problem with 19 century America, according to T, was the confusion of ends and means.
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He questioned the price civilization made humanity pay for progress, and therefore called inventions pretty toys
which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. An
adequate example for this statement he found in the magnetic telegraph, another splendid and spectacular
achievement of his age, which also struck him irrelevant.
The Lyceum was a peculiar 19 century American institution, a society of subscribers who would collect money
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and invite, during the winter when there were no agricultural jobs, lectures to speak on various subject, scientific
and literary. At the peak of the movement there were about 3000 lyceums in the U.S, but after the Civil War this
type of adult education became outmoded. The library Thoreau mentioned was the beginning of the later famous
Concord Free Public Library which today houses many of Ts own manuscripts and rare editions. One should
mention that Concord in the 1850s had about 2000 inhabitants. A place of comparable size in Europe in the
middle of the 19 century would have had neither a lyceum, nor a library. And yet T. was disappointed: his
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utopian educational ideas differed sharply from reality, and the only communal activity of the Concordians that
he described in Walden was the para-military training of the militia.
Throughout the book he uses colloquial American words and expressions, stressing such usage with quotation
marks. But his great accomplishment in Walden is the matter of merging his style and subject-matter: there he
took the financial or business lingo, surely one of the trade-marks of his age, and turned it to his own ironic use,
trying to respond to his wayward time in its own terms.Thoreaus business is actually the building of his cabin
and the planning of a bean-field while attempting a spiritual rebirth. T. knew his beans: the joke here is on Wall
Street and therefore on America, rather than on the rebel-hermit of Walden.
Another section of the contemporary American scene appearing in Walden is encapsulated in portraits of actual
people men and women T. used to meet. It is worth noting the multinational character of his visitors and
acquaintances, especially if one bears in mind the allegedly retired life of the hermit of Walden. They include
a French-Canadian woodchopper who reads an arithmetic, and whom T. called a true Homeric or Paphlagonian
man, since he heard and knew of Homer; then John Field, an Irishman recently arrived in America, who for T.
symbolized the materialistic aspect of the American dream, especially after his attempts at re-educating Field
converting him into a transcendentalist had failed. This topic is further developed in the story of another
Irishman, Colonel Quail, who, although compared to Napoleon, died of delirium tremens. Walden actually hints
at a religious, racial and national pluralism that marks the present America.
Thoreaus self-confessed aim of Walden is not only to wake his neighbors up, but also to discover a
gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and
appearances had gathered from time to time. To be American, for T. meant to be aware of the shams and
illusions of the world as well as of America itself, craving, as he kept repeating only reality. To be an
American, for T. meant also to believe in the coming of a more convenient hour, in the dawning of a glorious
future. For him it was very easy to transcend reality, especially when in a summer mood: he would then transport
himself to another world. Thoreau wrote about what he belied to be the true American history, criticized and
mocked the foibles and errors of his own country, believing it should be improved, but believing at the same
time that There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star, which are the two last sentences of
Walden. He and his books are paradigmatic of the American spirit.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Nature in Walden)

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau explains how a relationship with nature reveals aspects of the true self that
remain hidden by the distractions of society and technology. To Thoreau, the burdens of nineteenth century
existence, the cycles of exhausting work to obtain property, force society to exist as if it were "slumbering."
Therefore, Thoreau urges his readers to seek a spiritual awakening. Through his rhetoric, Thoreau alludes to a
"rebirth" of the self and a reconnection to the natural world. The text becomes a landscape and the images
become objects, appealing to our pathos, or emotions, our ethos, or character, and our logos, or logical
reasoning, because we experience his awakening. Thoreau grounds his spirituality in the physical realities of
nature, and allows us to experience our own awakening through his metaphorical interpretations. As we observe
Thoreaus awakening, he covertly leads us to our own enlightenment. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau is
written in first person about the events and ideas that came to the author during his time living at Walden Pond in
the eighteen hundreds. Henry David Thoreau was a poet and a philosopher who lived a life of simplicity in order
to make a direct connection between people, God, and nature. He viewed knowledge as an "intuitive force rather
than a set of learned, logical proofs." His writing in Walden focused on many different themes, including the
relationship between light and dark, the ideas and importance of nature, the meaning of progress, the importance
of detail, and the relationship between the mind and body. He also developed many philosophical ideas
concerning knowing yourself, living simply and deliberately, and seeking truth. In the first section of Walden
entitled "Economy," Thoreau develops his ideas of living simply and deliberately. He believed that "it is best to
want less," and that "there is no point of living if it is not deliberate." By living deliberately he meant giving
each part of life attention, whether in observing humans or nature, and living during "all moments of life." He
believed that humans had only four basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. The object of each of
these necessities is to "conserve an individuals energy." He also believed that "gluttony is bad," and so we
should "only content ourselves with possessions that we need." Thoreau focused on living deliberately, and
stated "to settle, and to feel reality in its fullness, is the point."
Many of the next sections of Walden focused on the relationship between the mind and body. In the section
"Solitude," he explained that "sensations exist within our mind even when our body senses them." Thoreau felt
that physical closeness does not translate into mental closeness, or vice-versa. He claims that "it is not the
physical possession of the physical acts that caused one to take possession of a place, but rather the mental acts."
he believed that we are our minds, and that our bodies are not as important. In the section "Highes Laws," he
stated that "to truly live is to truly be aware of all that we can do, and then to use all parts of ourselves." Thoreau
truly believed that the mind should redeem the body. In the section Thoreau uses to conclude the book, he
stresses the importance of knowing yourself. He stated that "truth means more than love, than money, than
fame. He also advised that if you want to travel, you should explore yourself. He stated that "the world of
nature is but a means of inspiration for us to know ourselves." He also believed that "it is the interpretation of
nature by man, and what it symbolizes in the higher spiritual world that is important to the transcendentalists."
Thoreau used his writing to show people what is possible, and to inspire them to find their own paths; to walk to
a different drummer, rather than all being alike. The path that Thoreau took in Walden is just one way to reach
that end.

WALT WHITMAN

Whitman uses free verse which doesnt contain either rhyme, or fixed meter, or other usual means of
versification. This is in his poetry replaced by colloquial language and lines of uneven length, by an open form
which obtains the poetic rhythm from a non-schematized exchange of the stressed and unstressed syllables.
Whitmans free verse is the extreme realization of the Romantic notion of the organic form, which ought to
proceed from the work itself and to express its uniqueness. The content of Whitmans most characteristic poems
is Romantic (or transcendentalist in American terms). The hero of a typical Romantic poem is a character
resembling the author, but still under the mask of historical or mythic personality. But this is not the case in
Whitmans poetry because he starts song of myself I celebrate myself, and sing myself. In other words he
in person becomes the hero of his own poem. The Romantic concept of egotism and arrogance merges in him
with a typically American feeling of democracy and equality, and becomes thus neutralized. His first collection
of leaves of grass he published on the 4 of July. He had 3 brothers whose names were George Washington,
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Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

America for Whitman is indeed primarily a mythic land, an image of the ideal world, and not quite the reality
which he saw around himself. Still, he doesnt sing for Americans only, he asserts, but for all men and women,
for the world.
Ideas in Whitmans poetry almost all come from Emersons essays Nature and The American Scholar.
Whitmans poetry relied mostly on his personal vision of nature as poetic subject as well as inspiration. real
nature for Whitman is only the wild nature. American nature, according to many American mid-nineteenth
century writers, can be only presented as a virgin territory, untouched by human foot. Whitmans most
characteristic poetic use of nature is contained in his paradoxical and pluralist central symbol the grass.
Choosing this symbol, he sets himself apart from the European literary tradition, unwilling to use traditional
poetic signs. Grass for him is uniform hieroglyphic, growing everywhere, not choosing company, without
setting conditions, not demanding plant, witnessing the invincibility and indestructibility of life. But on the other
hand, grass is also symbol of death, although the beautiful uncut hair of graves speaks about immortality. For
him, grass is the most extreme and the most eloquent aspect of nature. Whitmans resistance to tradition is also
typically American. He would have liked to perceive himself and to be perceived by others as an American bard,
a poet without any other roots except American ones, with no connection to anything European.
He thinks that a democratic poet, and he considers himself one, should be without the advantages and liabilities
of high culture. But later on, it was recognized that Whitmans poetry contains elements of various traditions:
echoes from the Bible, Ossian poems, Shakespeares blank verse as well as Blakes, Emersons, Carlyles poetry
and ideas.
Whitmans formal education was short, and although he later tried to present himself as a man of the people by
his clothing and his general appearance, he gained an above average education through persistent work in public
libraries and museums of New York, while Italian grand opera remained one of his steady interests throughout
his life. All such elements of his self-education entered his poetry, which contains echoes not only of European
but also of Eastern literary tradition; even grand opera has its place. This all is merged with Whitmans
American images and themes, with the help of his experimental poetic procedures, into a whole the meaning of
which is obviously much greater, wider, and more powerful than the sum of its parts.
He wanted to present America and the whole ideal world in his 52 stanzas of song of myself. 52 stanzas
probably represent the number of weeks in a year, and a year is an organic unit of time. He idealizes his country.
Although in its ideal projection America seems to him to be the future of the world. But it is primarily the
America from his dreams, and he believes that all people dream the same dreams, although they cannot have
identical political and economic systems. There is the runaway slave in stanza 10, as well as a massacre
portrayed in stanza 34, but Whitmans ideal doesnt suffer. Whitman is not a rebel, but rather in a divine gesture
accepts all the social contraries. There is at least one aspect of Whitmans poetry that is radically different from
the transcendentalists his contemporaries: it is his attitude towards human body and its various organs and
functions. Other transcendentalists in principle and in theory accept human instincts, and even celebrate their
divine origin, but, possibly because of some residue of Puritanism they were not aware of, they all felt
uncomfortable and awkward when faced with a naked human body, and therefore it does not appear in their
works. Whitman has no such reservations. The images of human body can especially be seen in the 3 edition ofrd

leaves of grass containing the poem cluster Children of Adam.

Whitman is also a comic poet. He was aware of this quality of his poetry, and in spite of his otherwise solemn
prophetic tone, welcomed humor. Towards the end of his life he told a biographer that he was proud of his
humor. The best and most characteristic examples of Whitmans humor are connected to his disregard of the
social sacred cows, religious images and practices. Example-stanza 41- gods from various traditions are
presented as drawings, lithographs and sketches which Whitman views at an exhibition, where he buys Osiris,
Isis, Belus, Brahma, BuddhaAllahOdin and Mexitli
Whitmans originality and at the same time the basic weakness of his poetry lies in his method of realizing this
divine comprehensiveness. He creates his catalogues by juxtaposing a great number of natural images,
joining and opposing them, trying to express through these very often bizarre sequences his basic ideas of
brotherhood and equality of all men (and women), as well as of the natural majesty of human personality. In
songs of myself Whitman uses many different images, the total effect is a complex image of new land
containing good and bad sides but moving inevitably towards a bright future. Whitman uses catalogues-endless
sequences of images, enumeration without a premeditated function. With this Whitman wants to strengthen the
representational quality and coverage of his work. Whitman preaches the immortality and invincibility of
humanity, the certain realization of an ideal existence on earth. This is how his own death is described in the last
stanza of the poem in an triumphant way. The last stanza shows Whitmans belief in man and his abilities, his
conviction of immortality and brotherhood. His optimism and his belief in the perfectibility and indestructibility
of the individual was further sorely tested in American Civil War. It isnt optimism about human fate that is
questioned, but the very roots of American dream; it is no longer clear that the concept of a fresh start will
survive the conflict. Out of Whitmans confrontation with rough American reality was born another extension of
Leaves of Grass with poems describing the national crises and the war under the title Drum Taps. In them he
didnt completely abandon his optimism, but changed somewhat his attitude and his tone. His vision and his
language become somewhat restrained. When faced with this great national change Whitman created his perhaps
best poem
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomd an elegy for the early and violent death of American president
Abraham Lincoln, the man who led the North in the civil war, trying to preserve the unity of the country, the
politician who became for Whitman during the war a personification and embodiment of the American spirit.
Lilacs, the central symbol in the poem, denotes death since it is the last one, in that particular year. It is the sign
of defiance to death since the persona of the poem puts it on the coffin of the dead president, but it also stands
for the hope for immortality and the birth of some future Lincolns in times to come, since lilac, as a wild plant
needing no nurturing, will bloom again next spring. The location of the lilac bush is also interesting to note: its
setting denotes some kind of Jeffersonian America: the mid-West that engendered Lincoln himself, the heartland
of America, between the eastern sea and the western sea. Lincoln, who appears mostly as the representative
of the million Americans killed in the conflict, is presented as a great and mighty star that set in the West. The 3 rd

basic symbol is a simple shy gray-brown bird, a thrush, who sings his own dirge hidden in the swamp. All 3
symbols, each in its own way, speak of the perennial human dilemma in human confrontation with death: the
question of meaning. It is obvious that Whitmans attitude to death essentially changed: although it is possible
that in this poem it could be transcended, although the lilac promises new springs, the reader is nevertheless
confronted with the reality of a million dead. Whitman exposes himself as an anti-war poet, questioning the
sense of the American civil war.
Unlike Whitmans earlier long poems, which suffer from the lack of form, when lilacs last in the dooryard
bloomd has a solid structural pattern, based on the contrasting and joining of the 3 major symbols. There are
catalogues in it, but they are functional and subordinate to the creative imagination. This poem is one of the
greatest achievements of American poetry.

Walt Whitman "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Summary and Form

This 1865 poem is part of a series of pieces written after Lincoln's assassination. While it does not display all the
conventions of the form, this is nevertheless considered to be a pastoral elegy: a poem of mourning that makes
use of elaborate conventions drawn from the natural world and rustic human society. Virgil is the most
prominent classical practitioner of the form; Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais" are the two best-known
examples in the English tradition. One of the most important features of the pastoral elegy is the depiction of the
deceased and the poet who mourns him as shepherds. While the association is not specifically made in this
poem, it must surely have been in Whitman's mind as he wrote: Lincoln, in many ways, was the "shepherd" of
the American people during wartime, and his loss left the North in the position of a flock without a leader. As in
traditional pastoral elegies, nature mourns Lincoln's death in this poem, although it does so in some rather
unconventional ways (more on that in a moment). The poem also makes reference to the problems of modern
times in its brief, shadowy depictions of Civil War battles. The natural order is contrasted with the human one,
and Whitman goes so far as to suggest that those who have died violent deaths in war are actually the lucky ones,
since they are now beyond suffering. Above all this is a public poem of private mourning. In it Whitman tries to
determine the best way to mourn a public figure, and the best way to mourn in a modern world. In his resignation
at the end of the poem, and in his use of disconnected motifs, he suggests that the kind of ceremonial poetry a
pastoral elegy represents may no longer have a place in society; instead, symbolic, intensely personal forms must
take over.
Commentary
"When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom'd" is composed of three separate yet simultaneous poems. One follows the progress of
Lincoln's coffin on its way to the president's burial. The second stays with the poet and his sprig of lilac, meant
to be laid on the coffin in tribute, as he ruminates on death and mourning. The third uses the symbols of a bird
and a star to develop an idea of a nature sympathetic to yet separate from humanity. The progression of the
coffin is followed by a sad irony. Mourners, dressed in black and holding offerings of flowers, turn out in the
streets to see Lincoln's corpse pass by. The Civil War is raging, though, and many of these people have surely
lost loved ones of their own. Yet their losses are subsumed in a greater national tragedy, which in its publicness
and in the fact that this poem is being written as part of the mourning process, is set up to be a far greater loss
than that of their own family members. In this way the poem implicitly asks the question, "What is the worth of a
man? Are some men worth more than others?" The poet's eventual inability to mourn, and the depictions of
anonymous death on the battlefields, suggest that something is wrong here. The poet vacillates on the nature of
symbolic mourning. At times he seems to see his offering of the lilac blossom as being symbolically given to all
the dead; at other moments he sees it as futile, merely a broken twig. He wonders how best to do honor to the
dead, asking how he would decorate the tomb. He suggests that he would fill it with portraits of everyday life
and everyday men. This is a far cry from the classical statuary and elaborate floral arrangements usually
associated with tombs. The language in the poem follows a similar shift. In the first stanzas the language is
formal and at times even archaic, filled with exhortations and rhetorical devices. By the end much of the
ceremoniousness has been stripped away; the poet offers only "lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of
[his] soul." Eventually the poet simply leaves behind the sprig of lilac, and "cease[s] from [his] song," still
unsure of just how to mourn properly. The final image of the poem is of "the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk
and dim." All has been worked through save nature, which remains separate and beyond. The death-song of the
bird expresses an understanding and a beauty that Whitman, even while he incorporates it into his poem, cannot
quite master for himself. Unlike the pastoral elegies of old, which use a temporary rift with nature to comment
on modernity, this one shows a profound and permanent disconnection between the human and natural worlds.
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" mourns for Lincoln in a way that is all the more profound for
seeing the president's death as only a smaller, albeit highly symbolic, tragedy in the midst of a world of
confusion and sadness.
Symbolism-The second line of the poem "And the great star early droop'd ..." establishes the allusion to
Lincoln with "Great Star" as an allusion to the 16th president of the United States. The blooming of the lilacs
in April, the same month in which Lincoln was assassinated, serves as Whitman's yearly reminder of
Lincoln's death.

The World According To Emily Dickinson

Poetry of Emily Dickinson is very different from the conventional poetry of her time and from Whitmans
poetic experiments. Her poems are mostly short, organized in a way very similar to the meter of Protestant
hymns and they are very often abstract, taking place in mental landscape, and when they are connected to the
real world, they are usually limited to the places she used to spend her time. Her basic themes are possession and
deprivation (to have and to have not) and when she writes about death it is completely different from Whitmans
transcendental optimism. Dickinsons poetry is not openly prophetic: the messages of her poetry are hidden (it
demands of the reader a point of view not an opinion). She tends to debate with herself in her poems about the
final issues of meaning and absurdity. There were some problems about publishing her poetry, in spite of her
poetic talent and efforts of family and friends her poems came out in 1955. Emily was always dressed in white;
she was spending her time mostly in her room isolated from the outer world.
Emily Dickinsons poetry stands on paradoxical dividing line between transcendentalism and Puritanism. She
was raised in Puritanical spirit in respectable New England family but at the age of 17 she renounced religion.
She read Emerson but didnt agree with him on many issues, so she was mixture of a Puritan and a free thinker.
Emily Dickinsons attitude to nature is ambivalent (unsure). Her early poems are poems of almost total
identification with nature. The voice telling the poem is innocent and in this sense close to origin, at home in
nature, unspoiled by civilization. In her later poems, nature stops being tame and serene. But for the poetess
nature does not forever remain intoxication by the summer, nor does she want to accept transcendental belief that
nature is source of general salvation. In her final poetic period Dickinson became a poet of doubt and ambiguity
when nature is concerned: for her nature is an illusion which is impossible to understand. However the nature
isnt the central focus of her poetry. She also writes about life, its meaning and death.
Emily Dickinsons conception of life is defined by isolation and solitude and she enjoys in it. But even if one
decides to isolate oneself from the society, loss is still unavoidable part of life. Her love poems are only an
introduction to her poems about loss. Passionate outbursts of feelings about wild nights (poem 249), yearning
poem in which the protagonist dreams of someones return, are just descendants of perhaps the greatest poem
about the persistent female position (poem 49), where God is seen as domineering patriarch. The image of trinity
(burglar, banker, and father) is not only a symbolic presentation of the almighty deity but also a reflection of the
universes patriarchal attitude to the eternal female.
Unlike transcendentalists Dickinson does not ignore death, nor does she seek to transcend it in any way. The
range of presentation is very wide and diverse: from nave view of death to the perception of death as the great
equalizer. Immortality is persistent in a number of her poems about death as a support, but it reminds more of
entropy, the smallest common denominator of spiritual presence reduced to absurdity, than of the paradisiacal
eternal existence. Immortality for Dickinson is combination of eternity and nothingness, rather than something to
be desired. She sometimes sees God as a not very skillful administrator.
But her poetry is not poetry of desperation, in spite of helplessness of the human position. She tries to achieve
the Romantic ideal of comprehensiveness in her poetry in little things. As a substitute for her lost faith in
religion, cosmic order, she points out her faith in art and human creative ability. Dickinsons poetry is also
distinguished by its constricted form and its isolation from contemporary world; she uses eye rhyme, assonance
and dissonance to break the monotony of regularity. She often puts together terminology from various
incompatible parts of experience. She had a little respect for the rules of grammar and her favorite stylistic
device is punning. But her poetic experiments sometimes produced disharmony, sometimes even cacophony. But
even the greatest poets can not achieve perfection in all their products: her best poetry is also the product of the
same stylistic devices, mutually balanced.Her poetry is separated from its time and space of origin, whether by
its universality, or by its narrowness and this is the main reason for her relative obscurity. Her poetry contains
glimpses of New England from the second half of 19 century. The sharpness of images is exceptional and the
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poems in which they appear are often uncharacteristically narrative. For the most part her poetry is touchingly
unaware of the world in which she was living, probably on purpose, since she didnt care much about politics,
but yet she is a direct product of her environment and her age precisely. However, in spite of the gauntlets that
her unconventional iconoclastic poetry threw in the face of Victorian taste, they managed to survive to witness of
a poetry which still is both the question and the answer to the mystery of human life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's versions of allegory

His literature was often characterized as allegorical literary method and for that reason his literary reputation is
uncertain and hazy.
Hawthorne succeeded in creating one of the chief masterpieces of English prose. This is his best novel-the
Sscarlet letter, first published in 1850. Hawthorne is the first great American psychological novelist and story
teller who paints, with the help of Puritan history, a complex portrait of the American mind confronted with a
number of new dilemmas springing from the possibilities of the new world: whether to live in the nature, far
from any neighbor, or in the civilization, whether to trust oneself or conform to the will of majority; whether to
believe in generally accepted dogmas, religious or political, or think one's own thoughts.
He sets himself apart from the English literary tradition and he decided for a non-realistic framework to present
his moralistic themes. Hawthorne achieved in his best work literary fullness and human credibility unknown in
American writing before him, through a symbolic network based on his own vision of human psychology and on
authentic American historical data. He tried to tell the American story, different from any of Europe
His first works which he published unanimously were not very successful (Fanshawe: A tale in 1828) so out of
depression he burnt the manuscript which contained his early works.
His first collection of short stories twice Told Tales(1837) was described by Edgar Allan Poe like this: As
Americans, we feel proud of the book.Not unlike the great Bosnian prose writers Andri and Selimovic, 1 t st
big theme of his works: Hawthorne is interested in history as a metaphoric or symbolic background against
which he contemplated unchangeable currents of mans fate. For him, Puritans present true image of human
condition; they went to the new continent, to the original wilderness to realize Gods kingdom on earth there
City on the hill. Hawthorne was not an enemy of Puritans and their ideas, his intention wasnt to judge and
ridicule them, but for him they were simply an illustration of the general human situation and imperfection of
humans nature. He wanted to study the conflict between the Puritans and other settlers who wanted to make
money in the new continent. This was a clash between tradition of the old world and Puritan rebellion against it
on behalf new vision of a society. So, for him Puritans were microscopic presentation of humanity and their
failure to create an ideal world a paradigm of the general human faith. A typical tale of such a conflict is the
May Pole of Merry Mount.
2 big theme: The other typical theme of his work is isolation, separation of an individual from the society which
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acts destructively on human psyche. This is presented in the tale Wakefield, disintegration starting from an
impulse and ending in total isolation.
Still, the most successful embodiment of this theme is found in the tale Young Goodman Brown from
Hawthornes second collection of tales Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). Herman Melville claims for this
story that it is deep as Dante. This tale is a combination of allegory as a literary method with Puritan mores
as a background and loneliness and isolation as the final outcome. In the tale, Hawthorne reveals a complex
world of appearance and reality between which each human life takes place. Young Brown, driven by an
impulse leaves his wife Faith and goes to meets the devil in the forest. The point is Puritan Brown is presented
as the greatest sinner of the tale: his pride prevents him from ever growing up and reaching spiritual maturity.
Hawthorne believed that refusal to come to terms with evil and sin (which are inevitable parts of human life) as
an ultimate sign of immaturity.
Mosses from an Old Manse contains a number of other extraordinary tales in which he reveals other aspects
of his world. He expresses his interest in dilemmas of the world caught in industrial revolution, which appeared
in the mid-19 century. He believed that science cant solve all the problems, and just as for Thoreau, science
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was a dangerous meddling in the secrets of universe. For him the scientists were selfish visionaries, even
criminals.
3 big theme: As usual for transcendentalists, for Hawthorne as well nature is untouchable. But unlike others, he
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VIEWS NATURE as a kind of no-mans land, a world where moral laws dont apply as an environment
which is probably beautiful but with no sympathy for man. Yet Hawthorne follows Emerson in his use of natural
images as expressive devices. Contrasting the town, civilization with its rules and limitations, with the freedom
of nature (especially important for people who confronted with the true wilderness in America, after refined
European landscapes) is also typical American theme that Hawthorne used. This can be seen in Young
Goodman Brown, where he presented nature as a kind of subconscious nightmare in which everything is
possible, with no regularities (neither psychical nor moral). This view of nature also dominate in his masterpiece
The Scarlet Letter.
The Scarlet Letter is actually a combination of all the themes that Hawthorne dealt with previously in structural
and thematic sense; it is fused of many ingredients with no visible seams. Paradox is that Hawthorne himself
wasnt quite sure of the value of this novel; it seemed too gloomy to him. In a letter to a friend he said that it
was a hell-fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light. Readers from
the 21 century appreciate the moral firmness of the main female character on her long suffering but
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triumphant journey through life and consider it a victory and faith in man rather than defeat and hopelessness.
The Scarlet Letter (together with Young Goodman Brown) is a novel that operates through symbols. The most
ambiguous symbol in The Scarlet Letter is that of the letter A embroidered on the breast of Hester Prynne. This
symbol is embodied in reality since Puritans really marked those who broke their strict rules with the initials of
the sin, so the letter A has a clear meaning to all the inhabitants of the 17 ct Boston; A means Adulteress (
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although Hawthorne never reveals this in the novel). But the fantastically embroidered and illuminated letter
is not only a sign of the sin on the breast of the heroine but also expression of DEFIANCE, because of its beauty
and artistic work characteristic for Hesters embroidery, so different from Puritan clothing which was gray and
brown. Later in the poem the meaning of the letter is constantly changing, indicating all sorts of abilities and
characteristics in Hester and other characters.
The second ambiguous symbol is a character from the novel, the love child of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale,
named Pearl. She is opposed to other Puritans not only by her wild and unpredictable nature but also by the
natural character of her birth and later existence. Her very name is paradoxical and symbolic. She, like the
scarlet letter, denotes Hesters sin, but at the same time because of her loveliness, slyness, vivacity and pledge of
redemption she represents the triumph of nature over the rigid regulations of Puritan formal morality.
Hawthorne often expresses his own views through Pearl (example in chapter 2, Market Place page 113 of the
American topics). Later in the novel Pearl reveals the hypocrisy of her father Dimmesdale (chapter XII, The
Ministers Vigil-page 113/114 of American topics). In chapter XV she makes a green letter A and in the next
chapter she says to her mother that the letter is the sing of an adult woman and she will have one of her own.
And still, in spite of her unconventional behavior she faces the conventional fate of middle-aged heroine in the
novel: she inherits a lot of money from Chillingworth, marries a nobleman from a Europe, moves there an lives
happily ever after-she is not obliged to face the ambiguities of American destiny, like her mother. All other main
characters in the novel are paradoxical in themselves, beginning with Hester herself. She should have been the
greatest sinner, but actually becomes not only the heroine of the novel but also the character with the firmest
moral convictions and actions (like Tolstoys Ana Karenina). Her former husband Chillingworth, the old
scientists and philosopher, impersonates a physician in order to take revenge on the lover of his wife, poisoning
him both mentally and physically. Dimmesdale should have been the moral leader of the Puritans, as a minister,
but he also has a secret sin, he is unable to admit Pearl as his daughter in front of his congregation till the very
end. Hawthorne takes the side of the Dimmesdale who transgressed the social norms but has no courage enough
to admit it to the society. Hawthorne never explicitly expresses this in the novel, the farthest that he goes is to
allow Dimmesdale certain defense during the only meeting between him and Hester, in the forest: May God
forgive us both! We are not the worst sinners in the world. There is one worst than even the polluted priest!
That old man revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated the sanctity of human heart. Thou and I,
Hester, never did so.Although there is a touch of narcissism in Dimmesdales words, when he speaks about the
sanctity of his own heart, he apparently expresses Hawthornes own opinion. But in order to preserve at least
apparent objectivity and to make the reader to judge by himself, Hawthorne gives to Chillingworth a chance for
defense as well. So, when Hester asks him to forgive her lover, he says: It is not granted me to pardon. I have
no such powersMy old faith comes back to me and explains all that we do and all we sufferThou didst plant
the germ of evil, but since that moment it has all been dark necessityye that have wronged me are not
sinfulneither am I fiendIt is our fate.The only character in the novel that doesnt need any justification is
Hester Prynne; she is proud, decisive, firm and still very sensitive woman. She loves and she would like to be
loved back, but she happens to stumble upon weak and helpless men. She is a sort of apostle of feminism. Since
Hester is probably one of the most admirable female characters in American 19 ct th

fiction, the question is posed: how did Hawthorne manage to create her?
It is possible that some roots of her character might be found in Hawthornes biography. His mother was
pregnant before she married and though his father married her as soon as was possible, he took her to live with
his three unmarried sisters, what wasnt pleasant experience for Hawthornes mother. His father was a ship
captain; he died leaving his wife with three children, the eldest of who was Nathaniel Hawthorne. After her
husbands death, Elizabeth Manning returned to her parents. Her psychological state maybe moved Hawthorne
to try to shape a character of Hester Prynne.
But she is also, like all great characters in literature, a composite character; she was not invented on a single
model. On the one hand she is sainted Ann Hutchinson, the one who questioned the authority of Puritans
and was therefore expelled from Massachusetts. She is also the adulteress Hester Crawford, of whom
Hawthorne read in old archives, who was whipped in Salem for adultery. She is also the portrait of one of the
first American feminists, Margaret Fuller.
Some critics point out that The Scarlet Letter is an anti-revolutionary book, because Hawthorne didnt believe in
progress, in the possibility of bettering human nature in any way. Some of his political views may be seen in the
long preface to The Scarlet Letter, entitled The Custom House. He was twice appointed to a custom house
but he resigned and moved to Brook Farm, the transcendental utopian community with capitalist pretensions,
trying to save some money to marry Sophia Peabody to whom he was secretly engaged. In Concord he met and
became friends with Emerson and Thoreau, and his first daughter Una was born. But they live in poverty. So,
he opens The Custom House with an ironic portrait of the American bald eagle, who probably looks fierce
but still many people are seeking the shelter under its wings. He is of course addressing to civil servants, who
work for the state and they hope for a sheltered and comfortable existence (opposed to the miserable position and
poverty of others and of his own). He is dissatisfied with the position of the artist in America and in the
Custom House imagines that his Puritan ancestors are judging him for being an artist: What is he ...A
writer of story-books? What kind of business in life, what mode of glorifying God or being serviceable to
mankind in his day may that be?But more importantly, he connects his way of learning for living to the story
of Scarlet Letter, he says that on the 2 floor of the building in which he was employed he found a small
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package, left by one of his predecessors (Jonathan Pue). In the package he found fine red cloth with traces
of gold embroidery. He also found some sheets written by Pue, describing Hester Prynne and her scarlet
letter. So, Hawthorne, in accordance to traditional literary convention, claims that he is not the author but
only the transcriber of this tale.
Hawthorne didnt call the genre of The Scarlet Letter a novel. He thought he was writing romances, which
were the portrait of the neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and the fairy land, where the
Actual and Imagery meet. In his romances he wanted to explore his moralistic themes, and that is why the
framework of romances better suited than the framework of the novel, under which he understood reality of
contemporary life. Hawthornes approach to structure and style is very different from the views of other
transcendentalists. He never accepted the idea of the organic form, but he held his books under control
through a symbolic framework. For example, The Scarlet Letter is organized around 3 similar scenes on the
pillory: the novel begins with Hester and Pearl exposed to the multitude for the first time, the center of the novel
is the scene in which the whole family stands there in the nighttime, and the end takes place at the same spot,
but in a daylight, when Dimmesdale finally confesses his sin and he can die, with Hester and Pearl by
him.Contrary to his original structure and symbolism, Hawthornes language is quite conservative. It has
been revealed that his wife Sophia polished his writings. So, for example, his smell was corrected into
odor, his pantaloons into trousers etc. He himself corrected some of his own writings, so he corrected
small into diminutive, good into beneficent etc. Still, although he didnt even try to build the
colloquial American language into his works (like Emerson and Thoreau did), his writings sounds authentic and
genuine. His old-fashioned language suits his heroes and heroines, to situations he presents, as well as to moral
conclusions that we as readers have to reach.Hawthorne is one of the most important American prose
writers, primarily thanks to his best tales and the novel The Scarlet Letter. He is a writer who confronts
some of existential issues of human life in general within the framework of moral allegory. Unlike literary
worlds of other transcendentalists, his literary world is filled with suffering and tragedy, but also with courage
and redemption. He is the Homer of that New England, but his homeland is a microcosmic presentation
of the whole world. His writings are combination of romantic and neo-classical elements, and this paradoxical
unity enabled him to create master-pieces. This unique contact between romantic topics, allegory as a literary
method, and the style of the 18 century, gave birth to a forceful literature. His best works transcend obvious
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limitations of his somewhat limited art, because they contain the psychological universality of human kind,
regardless of the epoch and geography.

Melville

Sea for Melville & his protagonists was a convenient refuge from contemporary America, to contemplate there
ones own identity, a kind of sanctuary similar to Poes Gothicism and Hawthornes Puritan world. While
Thoreau and Emerson critized America, Melville retires into another world where he could observe basic human
dilemmas in a simpler manner than in the everyday life of capitalist America in the making. He voices protest
against the dominant ideology, that peculiar compound of Puritanism & materialism or rationalism &
commercialism, of shallow blatant optimism & technology which proved so crushing to evolutions in religion,
art & life. Melville wrote his 1st novels, Typee; A Peep At Polynesian Life & Omoo almost literally on the basis
of his own experiences as a sailor, harpooner on a whaleboat and ship chandler in the South Seas btw 1841-84.
The vision which Melville built belongs to a disappointed transcendentalist. Melvilles intellectual growth led
him into disappointment. In Mardi Melville started to veer away from the autobiographic romance of the South
Seas. In a letter to Hawthorne, after having finished Moby Dick he said that he had written a wicked book but
that he feels spotless as a lamb. It may be in this contradiction that the essential paradoxical character of M.D
is contained: it is a great novel, one of the most forceful American literary creations, and its yet full of serious
literary faults, which succeeded in leading astray the 19 ct. critics in not recognizing its qualities. Its a book
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depicting simultaneously the highest peak of human pride & rebelliousness and the final human helplessness
when confronted to nature & fate. It is a literary work confined by its framework of a whaling journey, but in
spite of that it is as immensely wide and open as the sea. The upper surface layer of the book corresponds to the
literary convention of an adventure novel or a romance. The main hero Ahab captain of the whaling ship
Pequod to whom M.D. bit the leg off goes to sea to find & kill him. After almost 2 yrs Ahab clashes with M.D.
harpoons it repeatedly, but at the end, the whale sinks the ship and all the crew but Ishmael drowns. The novel
abounds with romantic overtones: Ahabs companion & harpooner, originally from Polynesia, Satan like Parsee
Fedallah utters a prophecy about Ahabs & his own death, which in the end comes true. 3 other harpooners,
originally come from Polynesia, Africa and N.America. The most romantic aspect of the novel is embodied in
the captain him self who bares the name of a wicked king from the Bible. The narrator Ishmael, also biblical
name, gets much such intimations and warnings, the most striking by the ragged prophet Eliah who mentions
their souls, to prepare the reader for belated appearance of Ahab. After more that 100 pages, after the ship spent
many months at sea the crew & the reader get to see the quarter-deck. Ahab is painted through out the book as a
Byronic hero, in rebellion against the whole universe but gifted with many capabilities persuasion especially.
In Ch. 36 we see his magnetic power through an incantation ritual, and an offer of gold, he succeeds in
persuading the crew to change the purpose of their journey. In verbal clash with his 1 mate Starbuck who
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exemplifies the deliberateness & calculation of a Yankee, Ahab reveals the metaphysical background of his
pursuit which doesnt exhaust itself in revenge.Ahab lke Faust, searches for the true face of reality hidden behind
the mask of appearance: through the whale he would like to penetrate the secret of the universe. The white whale
for him is a challenge a gauntlet which he has to keep up, invitation to combat which he cannot refuse and yet
keep his self respect. He stops at nothing & therefore is destroyed with his crew, because of his almost satanic
pride.
Ahab is a damned king like his Biblical predecessor like Cain he rebels against the natural order & pursues the
white whale over all seas and oceans, to meet in the end his inevitable destiny death.
First sentence of the book starts with Call me Ishmael. Ishmael explains that he goes to sea when hit by
depression instead of committing a suicide, but he also returns as the source of life in order to learn his essence
& as well as essence of the world he lives in. Ishmael is a rather tentative narrator. As soon as Ahab appears he
starts to pale, occasionally disappearing completely.
At the end of 1950s, American critic Richard Chase proved that M.D. started as an autobiographical novel
combined with South Seas romance and then became a philosophical epic. 15ch. are Melvilles 1 version, next 7
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are modified, and from Ch 23 new concept is fully implemented. The many true facts about the whaling are a
lure for the reader to accept everything else in the novel as true. The main message speaks of human condition,
which has hinted at from the very beginning, so the main theme is the conflict btw predestination and free will,
will & Deity... god is seen as inscrutable & indifferent.
Ishmael is the only non-professional on the ship and can therefore admire the beauty and serenity of whales, to
glorify their mysterious nature, not thinking of the profit of oil. Each symbol including white whale is
paradoxical & controversial. The whiteness of the whale can be seen as innocence, but also as vastness & ghastly
quality. There is also the theme of appearance & reality. The structure of M.D. can be seen as poetic then the
organizational basis become 2 characteristic repeated events leitmotifs the killing of the whale & the meeting
of the ship.