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1 emerson, transcendentalism, and the Problem of literary Vision Emerson introduces his 1844 essay “The Poet” with a poem that describes a pair of eyes that “rived the dark” and, through “worlds, and races, and terms, and times, / Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes” (445). What Emerson’s poet sees not only already bears aesthetic form but also yields specifically linguistic, poetic results. Seeing “pairing rhymes” implies the perception of likenesses between things in the world, but because rhyme requires the aural likeness of two words rather than the visual likeness of two objects, Emerson ’s verse equates the very words, syntax, and sounds of poetry with visual apprehension of the world. He argues later in the essay that “poetry was all written before time was” and thus awaits discovery rather than linguistic creation (449). Acts of creation, in fact, yield mistakes: when most of us attempt to write down what we have seen in moments of clear perception, “we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem” (449). The Emersonian poet adheres to the astonishing principle that poetry “is not art” but is “the science of the real” (457, 452). Emerson’s visible, pre-existent poetry, lying in wait for the poet’s transparent eye, is a paradigmatic figure in the development of an American transcendentalism that turned the inwardness of European romanticism toward both the external world and the origins of language. Emerson’s effort to find poetry in the material world—“a language, not of words but of things,” as Sampson Reed puts it (44)—marks a turn from the imagination to the eye as the most privileged source of poetic language. But, paradoxically, Emerson turns to the eye to counter empiricism and to signify in fact a faculty of intuition that fundamentally transcends the limits of the senses, just as their European forebears had aimed to do via the imagination. Thus he and his contemporaries desire a language seen in the physical world rather than Emerson, Transcendentalism, and the Problem of Literary Vision 19 imagined within the mind, but they also desire a language derived from an intuitive perception of the world rather than a language derived from physical perception. This chapter traces the emergence of this vexed figure, following Emerson ’s and other American transcendentalists’ conflicted pivot from the European imagination to an American literary vision. To account for both the transcendentalist pivot to vision and American writers’ continued compulsion to take up the figure, the chapter examines the ways vision enables writers to address a shared national mandate to produce a literature derived from what Emerson calls an “original relation” to the external (American) world (Nature 7). But the chapter is also concerned with the ways literary vision constitutes not a fixed trope but rather a contested discursive formation, an accumulation of figures impelled by all that is problematic about that “original relation.” I thus conclude by turning to subsequent eyeballs penned by Thoreau and Jacobs—visions that restage the transparent eye and point us toward the ethical and epistemological problems that animate the writers I examine in subsequent chapters. Emerson’s displacement of the imagination is an outgrowth of the particular way he interprets the Reason, or that faculty of pure consciousness Kant and his followers distinguished from sense-derived experience. Leon Chai has pointed to a “genuine rupture”—a “deliberate renunciation of formal philosophy”—that separates Emersonian thought in particular from key tenets of European romanticism (336, 333).1 Chai’s primary argument about this rupture is that whereas Kant and his European descendants understand the Reason, or consciousness, to be the assertion of the self as distinct from its contact with the external world, for Emerson, “consciousness represents an act of pure seeing” (332): “It is the absorption of the world of external phenomena into the mind (or soul), and this absorption assimilates the content of experience. . . . For Emerson, the being of the world is the blending or merging of a seeing consciousness with the objects it perceives. . . . Experience in this sense, as the fusion of consciousness and external world, can also be seen as containing thought, which is the element of consciousness. Hence experience precludes pure thought. . . . [T]hought, which as consciousness has become one with external things, ‘knows’ the external world in a moment of immediate apprehension that transcends the limits of rational thought” (332–33). The shift Chai describes is toward an absolute blending of the...

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