At the Brink of Infinity: Poetic Humility in Boundless American Space

1. The Beachcomber’s Horizon

1 TheBeachcomber’sHorizon Before Emerson’s writings were ever about power, they were about knowledge. His ethics have been deplored equally for excessive idealism and for excessive pragmatism: his continued importance to readers results instead from the bold and jagged contours of his philosophy. No call to action stirs the reader of Emerson in the way his alterations of perspective do. He holds intellectual and aesthetic attention not because of his renown in the lecture halls of his age, or any powers of persuasion, but because of the special effort he undertakes to situate the human mind at the center of the natural world. All that extra effort is necessary because he makes the task so hard: rather than subjecting one to the other, he refuses to limit the potential either of the mind or of the world.1 In many of the most striking passages of Emerson’s prose, and in the most rigorouspoetry of the followinggenerations, boundlessly ambitious American knowledge confronts its own absurdity. Infinite in its possibilities, and therefore both unchanging and unstable, the Emersonian imagination meets its match not inland, in the arena of temporal activity, but in the open horizon of the uninhabitable ocean. The result is an aesthetically intense double bind for American philosophical poetry. No finite space can correspond adequately to the depth of the human spirit, yet no human action can respond adequately to the vastness onto which the poet’s eye opens.2 On the beach, absolute ambition paralyzes both the Emersonian epistemologist and the Emersonian poet. Uncannily, a powerful imagination entangles helplessly with its external equivalent: a world without borders. The secret of Emerson’s epistemology, then, is the problem this tangling represents to triumphalist, dynamic ideas of sensory knowledge. What is to be done when the world’s vista coincides all too perfectly with the writer’s view? That problem gives rise to some of the most intense American poetry of 2 | the beachcomber’s horizon the following generations. The four lyric poets examined here all read the bare ocean horizon with a complex double attitude of aspiration and subjection. In one instance, Robert Frost describes the sensation in an end-stopped trimeter that suggests the abortiveness of seaward longing. In “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” he depicts a scene without any apparent societal context, severed both from inland variability and from the satisfactions of deep oblivion. The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass A ship keeps raising its hull; The wetter ground like glass Reflects a standing gull. The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be— The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea. They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep. But when was that ever a bar To any watch they keep? The inexhaustible fascination of what is fundamentally a dull tableau resembles the ongoing appeal of Emerson’s philosophy. The multiple minds of Frost’s poem, like the diverse readers every Emerson paragraph seems to anticipate , are absorbed with the vision of a space of pure possibility, outside of variation. Inevitably, they fail to probe that possibility in full. In turn, the performance of such failure—represented here by the catch in the breath at the word “bar,” before Frost’s awkwardly enjambed final line—supplies the principal beauty to a lineage of American poetry. The sensation of possibility should always create ambivalence, for the incomprehensibly boundless world is a recapitulation of the unknowable American self. Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill constitute the central line of a distinct Emersonian tradition of the seascape.3 the beachcomber’s horizon | 3 This does not mean that they are simply influenced by the essayist. Interpretive reciprocity, rather than unidirectional “influence,” describes the proposed relation between Emerson and the writers of this school. He makes it possible to discern and understand their obsession with boundlessness, while their poems are crucial to any reader who would fully discern Emerson as a thinker of electric stasis (as well as an advocate of competence or a champion of newness ). We know Emerson better when we read him retrospectively through succeeding poets, just as we know those poets better when we read them as Emersonians.4 In considering the difficult epistemological questions Emerson...