Emerson and Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the course of writing a book, one inevitably incurs many debts to those who provided help and encouragement along the way. After more than thirty years of writing about Emerson, I have accumulated an unusual number of these. Since it involved so many different aspects of Emerson’s life and thought, this particular project was a special challenge. My journey into the depths of Emerson’s inner self forced me to consider everything from his psychological development, to his spiritual crises, to his complex and, at times, conflicted relationships with church, family, friends, and community. It also necessitated a consideration of the sources of Emerson’s remarkable creativity and the unique expression of that creativity in his lectures, poems, and essays. The philosophical sources of Emerson’s thought and his place in a historical and intellectual continuum reaching back to the Neoplatonists of the third century and forward to the psychomythic humanists of the twentieth century presented yet another challenge. And so my debts are many. To name all of the persons who have contributed to my knowledge and appreciation of Emerson over the years would require more space than is available here. It would begin in graduate school with A. W. Plumstead and David Porter and continue on from there. And so I will not attempt it. Instead I will limit myself, first of all, to those individuals who were kind enough to read and comment on the manuscript of this study at various stages during the long period of its evolution. Among the earliest of these were Robert Habich, Wesley Mott, David Robinson, Alan Hodder, and Richard Geldard. Their many suggestions , as well as their encouragement, were invaluable. Later readers included Robert Richardson and Joel Myerson, both of whom possess a vast knowledge of Emerson and the period in which he lived and worked. Others outside of the Emerson circle were also extremely generous in providing much needed guidance. John Norcross, whose knowledge of modern psychology is second to none, was a tremendous help in preventing me from running off the tracks at various junctures. My philosopher friends and colleagues, John McGinley and Kevin Nordberg, performed a similar ix noble service, drawing from their considerable experience in teaching classical philosophy. And in my own English department, John Meredith Hill and Carl Schaffer, a poet and a creative writer, as well as humanists of the first order, offered sound advice on my “sound and sense.” To all of these, I will be eternally indebted. There are, of course, a myriad of Emerson scholars whose works help to provide the necessary underpinnings for the present study, in addition to those already noted. Their names can be found in the list of works cited at the end of the text. Among these, especially , are Lawrence Buell, Ronald Bosco, Phyllis Cole, Albert von Frank, Barbara Packer, Laura Dassow Walls, and Sarah Wider. It is my good fortune that these scholars are also friends, and to them I offer my heartfelt thanks for the many conversations we have had and the works they have published, all of which contributed considerably to my own modest effort. Finally, closer to home, I would like to thank Patrick J. Scanlon, a former graduate student whose enthusiasm for psychomythic criticism helped to rekindle my own, my daughter, Nadia Lynn Gougeon, who was kind enough to read and critique my manuscript in its various stages, and lastly my wife, Deborah, whose faith and patience were a constant resource throughout the long gestation of this study. x Acknowledgments ...