Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America

4. Keeping the Metaphors Alive: American Poetry and Transformation

63 = 4 Keeping the Metaphors Alive American Poetry and Transformation Barbara Packer Every lover of literature will remember Emerson’s warnings to readers in “The American Scholar”: “one must be an inventor to read well,” and “the discerning will read in his Plato or Shakespeare only that least part,—only the authentic insights of the oracle,—and all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s or Shakespeare’s.” But how does one determine which parts of a great author are authentic? Easy: they are the ones that kindle one’s own thoughts and bring them to expression. In the Arabian proverb Emerson quotes: “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.”1 Armed with this principle of selection, I can search through the paragraphs of Elisa New’s meditation on classic New England literature to reach the ones that are, for me, authentic and that make figs sprout again on branches the winter had left bare. The first such sentences stood out at me in the preface New provided to her symposium presentation. In the course of discussing Emily Dickinson’s poem, “There’s a certain slant of light,” she observed: “Meaning, in this poem by Dickinson, instructs shallow expectancy how to take in, how to internalize, patience before obscurity. . . . It reminds revelation that its origin is mystery.” This seems to me profoundly true, not only of Dickinson but also of much American literature. Our professional habit as elucidators of obscure texts is so deeply ingrained that we habitually try to beam light into darkness without bothering to ask ourselves whether that was the fate the authors wanted. There is plenty of evidence that they did not. Emerson reminds us in “Poetry and Imagination” that “God himself does not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, omens, inference and dark resemblances in objects lying all around us.”2 Thoreau asserts in Walden, “it is a ridiculous demand which 64 Barbara Packer England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toad-stools grow so.”3 And in the closing lines of Song of Myself Whitman promises that he will serve as a kind of dialysis machine for us without engaging the understanding at all: You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.4 The baffles Dickinson sets up to understanding are different only in degree, not in kind, from the projects of her contemporaries. All were in flight from what they saw as the shallowness of Enlightenment thought and literary styles; all wanted to recover the richness of earlier writers without giving up their hospitality to universal religion or to progressive thought. This made them, as New said in an earlier draft of her chapter, “scornful of the apparent, and committed rather to recessive, diffuse, and even obscure species of meaning .” It also left them open to attacks from the conservatives—the old, eighteenth-century liberals, that is—that they were flatulent rather than inspired, occluded rather than deep, and that their obscurantism risked opening the door once again to the superstitions their fathers and grandfathers had with such courage driven out of the Commonwealth in the era of its birth. Was there any way of deciding who was right? One litmus test proposed by the writers themselves lay in the study of a writer’s metaphors. Trite metaphors suggest a mind that is either unoriginal or servile; arresting minds offer hope that the writer perceives the analogies inscribed by the First Cause on nature. “Picturesque language,” Emerson argues in Nature, “is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.” And he goes on, in a passage we know from the journals to describe his own methods of composition: “A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. . . . This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.”5 The problem is, as Emerson later discovered, that while the process of originating metaphors might be spontaneous, even...