'The Crucial Century'

...But The American Procession is not just a survey of American literature or a study of American individualism...

...But contrary to vulgarized versions of Emerson's ideas, he persistently demanded that the individual's power be directed toward improving the commonwealth rather than being used for personal profit...

...Dickinson commented that she was so sensitive to opening lines in other poems that she often had to read poetry backwards from the end to the beginning...

...Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway...

...The title of Ka-zin's new critical study, An American Procession, comes from Whitman's avowal that the "whole procession" of American writers had its beginning with Emerson, who shows "a secret proclivity, American maybe, to dare and violate and make escapades...

...I simply experiment," Emerson said, "an endless seeker with no past at my back...

...Kazin shows himself to be in the pattern of Emerson's American Scholar, he has not lost his devotion to the ideals of a democratic literary tradition even though he sees it drifting inexorably from our grasp...

...It's a sign of the times that the influential French critic Roland Barthes parodied Whitman's line, writing, "We must unexpress the expressible...

...Nothing was sacred to him but Gene Bluestein teaches at California State University in Fresno...

...In Emerson we see the power of the "radical protestantism" which has lain like an unexploded bomb that goes off every twenty years in the United States and always in the context of an awareness that style, as Ezra Pound insisted, existed to make everything new...

...by Gene Bluestein N; I othing is more puzzling in our literary history than the persist-I ent rejection of Ralph Waldo Emerson...

...Kazin covers "the crucial century," the period from 1830 to 1930...

...The unity of form and content enabled Whitman to create the first (and still the greatest) American poem...

...It was Emerson who convinced him that American English could be the language that would "well nigh express the inexpressible...

...And Whitman paid the greatest tribute to his "master" by pointing out that "Emersonianism is the giant that breeds its own destruction...

...With the restrictions of institutional religion gone, the mind inevitably moves toward its natural expression, and human beings reap the harvest of their creative capabilities...

...Emerson, Kazin argues, saw that unlimited personal power could be "gained from the energy and imagination no longer sacrificed to formal religion...

...He notes how Dickinson "rushes at a poem, takes an immediate gulp of the situation in the first line...

...Melville noted Emerson's reputation as a great humbug (a New England "Plato who talks thro' his nose") but also identified him as one of the great "thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began...

...I look forward with pleasure to Kazin's estimate of the last fifty years, which are part of the same great procession...

...Thrown back on its own resources, the intelligence of human-ity will discover an independence and vitality that match the promise of America itself...

...I remember well the condescension of some professors who dismissed Emerson's "muddle-headed" ideas—and by association, Walt Whitman's as well...

...Through the conscious manipulation of language and the connection with natural facts, the poet finds that the "day of facts is a rock of diamonds...

...Here as elsewhere, Kazin not only finds the keys that open up vistas we have never seen but points to techniques that clarify the writers' styles...

...Here I sit and read and write," Emerson DANNY O'ROURKE reflected, "with very little system, and as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence as an infinitely repellent particle...

...that a fact is an Epiphany of God...

...It is characteristic of Emerson's most severe critics that, like Updike, they pay no attention to his aesthetic theories...

...Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, for example, who were exasperated by Emerson's politically naive optimism, were overwhelmed by his aesthetics and picked up his hints for a new kind of fiction that rejected the patterns of European prose...

...The significance of style was not something important in itself, but always a symbol of the individual's power...

...The brilliance of Kazin's performance lies in his unceasing revelation of Emerson's role in the otherwise centrifugal movement of American literature...

...Emerson is not just an innovator in American tradition, but one of the founders of modern literary approaches...

...Like all the rest, Emily Dickinson shows how the rejection of formal religion led to extreme individualism and the mastery of language...

...Emerson invented the literary theory of epiphanies (usually associated with James Joyce) in Nature (1836) and in his most exciting essay, "The Poet" (1844...

...the integrity of his own mind...

...The "romance," as Hawthorne called his prose fiction, is as much a new invention suited to the "new man in the world" as Whitman's idea that free verse is the appropriate literary form for a democratic society...

...In addition to those I have mentioned, the writers include Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Henry James, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, T.S...

...Unlike most of Emerson's critics, Ka-zin understands that Emerson's legacy is not just political but aesthetic as well...

...Kazin shows how each illustrates Emerson's themes in the context of an American society that has moved away from its goal of freedom, security, and community...

...Perhaps that explains his recurring interest in Henry Adams, that "angelic porcupine" who underlined the entropic nature of modern culture...

...Melville, Kazin points out, is another one of those Emersonian "iso-latos" (Melville's word) "looking for a place to put his mind...

...No wonder Whitman thrilled to his discovery of Emerson, which led him to his great "language experiment" in Leaves of Grass...

...The main virtue of this fine work is that it takes us over familiar ground and reveals elements in the landscape we have never seen before, chief among them the lasting influence of Emerson...

...Kazin has given us a clue to the surprising modernism of the important writers in what he calls "the American procession...

...She reveals best what is for Kazin "the one constant in the American succession, the Emersonian legacy: the unconscious mind as oracle...

...Emerson continued to preach a new sermon for a literary mission: As Kazin points out, "It was to be founded on the comprehensive power released to the individual by his emancipation from institutions...

...In a recent review in The New Yorker, John Updike sounded appalled by the suggestion that Emerson is one of the masters of American literature: "Is there not something cloudy at the center of his reputation, something fatally faded about the works he left us...

...Kazin also shows Emerson at the center of another crucial development in American literature, the emphasis on language and symbolism...

...Alfred Kazin, however, sees the movement of American literature as a long march that "began in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson left the church and founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution...