Word: emerson
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...century: the hundred-year collapse of America's "communal ties." And he knows who did it. For undermining "the authenticating offices of the family and society" and putting a wobble in America's "sense of direction since the mid-nineteenth century," Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry James...
...Emerson masterminded the "beginning of the dissolution of society." With him, "society was not spurned; it was judged irrelevant." As the ultimate Protestant, Emerson liked to boast that "a great man should occupy the whole space between...
...Emerson was in love with the vibrations of his soul, says Anderson. Whitman was even more narrowly self-concerned: he was in love with the smell of his armpits. Whitman swallowed cities, rivers, people in a sort of king-cannibal self. The firmament existed only to serve as his drum...
After roasting the proudly remote metaphysics of Emerson's essay Self-Reliance, after deploring the enchanted navel gazing of Whitman's Song of Myself, Professor Anderson confronts James' The Golden Bowl. The Jacobin crime, as he draws it up, was to take European culture, abstract it, then reconstruct the abstraction as a kind of kingdom in the novelist's mind, with Mad Henry as its tyrant...
...keeps demanding context and more context, he seems remarkably provincial. He acts as if the disintegration of "communal ties" were a problem invented by 19th century America. He is guilty of a crime of his own: thesis protecting. He neglects to point out that Emerson's "imperial self" was bred, after all, with the help of German philosophy. Every Zen trender can spot for himself the Oriental mysticism in Whitman, but as far as Anderson is concerned, it all comes f.o.b. Brooklyn and New Jersey...