Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre Book

Emerson can annoy me at times, but when he's in full cry, his ecstatic professions of readerly adventure and speculative gusto are difficult to dislike. He writes the marching songs of America's thinking men; and like Whitman's

I have witness'd the true lightning'I have witness'd my cities electric;
I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise...

and

All the past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!

his essays are calls to experiment, and the literary phrasing of 19th century America's feeling of maturing strength and explorative vigor. I think it's fascinating to witness different levels of a society processing a set of ideas in various ways, to various ends. The pioneer is a poetic symbol of spiritual youth, innocence and freshness, and he is an actual man who will have his God-given plot, ancient forests and Indians be damned. I'm very interested to read more about Emerson's opposition to the Mexican War and other of the political and imperial'-as opposed to the spiritual and intellectual'-consequences of America's energetic bursting forth.

Talking about Plato, Emerson shows his affinities with Eastern monism; this made me want to go back and re-read that chapter in The Pound Era in which Hugh Kenner pictures China, "with centuries-long deliberation" writing, through Emerson and others, "the macro-history of western thought." The essay on Swedenborg--unreal, unread Swedenborg, who perhaps persists for the contemporary reader in "Swedenborgian," a word always adhering to Henry James Sr.--was very tedious until Emerson brought out his big rhetorical guns and began pummeling his subject's elaborate demonologies and interstitial soul-rankings; this rant contains ferocious poetry, and it also made me feel better about never getting very far in Merrill's The Changing Light of Sandover.

Emerson's grapple with Montaigne makes one realize why Nietzsche valued him, Emerson, so highly. He sinuously navigates the biggest issue in philosophy--not suicide, as we thought years ago when Camus-reading teenagers, but the subversion of our ideals by our actions, by the dark ironies that abound; and ideals as free products of dreams, but also hostages to stomachs and nerves. The essay on Shakespeare as the eternal, the unsurpassable type of "Poet" is wonderful, if not quite as intense as "The Poet," the essay that lit Whitman's fire. Emerson calls Napoleon the representative man of the 19th century, the "incarnate Democrat," agent and attorney of the middle classes but, preacher-like, warns that the energies liberated from the old feudal forms should bear spiritual and intellectual as well as capitalistic fruit, else

Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth.

The essay on Goethe is weak, though its long first paragraph

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal.

is a pearl of the dynamic, incantatory style that marks the American Renaissance. A young society entering a New World of experience backed by Shakespeare and the King James Bible is not a backwater of literary English, but its marvel-making frontier.