American Metempsychosis
Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry
ISBN13: 9780823242344ISBN10: 082324234X
Hardback,
272 pages
Mar 2012,
In Stock
Price:
$55.00 (06)A Fordham University Press Publication
Description
"The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human." With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: to evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history's chronology in themselves--because their own minds and bodies are its evolving record.Whereas scholarship has tended to minimize the mystical underpinnings of Emerson's notion of the self, his depictions of "the metempsychosis of nature" reveal deep roots in mystical traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Platonism and Christian esotericism. In essay after essay, Emerson uses metempsychosis as an open-ended template to understand human development.
In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman transforms Emerson's conception of metempsychotic selfhood into an expressly poetic event. His vision of transmigration viscerally celebrates the poet's ability to assume and live in other bodies; his American poet seeks to incorporate the entire nation into his own person so that he can speak for every man and woman.
Features
- Yes, nineteenth-century Americans were just as New Age as Americans are now (or maybe more so): this fascinating book traces Emerson's and Whitman's involvement with the notion of the transmigration of souls, a doctrine that has in fact been part of Western thought since Plato, though we tend to associate it with Hinduism and Buddhism. Both these classic American writers took it very seriously, and did very creative things with it.
- Whitman's poetry, in particular, is transformed if one takes in full literalness the notion that writing and reading involves a sort of transmigration of souls--from the writer into those he writes about, and into the reader.
Reviews
"American Metempsychosis is a valuable work that contributes an original reading of Emerson and Whitman."-Arthur Versluis, author of American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance
About the Author(s)
John Michael Corrigan, Assistant Professor of American Literature, Ming Chuan University, Taiwan, Republic of China
