Freedom And Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Stephen E. Whicher. University of Pennsylvania. $4.75.
This is not a fashionable kind of book on Emerson. In the hands of Charles Feidelson and Sherman Paul, who seem to represent the ascendant method of treating him, Emerson becomes the man who launched American symbolism; in Paul’s words, a writer who, confronted by the world’s obstinate dualism, “was forced to find the bases of unity, where many contemporary philosophers and poets have, in the act of perception and the symbolic imagination.” Feidelson’s implication (in Symbolism and American Literature) that at a certain moment in history the chief American writers began to conceive their work in post-Kantian terms, and that we too must Cassirerize in order to comprehend them almost makes one long to have Parrington back. It seems an unnecessarily heavy price to pay for the recognition that Emerson was an artist; to be asked to divest him of his ancestral status, to play down his relation to subsequent cultural history.
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