F.O. Matthiessen on the Polarities

     Matthiesen,  writing in "The American Renaissance" about Ralph Waldo Emerson, says, "[Emerson's] escape from the practical restrictions of his age had been so complete,  the freedom of his consciousness was so absolute, that he sensed the need of some strict challenge to bring him back into manageable dimensions.  Put in terms of artistic expression, the want of coherence between his understanding and his reason, his feeling that he was either parched or drowned, meant that he lacked the tension between form and liberation, between abandon and restraint. Coleridge knew that the power of art lay in reconciliation of these very opposites.  Margaret Fuller was commenting on the absence of this dynamic struggle in Emerson when she said: 'It is a fine day for composition, were it not in Concord.  But I trow the fates which gave this place Concord, took away the animating influences of Discord.  Life here slumbers and steals on like the river...'"
     Matthiesen goes on to say, "One weakness of [Emerson's] poems that he deplored was that they did not contain sufficient evidence of the 'polarity' of existence, of how its inevitable law is action and reaction, of how every statement contains the seed of its opposite."   But in Emerson's poem "Days", Matthieson points out, he does produce a parable that is "true to both halves of his consciousness and has set going a dynamic tension between them."
     Emerson, emerging from the age of dogmatic Puritanism threw off the strait-jacket of this prior age, and sought a new revelation in religion and philosophy.  In his search for and expression of new revelations, Emerson describes the split in his thinking:
     "The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other; one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves."
      Emerson's revelations, as expressed in his essays and in the new transcendentalism of which he was a founder, freed man from the burden of concepts of "original sin", "predestination" and "atonement" only to propose an optimistic view of man as ideal, with limitless potential,  if only he can remain solitary, free, and listening to his own thoughts without regard to tradition or society.  "As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions."
    His ideal man floats, like a helium balloon, without a string anchoring him to earth.


Sources:  American Renaissance, by F.O Matthiessen, Oxford University Press, NewYork, 1941.
 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Brooks Atkinson, Modern Library, New York,2000.