Identity and Society in American Poetry: The Romantic Tradition B ...

Post-Emersonian thinkers and artists are a special adaptation of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Where Coleridge tended to pursue a resolution between self and object, Emersonian writing seems to envision a self that is free of the empirical qualities by which it might be identified. The Emersonian figure of the poet is a mystic, essentially, who has transcended any self/object distinctions. The objectivist poetics of figures like Ezra Pound grow out of this Emersonian model. They remove the authorial presence from the poem and depict a world which is at once physical and invested with transcendental energy.

The resultant anonymity and alienation became the source of a psychological struggle for Pound which is resolved, to a great extent, by successive poets. The great American epic poems after The Cantos constitute a model of community that preserves both the transcendental ideals of Romanticism and the functional social structures of Liberalism. These postmodern poets were spurred by Pound’s failure to extend his “objective mysticism” into a plausible political model, as well as by their own struggle, parallel to Pound’s, to effect a meaningful literary “society” between themselves and the presumed reader. The most striking modern and postmodern poetic styles are a byproduct of that struggle.

Critics in the Material World

There are two sides to poetry: one that presents itself as transcendent or mystical and another that is experienced as concrete. One belongs to the poet and his or her conceits; the other is more friendly territory for the critic.

Certainly, whether one regards poetry as entirely a craft, as the Augustan poets did, or as entirely driven by Aeolian inspiration, as the Romantics and their descendants did, it is difficult to discuss inspiration cogently. No art form has delighted self-definition as poetry has, and the definitions, from Aristotle to Sidney to John Stuart Mill to Emerson, do not represent a great range of thought. If there is a difference of opinion, it concerns whether the poet or critic doing the defining tends toward the transcendental or the material. Wordsworth locates the subjective and emotional impetus for poetry as its key characteristic, but this emotion is, for him, a doorway to the great natural forces that structure reality.