랄프 왈도 에머슨과 금욕주의적 서사시

Abstract

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a literary thinker and poet who holds a unique position in the discussion of the American epic. Yet because of his intellectual capacity shown in many of his essays, Emerson has been viewed as more a literary thinker who provided poetic inspiration to Whitman than an authentic American bard who created original epic poetry. Such approach to Emerson’s literary position seems to be closely related to two of the main assumptions concerning the ‘American’ epic. Critics often find that Emerson’s poetry is not original enough to be called a distinctively ‘American’ epic because he contains his creative spirit in a conventional poetic form and prosody. Secondly, they often point out that Emerson’s highly intellectual poetics is too hard and too individualistic to offer a common poetic ground on which the bard and the masses of common people can communicate each other.Therefore, in this paper I'd like to re-examine Emerson’s transcendental views of one's self and explore the possibility to consider Emerson a paterfamilias of another American epic tradition. For Emerson’s stoical ethos of “Obey thyself”not only laid the foundation of a quintessentially American quest for the spiritual self but also continues to be re-interpreted by modern writers. In detail, I will first review a familiar set of premises Emerson asserts concerning the relationships among Man, Nature, and God, and then foreground how his transcendentalism shapes a sacerdotal message and rhetoric of the American stoical epic. By re-interpreting Emerson’s poetry, which has been separately studied as transcendental poetry, in the context of the American epic, I hope that Emerson's bardic status will be truly appreciated and that the boundary of the American epic will be expanded inside and out.