| Emersonian vision often orients itself toward the empty space of the ocean-horizon. Human power is useless before that vista—but the very futility of the senses' encounter with infinity gives rise to intense philosophical poetry in the U.S. from the time of Emily Dickinson through the end of the twentieth century. The present study highlights the theological valence of oceanic sight by attending to the problems involved in representing infinity, a category that is incommensurate with the bodily scale of sensory knowledge. The objects of study are poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, although in discerning an underappreciated ‘lyric Emersonianism’ the essay contributes to U.S. literary studies generally. The argument qualifies the well-established triumphal and pragmatic interpretations of Ralph Waldo Emerson's sensory philosophy, and complements the familiar Emerson of the frontier—seen through the lenses of Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Wallace Stevens—by construing one strand of Emerson's philosophy as rigorously Dickinsonian. Standing in a “shoreline” space, the writer of infinity envisions no narrative progress: she simply poises her limited selfhood against the vastness her imagination constructs. In keeping with the static quality of this tableau, the method of the thesis emphasizes the single poem as the unit of meaning. After initial consideration of the opposed central figures of the house and the ocean, intensive analyses of poems are employed to trace the concern with the incommensurable through a distinctive strain of Emersonian poetry extending through the twentieth century. An epilogue places this approach to lyric interpretation in a broader philosophical context: poetic incommensurability evokes the cognitive schema of Søren Kierkegaard. G. W. F. Hegel's temporal philosophy dictates the premises of most current literary interpretation, but Kierkegaard's paradoxical epistemology is better suited to the static Dickinsonian poetic of agony. |
