THE INTELLECTUALS' TRADITION
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in later years he turned upon New England, the seat of his own
cultural development, to cast a loving eye on the turbulent settle–
ments of the West, where he found the dawn of our native genius.
No wonder, then, that the entire tendency, of which Emerson was,
perhaps, the most representative figure, was soon reabsorbed, in
the main, by the life and philosophy of the general mass, whose
premises it accepted, and to whom it made its prime appeal.
This, in essence, is the story of American letters: momentary
efforts by solitary writers or by intellectual groups to differentiate
themselves and to set a new current in motion, with the inevitable
petering out, and the necessity for a fresh start over again. Hence
our unusual number of literary sports. By the time Whitman, for
example, was ready to affirm again the democratic ethos and the
frontier excitements of the new cities, he had to start from scratch,
with the result that his vision was largely a matter of itemized
experience, devoid of those central symbols and values that are
handed down by a creative tradition. The case of Poe is even more
striking: he was the first truly bohemian writer in America (if we
except the peculiar rustic bohemianism of Thoreau), and through–
out his life practically the only one. Hence he lacked those profes–
sional resources of esthetic and social subversion that are normally
provided by an organized bohemia. In only a negative, escapist
sense, did his poetry have a characteristically bohemian content;
although it gave the lead to Baudelaire, his poetry fell short of
the programmatic experimentalism of his French contemporaries;
even his essays, as Henry James once remarked, were excessively
amateurish and provincial; and his verse constantly tended, in an
over-felicitous fashion, toward a lovelorn provincialism. What
saved Poe, I suppose, was a happy coincidence of talent, morbid–
ity, and the capacity for absorbing those literary strains that
served the needs of his sensibility.
Not until the last two or three decades did any literary
"schools," promoted by an active literary intelligentsia, make their
appearance here. But their inspiration was largely European, and,
in a basic sense, they never really succeeded in lifting themselves
above the conceptual plane of American writing as a whole. Con–
sider the Marxist or proletarian school; perhaps the most confident,
aggressive, and most thoroughly international of recent trends.
One might have expected that a movement so completely regulated
by an organized body of left-wing intellectuals, committed to an
