Richard Poirier
WORLDS OF STYLE
The most interesting American books are an image of the
creation of America itself, of the effort, in the words of Emerson's
Orphic poet, to "build therefore your own world." American writers
who make this effort are, in one sense, only doing what writers,
especially in the romantic tradition, have always done. To "enclose"
the world, as Emerson puts it, so that "time and space, liberty and
necessity, are left at large no longer," is to do no more in Concord
than has already been done in Coleridge's lime tree bower. But such
images have a recognizable uniqueness when they occur in American
books. They are bathed in the myths of American history; they carry
the metaphoric burden of a great dream of freedom-of the expansion
of national consciousness into the vast spaces of a continent and the
absorption of those spaces into ourselves. Expansive characters in
Cooper or Emerson, Melville, James or Fitzgerald are thus convinced
as
if
by history of the practical possibility of enclosing the world in
their imaginations. It is as if the conventions of English romantic
poetry could in America take on the life of prose, assume a reality
that even history might recognize and that novels could report as
news. Let us for the moment assume with Hegel that "freedom" is
a creation not of political institutions but of consciousness, that free–
dom is that reality which the consciousness creates for itself. The
assumption makes it more understandable that the creation of America
out of a continental vastness
is
to some degree synonymous in the
imagination with the creation of freedom, of an open space made
free, once savagery has been dislodged, for some unexampled expan–
sion of higher human consciousness.
I shall accordingly treat books and paragraphs of books as scale
Copyright
©
1966 by Richard Poirier. From
A World Elsewhere.
