Readings in the (un)divided self: Edwards, Emerson, Frost and Cummings.

Abstract

In this thesis I have tried to evaluate the literary affiliation shared by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Edwards, Robert Frost and E. E. Cummings. In his ethics of mental self-reliance Emerson recapitulates some of Edwards's Puritan ideas on the relation of self to reality. The tension that emerges as the self-relying/self-denying dialectic in Emerson's writing is an extension of Edwards's prescriptions to try to attain contact with the immanent presence of divinity in the individual soul. This dualism of nature and consciousness and the self's attempts to overcome it become the fissure in the foundations of American individualism laid by Emerson and his principal New England forbear. The intellectual inheritance received by Frost and Cummings is thus ambiguous between transcendental idealism and a tough-minded realism: their struggle with the question of causality gives way to existential concerns. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)