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‘Line’ and ‘Round’ in Emerson's “Uriel”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hugh H. Witemeyer
Hugh H. Witemeyer*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

“Uriel” is a poetic summary of many strains of thought in Emerson's early philosophy. Most interpretations of the poem have, however, emphasized its biographical significance. Stephen E. Whicher, for instance, has used the poem to illustrate the shock felt by the sanguine transcendentalist at the unfavorable reception of his Divinity School Address. But “Uriel” is important not simply because the “stern old war-gods” who “shook their heads” may be Andrews Norton and the Harvard Divinity School faculty, or because the “seraphs” who “frowned from their myrtle-beds” were the budding young powers of New England theology, assembled in 1838 at their “holy festival.” To be sure, one of the poem's highlights is its trenchant and witty satire of what Emerson called, in his Address, “historical Christianity.” That false faith, however, was but one manifestation of a pernicious mode of perception and discourse which the author found throughout history and contemporary thought. The poem was inspired not by a local animus but by a comprehensive, “meter-making” philosophical argument. It was probably composed early in 1845, well after the immediate animosities of the controversy over the Address had fallen into perspective. From that distance, Emerson generalized the biographical incident into a clash of opposing philosophies.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 98 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 74–76. Frederic Ives Carpenter follows Whicher's suggestion, originally made in his Ph.D. thesis, in Emerson Handbook (New York, 1953), p. 57. F. O. Matthiessen's reading is similar, but he adds rightly that the “poet's role” is a subject of the poem in American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 74.

2 C. F. Strauch has established this date on the basis of manuscript evidence. See his introductory note to “Uriel” in American Literary Masters, ed. Charles R. Anderson (New York, 1965), i, 541.

3 Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision (Cambridge, Mass., 1952). See especially his discussion of “The Linear Logic,” pp. 18–23, and of circles, pp. 98–102.

4 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903–04), ix, 13, ll. 12–14. All subsequent references in the text, unless otherwise indicated, will be to volume and page numbers in this, the Centenary Edition.

5 Works, ii, 344–347. Italics are mine. For a more favorable view of Plato's “celestial geometry” as opposed to “a logic of lines and angles here below,” see “Plato: New Readings,” in Representative Men (iv, 84).

6 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston and New York, 1910), v, 310. Hereafter referred to as Journals.

7 See the account of Emerson's reception in Scotland during his 1847 lecture tour: William J. Sowder, “Emerson's Early Impact on England: A Study in British Periodicals,” PMLA, lxxvii (1962), 565–566.

8 The Rev. Dr. A. Cohen, Everyman's Talmud (London and New York, 1949), p. 52.

9 Smith, “Emerson's Problem of Vocation—A Note on ‘The American Scholar’,” New England Quarterly, ix (1939), 52–67. Smith outlines the theme of conflict between “Actor” and “Student” throughout Emerson's writings, early and late. Though biographical in origin, the theme is usually generalized by Emerson; in the case of “Uriel” this is accomplished by the allusion to Milton's odes.

10 “Shrilling from the solar course” may refer to the displacement of the Ptolemaic cosmogony by the Copernican, a development which Emerson regarded as a healthful liberation of mind and spirit from the Calvinist and Unitarian outlook. See Journals (ii, 490, and iii, 199–200), Works (x, 336), and E. W. Emerson's note to “Uriel” (ix, 408–409). The metaphysical significance of “the speeding change of water” was emphasized by Emerson at several points in an 1834 lecture entitled “Water.” See The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), i, 52, 68. See also the emblematical meaning of circles in water in the section on “Language” in Nature (Works, i, 26–27).

11 In “A Masque of Reason” (Complete Poems of Robert Frost, New York, 1949, p. 601) Job says:

Yet I suppose what seems to us confusion
Is not confusion, but the form of forms,
The serpent's tail stuck down the serpent's throat,
Which is the symbol of eternity
And also of the way all things come round,
Or of how rays return upon themselves,
To quote the greatest Western poem yet.

Frost repeated this judgment in “On Emerson,” Daedalus (Fall 1959), p. 717; reprinted in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton Konwitz and Stephen Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 16. He also echoed “Uriel” in “Build Soil—A Political Pastoral” (Complete Poems, p. 427):

We are round from the same source of roundness.
We are both round because the mind is round.
Because all reasoning is in a circle.
At least that's why the universe is round.

Reginald L. Cook reports that “in conversation he [Frost] called Emerson 'a great disturber of the peace,' and 'Uriel' a ‘bugaboo poem that is meant to scare people’ (22 Sept. 1945).” See “Emerson and Frost: A Parallel of Seers,” New England Quarterly, xxxiii (June 1958), 215.