랄프 왈도 에머슨(Ralph Waldo Emerson)과 금욕주의적 서사시(the Stoical Epic)

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Stoical Epic

&nbsp;&nbsp;Ralph Waldo Emerson is a literary thinker and poet who holds a unique position in the discussion of the American epic. Yet because of his intellectual capacity shown in many of his essays, Emerson has been viewed as more a literary thinker who provided poetic inspiration to Whitman than an authentic American bard who created original epic poetry. Such approach to Emerson&quot;s literary position seems to be closely related to two of the main assumptions concerning the &quot;American&quot; epic. Critics often find that Emerson&quot;s poetry is not original enough to be called a distinctively &quot;American&quot; epic because he contains his creative spirit in a conventional poetic form and prosody. Secondly, they often point out that Emerson&quot;s highly intellectual poetics is too hard and too individualistic to offer a common poetic ground on which the bard and the masses of common people can communicate each other.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Therefore, in this paper I&quot;d like to re-examine Emerson&quot;s transcendental views of one&quot;s self and explore the possibility to consider Emerson a paterfamilias of another American epic tradition. For Emerson&quot;s stoical ethos of "Obey thyself"not only laid the foundation of a quintessentially American quest for the spiritual self but also continues to be re-interpreted by modem writers. In detail, I will first review a familiar set of premises Emerson asserts concerning the relationships among Man, Nature, and God, and then foreground how his transcendentalism shapes a sacerdotal message and rhetoric of the American stoical epic. By re-interpreting Emerson&quot;s poetry, which has been separately studied as transcendental poetry, in the context of the American epic, I hope that Emerson&quot;s bardic status will be truly appreciated and that the boundary of the American epic will be expanded inside and out.