Emerson seems to be the quintessential dead white male. Usually the trick to coming to terms with DWMs is to forget the serious, respectable, prosperous portraits of them painted when they were in their fifties or sixties and try to imagine what they were like when they were just getting started with their creative work and were disreputable bums wasting their time scribbling or painting instead of getting a steady job and becoming respectable citizens.

I think of Beethoven and Mozart as being more like the Beatles than like Phillip Glass. Ludwig and Amadeus were trying to blow people's minds by inventing new tricks that no respectable composer would have had anything to do with.

I think of Shakespeare as being something like Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg or even a creator of TV sitcoms. His primary concern was to fill his theatre and pay the rent.

I think of Dickens as being the first really successful pulp fiction writer. A lot more like Frederick Pohl or Sue Grafton than William Gaddis or J.D. Salinger. (I'm talking about the way I think of him as a person, not the quality of his writing.)

But with Emerson.... It seems to me that the guy was well on his way to being a Dead White Male even when he was still alive. He should have taken his own words to heart and livened up his own writing some. I don't think anyone ever found in Emerson ``A thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or animal it has an architecture of its own.''

What you find in Emerson are endless generalities, one abstract noun after another.

I have to give him credit, though. Read any of his essays and your first impression is, ``Boy, this guy is really profound!''

Did you ever notice that one almost never finds anything in an Emerson essay that one disagrees with? You read him and think, ``Yes, this is what I've always believed, but I never found it put in words before.'' He really did have a genius for taking what everybody knows and making it sound profound.

I do like his little dig at the beginning, though, pointing out that people who make a profession out of the appreciation of some form of beauty almost never have beautiful souls themselves. They may be experts on Blake or Thoreau or Rilke or François Truffaut or Bob Dylan or whoever, but somehow they seem to have missed the real message of the work.

But of course! If the work had had its intended impact on them, they would have dropped out of graduate school and would never have become experts.

I have to wonder whether Emerson had ever met any real poets. I think he formed his ideas of poets from looking at the portraits on the back covers of books by writers who were already dead white males in 1840.

The best point Emerson makes, in my opinion, is the fact that symbols and vivid ways of expressing things are something that everyone seems to value, whatever their opinion may be of ``poetry.'' This seemed to me to be more or less what Sir Philip Sidney was saying as well.

Whether it's a conversation in a bar, or people commenting on a movie they've seen, a particularly fine way of expressing something will always attract people's attention.

I'm reminded of an experience I once had in a bar when a old guy remarked that I seemed to be an especially agreeable person. My response was, ``In my experience, it never pays to argue with drunks.'' And when he indignantly said, ``I'm not drunk,'' I responded,

``As to that, I couldn't say, since, never having seen you sober, I have no standard of comparison.''

After a minute, he asked me to repeat my comment, and I was momentarily afraid he might get angry or even hit me. But instead, he said, ``You have a really good way of saying things. 'Standard of comparison.' I really like that. You must be a writer or something.''

At the beginning of his essay, Emerson says that the virtue of poets is that they can put into words those deep feelings which we all have, but which most of us are incapable of expressing. ``I know not how it is that we need an interpretor, but the great majority of men ... cannot report that conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth and water. [But] too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation that which had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses(?) have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compell the reproduction of themselves in speech'' (or, for that matter, in the form of a visual representation or music).

What's most interesting to me in this passage is what Emerson takes for granted. Namely, the fact that there's some impulse in us that often prevents us from being satisfied with our experience of the world (``nature,'' Emerson would say, but the experiences I myself value more often have to do with cities and interactions between people), and which somehow makes us feel the need to make this experience our own by representing it in artistic form.

This goes back to the question asked on the first day of class: ``What is it that makes us [want to] write?'' For me, part of it is this desire to put into written form experiences that have been deeply meaningful to me. And the other part of it, for me, is the desire to create experiences/adventures/worlds that I have never actually known, but have always wanted to know.

I was in high school in the late Fifties. At that time, the world seemed to care about literature, and ideas, and philosophy. I learned about Existentialism, albeit superficially, from Time Magazine. Later on, the public imagination was captured by Jack Kerouac and the Beats. For a few brief years then, people actually cared passionately about poetry. They thought that by writing poetry they were doing something important, something which would have an impact on the world.

And the same thing was true in the visual arts. To be sure, painters in those days hoped to eventually become successful and make money from their art. But success was a secondary consideration. The primary goal of most painters in those days, and of most writers, and of many jazz musicians, was to create great art that would last over time.

There's a book by Russell Jacobi called The Last Intellectuals which talks about the way attitudes have changed since those days, although Jacobi is really more concerned with criticism and philosophy and history and economics than art.

But I don't know to what extent it's true that we don't take ideas and art as seriously now as we did forty years ago, and to what extent it's just that creative energy has just moved off into different directions. In the early Sixties, the folk music scene became important. It certainly didn't have a lot of intellectual depth, but there were a few people who used pseudo-folk music as a way of saying things that were important. Bob Dylan is the main writer whose work survives today. Then there was the incredible artistic explosion of rock, which in my opinion (for what it's worth) was at least as musically significant as Beethoven was in his day. And in literature, the ``new wave'' brought literary values, and the value of literary experimentation, into science fiction.

And then in the Seventies the major creative energy went into filmmaking, with directors like Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and many important films made by lesser known directors. And in the Nineties, new technology made it possible for a new wave of directors to make very interesting films on a very low budget.

Cinema has given us an entirely new form or artistic expression: an expression based on motion. (Dance and live theatre involved movement, but they are not capable of playing with images in motion.) We're only now in the process of discovering the syntax of visual language. Television commercials and MTV have actually gone much further in exploring this language than feature films have, and in particular have learned to do successfully what the Surrealists in the Twenties and Thirties were only partially successful at.

It's hard for those of us who are so verbally oriented to judge the value of thoughts expressed in visual language. Certainly images in motion can have a powerful emotional impact. But can they have the same sorts of profound meanings we expect from literature?

One doesn't have to capture the popular imagination to be doing important art, of course. Time Magazine never wrote about Emily Dickinson or Vincent Van Gogh in their time. But I wonder about the intentions of contemporary poets. What do they hope to accomplish by their poetry? Do they believe that poetry is important to the world in the way that Emerson and Sir Philip Sidney believed it is?

I hope that maybe in this course I'll get an answer to this question.

 
-- Lee
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A good deal of the strategy of teaching is rhetorical strategy, choosing words and images with great care in order to evoke the response: ``I never thought of it that way before,'' or ``Now that you put it that way, I can see it.'' What distinguishes, not simply the epigram, but profundity itself from platitude is very frequently rhetorical wit. In fact, it may be doubted whether we ever really call an idea profound unless we are pleased with the wit of its expression.     -- Northrop Frye