Symbolism in Poe and Emerson

Transcendentalism is the name given to a personalist metaphysics associated with the so-called Concord School of Philosophy, which articulated a recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses. In the transcendentalist view, there are certain laws of religion and metaphysics in the spiritual world that can be known even though not directly experienced. Because the mind makes intuitions, leaping from the material to the spiritual world, observation is a means by which one can partake of the universe. Transcendentalist intuition can take a variety of forms. For example, in the essay "Nature," Emerson speaks of intuition in terms of beauty and emotion that only the natural world can inspire. Indeed, Nature is said to symbolize the human spirit (Emerson, "Nature" 534). Transcendentalist thought in Emerson's work entails a natural religious morality, wherein a moral order in general and personal habits of self-control in particular are accepted as a matter of course. In the poem "Each and All," the cosmic order is found through the pat

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lled New Age philosophy as solipsistic, or tending toward self-absorption. In this connection, Toolan characterizes the determined but inchoate search for New Age cosmic harmony as "a whiff of Ralph Waldo Emerson," who "turned radically individualistic, anti-institutional and was virtually blind to evil, pain, and death" (Toolan 377). Toolan sees New Age spirituality as solipsistic because it slips into self-absorption, with such visionary energy as it may have being "unsupported by any institutional means of realization, [and] . . . drained away by the individualistic habit of turning everything into a consumer item for the exclusive benefit of the omnivorous self" (Toolan 377). The environment that Prospero creates is very much individualistic to the degree it reflects his bizarre tastes. It is also in its very conceptualization consumerist and exclusive, turning the court upon itself and sealing the court away--unsuccessfully, as things turn out--from the world at large. Prospero is described as happy, dauntless, and sagacious, although the last-named term is plainly ironic. For Prospero's presumably rational motives in "defiantly" responding to fear of death themselves involve a betrayal of human rationality: "the external wor
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Approximate Word count = 3238
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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