writes runs a boundless optimism about the capabilities of the individual man, if he will only do what he knows is right for him," and specifically noting that what was to be transcended was what was felt to be the principal American preoccupation of the day, making and spending money (Schorer, et al. 326). While Transcendentalism is identified as a strand of thought consistent with Romanticism, Emerson's work does not reflect an omnivorous acceptance of intuition as the only path to knowledge or a satisfied life. In this regard, Gilman characterizes Emerson's life as "in some ways the eternal romantic's pursuit of the unattainable, the pursuit of a beauty which would immediately escape you if you tried to lay your hands on it" (Gilman xiv). This argues ambivalence toward the difference between the potential and actual, even in the face of what Schorer, et al., characterize as Emerson's preference for "the dictates of the heart over the lessons of the mind" (Schorer, et al. 326). Indeed, the philosopher William James, something of a literary protTgT of Emerson's, appears to have been drawn to Emerson's line of thought to the degree Emerson "divided" himself from the "unself-critical solemnity" of the Concord School, which in James's view comprised "a series of 'experiments in the void,' unaware of the actual complications of life" (Perry 64). To put it another way, the moral content of Transcendentalism appears to have been as important to Emerson as the fact of transcendence itself.
A strategy of or more exactly attitude toward transcendence can be found in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," but its philosophical affinities with Emerson's thought can be seen principally by negative example. What Poe and Emerson share is an apparent intention to make philosophical points; however, whereas the evidence of Emerson's work is an intention to cultivate and encourage a rather gentle, optimistic habit of mind, the evidence of Poe's work i...