Blowing Clover, Falling Rain: A Theological Commentary on the Poetic Canon of the American Religion

By W. Travis Helms and Malcolm Guite

The field of theopoetics explores the ways in which we "make God" (present)--particularly through language. This book explores questions of theopoetics as they relate to the central poetry of the American Sublime. It offers a fresh, theological engagement with what literary critic Harold Bloom terms the American religion (transcendentalism: Emerson's homespun mysticism). Specifically, it seeks to rehabilitate Emerson's concept of self-reliance from the charge of gross egoism, by situating it in the context of normative mysticisms Eastern and Western. It undertakes a more poetic approach to reading theologically-inflected poetry, by exegeting four poets collectively constituting Bloom's American religious "canon": Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. It utilizes a modified version of the ancient fourfold allegorical mode of reading Scripture, to draw out theological dimensions of four quintessential texts (Nature, "Song of Myself," "Sunday Morning," "Lachrymae Christi"), in order to offer a more imaginative way of reading imaginative writing. Building on Emerson's contention, "just as there is creative writing, there is creative reading," and Bloom's claim, "a theory of poetry . . . must be poetry, before it can be of any use in interpreting poems," it demonstrates the unique, viable ways in which poems are able to "do" theology--and perform or embody theopoetic truths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Nov 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725258426

W. Travis Helms

Travis Helms serves as priest to the Episcopal Student Center at the University of Texas. He is also the founder and curator of LOGOS Poetry Collective, a liturgically-inflected reading series that congregates in east Austin. His poetry and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Book 2.0, North America Review, New Haven Review, and Noesis. He was the inaugural William W. Cook Frost Place Fellow, and winner of the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize.

Book preview

Opening the American Religious Canon

The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also quite separate and solitary, that is, a free God or God of freedom.

—Bloom, American Religion

¹

In the context of this study, the phrase American Religion is intended as a technical term. According to Harold Bloom’s eponymous book on the subject, the term indicates a unique form of spirituality native to what the literary scholar calls (troping on the title of a poem by D. H. Lawrence) the Evening Land. According to Bloom, domestic forms of both American denominational Christianity and Sublime poetry have their origin in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson—specifically, in the intuitive forms of knowing and expressing that ground the poet-essayist’s Transcendental philosophy. Defining this distinctive, indigenous strain of spiritual understanding and expression (in contrast to those of traditional Western European Christianity) as a sort of proto-gnosticism inaugurated by Emerson, Bloom explains, "Awareness, centered on the self, is faith for the American." Appropriating his conceptual denomination of gnosis from the third-century heterodox movement, Bloom explains, Gnosticism was (and is) a kind of information theory.² What does such a theory look like in practice and application?

Hermetic in its character and hermeneutic in its procedure, the American Religious poet’s Intuition or Soul (both technical terms for Emerson) "does not believe or trust, it knows, though it always wants to know yet more."³ This unique and vigorous mode of knowing, according to Bloom—which originates with Emerson, and then becomes incorporated into the strong series of poets who comprise his American Religious progeny—is necessarily undertaken in solitude. Even so, the individualized process always opens into a broader, democratic form of soteriology-qua-knowing—an option of health and salvation via knowledge of, rather than faith in—that is universally available to all who choose it.

As a self-described work of religious criticism, American Religion documents the rise of this gnosis from its origins in Emerson, and the Enthusiasm of the Cane Ridge Revival during the Second Great Awakening (1801), to its varied expression in indigenous denominational traditions (Pentecostalism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Mormonism, Christian Science, Southern Baptist Convention, Jehovah’s Witness), and later flourishing in the poetry of the American Sublime. Bloom asserts that while the American Religion patently characterizes these denominations, it also extends to each citizen, generally. If we are Americans, Bloom claims, then to some degree we share in the American Religion, however unknowingly or unwittingly. Since, according to Bloom, the American Religion originates in Emerson, it shares the elements and dynamics of the poet-essayist’s thought. Bloom’s prefatory delineation of applied Emersonianism therefore serves as a helpful introduction to the American Religion’s embedded theology, particularly in its emphasis on transcendental knowing. Here is Bloom’s diagnosis, set as high rhetorical prescription:

Freedom, in the context of the American Religion, means being alone with God or with Jesus, the American God or the American Christ. In social reality, this translates as solitude, as least in the inmost sense. The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also quite separate and solitary, that is, a free God or God of freedom. What makes it possible for the self and God to commune so freely is that the self already is of God; unlike body and even soul, the American self is no part of the Creation, or of evolution through the ages. The American self is not the Adam of Genesis but is a more primordial Adam, a Man before there were men or women. Higher and earlier than the angels, this true Adam is as old as God, older than the Bible, and is free of time, unstained by mortality.⁴

This experience of knowing, animated by a strong pneumatological element, is the spiritual core of Emersonian Transcendentalism, and undergirds the American Religion doctrinally. Some scholars have interpreted Emerson’s Transcendental optimism as a vitalistic assertion against the somewhat denigrating anthropology transmitted from Puritanical strains ingrained within the country’s religious heritage.⁵ Whatever the source, contrary to belief-based structures of normative Western Christianity, knowledge of the Self’s ultimate reality—the presence of the Divine within—provides a vitalizing core, or animating nexus, around which Emerson’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics connect and cohere. Emerson’s fundamental insight, according to Bloom, is that "the God of the American Religion is an experiential God, so radically within our own being as to become a virtual identity with what is most authentic (oldest and best) in the self.⁶ Parsing what Emerson termed the doctrine of the Soul,⁷ Bloom describes the central credo of the American Religion as, the origin of the occult self, the saved element in one’s being, goes back beyond nature to God, beyond the Creation to the Creator."⁸

For all of its emphasis on transcendental knowledge of the Self, however, Emersonianism is nevertheless resolutely pragmatic in its aim. In this exploration, the term pragmatic refers to Emerson’s proto-pragmatism in the sense Bloom employs—namely, as an applied metaphysics qua ethics: the transcendent Self’s capacity for knowledge and action.⁹ Emerson gave his own definition of pragmatism in the central essay Self-Reliance, which Bloom often cites. Emerson writes:

Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is.¹⁰

Like many of the theological and philosophical traditions on which he draws, Emerson values knowledge for salutary or salvific ends (the etymology of these words being cognate).¹¹ Emersonianism, like the American Religion, is unequivocally oriented toward a knowledge that is also liberation—a freedom attained through awareness of the Self as part or particle of God.¹²

Following Emerson, Bloom describes the perpetual, salvific hopefulness that so indelibly characterizes American Religious thought as the Optative mood,¹³ and summarizes thus: the American finds fault with nature, time, time, and history, but neither with God nor with herself or himself. . . . It keeps us a republic of hope, at least in pure good theory.¹⁴ The great tension throughout Emerson’s career is between this insistent optimism and a clear-eyed acknowledgment of limitation and contingency. Like many thinkers within Hindu Vedantic, Christian Mystical, and Neoplatonic traditions, Emerson was ever concerned with the problem of unity and diversity—the reconciliation of the many and the one. An understanding of Emerson’s singular response to this inquiry will illuminate the theological intelligibility, and practicability, of both Emerson’s thinking and the American Religion’s central forms of poetic gnosis.

In this study, I build upon Bloom’s reading of Emersonianism and the American Religion, but also extend and challenge it in significant ways. For, although I agree with Bloom’s contention that Emerson inaugurates a unique form of spiritual thinking that deeply influences an entire school of American Religious poetry, I also believe that Bloom omits many orthodox theological strains that significantly inform the work of Emerson and the poets writing after him. By tracing analogues between Emerson’s work (and that of three poets writing in his mode) and texts of normative mysticisms Eastern and Western, this study will offer a fuller, more comprehensive appreciation of theological dimensions within the poetic canon of the American Religion.

Emersonianism and Mysticism: Analogues Eastern and Western

Throughout the intricate permutations of his oeuvre, Bloom returns repeatedly upon Emerson—who, according to Bloomian influence theory, definitively centers the American Religious canon. Of Bloom’s numerous iterations of Emersonian preeminence, the chapter Emerson: The American Religion in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982) may be the definitive, for its polish and perspicuity. The fourth and culminating tract in the series of highly technical exercises in antithetical criticism initiated by The Anxiety of Influence (1971), Agon presents Bloom’s understanding of Emersonian gnosis at its most incisive and concise. The chapter’s opening paragraph issues a somewhat audacious claim: The mind of Emerson is the mind of America, for worse and for glory, and the central concern of that mind was the American religion [sic], which most memorably was named ‘self-reliance’ [sic].¹⁵ Drawing a crucial distinction, Bloom elaborates, "It is self-reliance as opposed to God-reliance, though Emerson thought the two were the same." The summation of Emerson’s pneumatology that then follows is worth considering in full. Bloom cites Emerson, and then offers commentary on the dominant motif in the American Religious progenitor’s thought:

Reliance is not of the essence, but the Emersonian self is: To talk of reliance is a poor and external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is. What works and is is the stranger god, or even alien god, within. Within? Deeper than the psyche is the pneuma, the spark, the uncreated self, distinct from the soul that God (or Demiurge) created, Self-reliance, in Emerson as in Meister Eckhart or in Valentinus the Gnostic, is the religion that celebrates and reveres what in the self is before the Creation, a whatness which from the perspective of religious orthodoxy can only be the primal Abyss.¹⁶

Is the comparison with Valentinus (a source Emerson himself never actually read) valid? Bloom’s identification of analogues such as Meister Eckhart seems more apposite. For indeed, references to orthodox mysticism preponderate in Emerson’s published work and private papers, especially the early essays. Emerson draws upon a variety of theological experiences to weave the homespun mysticism that is Transcendentalism: the raw fabric of the American Religion. The commentaries of this book (chapters 1–4) will trace affinities of Emerson’s colloquialized American Religious theology (and iterations it receives in the American Religious poetry Emersonianism engenders) with not only Christian mystics such as Eckhart, but also with crucial Eastern influences that scholarship has delineated. The substantive or thematic burden of this dissertation will be to demonstrate that, far from being a gross form of solipsism—one last glorious gasp of the Egotistical Sublime¹⁷—the Self-Reliance of Emersonianism, and the mode of American Religious knowing and writing generated thereof, accords, in identity and application, with the thought and practice of orthodox mystical traditions, Eastern and Western.

What we read in the quotation above is a description not only of the American Religion but also of the American Sublime. Bloom devotes an early chapter of The Anatomy of Influence (2011), a reprisal of his entire critical theory, to the concept of the Sublime. Beginning with Longinus’s notion that a sublime poem transports and elevates, allowing the author’s ‘nobility’ of mind to enlarge its reader as well, Bloom asserts, reading a sublime poet . . . we experience something akin to authorship. He then evokes a favorite Paterian description of Romanticism as the adding of beauty to strangeness . . . the mark of sublime literature.¹⁸ This description particularly resonates with Emerson’s own aesthetic views. Consider, for instance, the opening passage of Self-Reliance, which contains the sentence, In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.¹⁹ The notion of the Sublime as an aesthetic category will re-emerge as a leitmotif throughout this study. At present, let us note its centrality to Bloom’s and Emerson’s thought, and continue our consideration of Bloom’s reading of Emerson.

Bloom frequently stresses the literality of the American Religion. The idea that Emerson proposed a serviceable poetic scripture for the nation in its nascence—as a pragmatic program for transcendence—is attested to by scholarship, and is indeed the premise from which scholarly examinations of Emerson’s Eastern analogues have been made to date. In his pioneering American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, for example, Arthur Versluis speaks of Emersonianism as the earliest American instance of a kind of literary religion.²⁰ Such a definition accords with Bloom’s conception of the American Religion and its poetic canon, and helpfully outlines not only the inherently textual elements of Emerson’s project, but also its theological ones. Though we will explore the affinities between Emersonianism and Vedanta at length in chapter 1, a brief collation of a few conceptual correspondences between the two modes will underscore their strong affinity. Even drawing simply on titles of Emerson’s essays, one can assemble the rudiments of a rich parallel concordance. Consider, for example, the following resonances: Self-reliance and Ātman, The Oversoul and Brahman, the two-part Compensation/Spiritual Laws and karma.²¹

Emerson read as widely as he could in a variety of spiritual traditions. Essentially assimilative and syncretic in his method, Emerson was less interested in systematically working through specific theological convictions or philosophical postulations than in reworking, from the vast stores of literature he encountered, insights that could be put to use in his own writing. As our close reading will show, Emerson’s chief achievement, and most lasting theological contribution, was to translate the perennial wisdom of the world’s scriptural traditions into a distinctive, influential American grammar and idiom. I read for the lustres is an Emersonian dictum Bloom is fond of quoting. The essay in which this adage is given, the early Nominalist and Realist, continues with a formulation evocative of Bloom’s own hermeneutic method:

I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. ‘Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself.²²

Not only for the lustres Emerson exudes, but also the wisdom he embodies, Bloom famously classifies (or, exegetes) the essayist as a Wisdom Writer, in the manner of the Biblical writers Qoheleth or the anonymous author(s) of The Book of Proverbs—and identifies his literary progeny as the American Religion’s poet-priests. Perhaps even more audaciously, Bloom frequently casts Emerson into a prophetic role, anticipating (explicitly in essays like The Poet) the arrival of an American Religious bard and even messiah—a prophecy that Walt Whitman ostensibly fulfills.

In my own reading of these American Religious poets, I intend, employing Bloom as my conceptual and methodological starting point, to extend these genre formulations to the poets he identifies as writing most strongly in an Emersonian/American Sublime mode—and moreover, to nuance the vocational role and correlative aesthetic stance of each. Since Bloom himself posits a literary canon of foundational texts for the American Religion, I will provide readings of the central post-Emersonian poets in a manner corresponding to their dominant roles within that canon. Specifically, I will apply the following formulations:

I.Ralph Waldo Emerson as New Elijah/John the Baptist:Prophetic Forerunner of the American Religious Mode.

II.Walt Whitman as Parabolic Preacher: Messianic Poet-Priest of the American Religion.

III.Wallace Stevens as Meditative Logician:Pauline Systematizer of American Religious Theology.

IV.Hart Crane as Ecstatic Visionary: Apocalyptic Seer of the American Religion/American Sublime.

By proposing the above formulations, I do not intend to claim the same level of canonical authority for these poets as for sacred scripture. That is to say, I do not mean to suggest (to take one example) that Wallace Stevens necessarily engages Pauline texts or themes. Rather, I intend to build on Bloom’s own creative appropriation of traditional notions of canonicity to draw out and emphasize the theological dimensions within these ostensibly secular texts in a sort of ludic parallel. The method I am about to outline, which draws upon Bloomian, Emersonian and other methods of creative reading, will allow me to demonstrate how these poets, while not writing within the norms of Christian scriptural and theological traditions, may profitably illuminate aspects of them. However, before proceeding to more detailed explications of the ways in which these poets can conceivably be understood as collectively constituting a pragmatic theopoetic canon for the American Religion, the very question of canonicity and scriptural authority must be addressed.

In An Elegy for the Canon, the introductory chapter to his monumental, somewhat controversial survey, The Western Canon (1994), Bloom claims that The Canon, once we view it as the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written, and forget the canon as a list of books for required study, will be seen as identical with the literary Art of Memory, not with the religious sense of canon.²³ Can one dispense, however, with the notion of religion in any discussion of canonicity? In his Preface and Prelude, Bloom himself acknowledges the religious origins of our notion of canonicity. Asking where did the idea of conceiving a literary work that the world would not let die come from? he notes, It was not attached to the Scriptures by the Hebrews, who spoke of canon writings as those that polluted the hands that touched them, presumably because mortal hands were not fit to hold sacred writings. Pressing toward more literary concerns, Bloom explains, secular canon, with the word meaning a category of approved authors, does not actually begin until the middle of the eighteenth century, during the literary period of Sensibility, Sentimentality, and the Sublime. We will come shortly to consider how the ideas of one writer of that period, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, accord with Bloom’s notions of canonicity. Most basically, Bloom says, we posses the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. Given this predicament, perpetually compounding, where is guidance to be found? Bloom offers a single, very practicable and useful recommendation: one ancient test remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify.²⁴ Bloom’s conception of canonicity is therefore essentially pragmatic—and ultimately calibrated by the concerns of pedagogy.

The history of the formation of the Biblical Canon is a lengthy and complex one. I will confine my survey here to the canonization of the Christian New Testament,²⁵ as it serves as a fitting analogue to Bloom’s codification of American Religious poetry. In his introduction to The New Testament Canon in The Cambridge History of the Bible, R. M. Grant explains, The books rejected from the Canon were rejected because they seemed to conflict with what the acceptable books taught. Selection thus involved not only comparison among other books but also compared with a norm viewed as relatively fixed.²⁶ Since that norm was established almost solely upon the early authoritative sources of dogma and practice, namely the Apostles, it may be said that, respecting the formation of an American Religious poetic canon, inclusion must be determined according to a text’s consonance with the theological orthodoxy inaugurated by the tradition’s authoritative forbear(s)—namely, within the Bloomian account we have been tracing, Emerson.

The term canon, from the Greek κανών for rule,²⁷ came to describe the standard of orthodoxy by which given texts were judged as fit for inclusion in, or exclusion from, a body of communal scripture. In his chapter in the Cambridge History, The New Testament in the Making, C. F. Evans further underscores the practical, indeed pedagogical, impetus behind the process of canonization. He asserts, the subsequent history and use of the New Testament writings after their publication were governed less by the circumstances and needs of their several and varied origins than by the circumstances and needs of the churches of the second century. Evans also stresses the merits of the historical critical method, in so far as it legitimately brings the light the variety of the New Testament documents, of their backgrounds, intentions, sources and strata, as the starting point for a proper exegesis of them.²⁸ To summarize, Evans emphasizes utilitarian dimensions motivating the process of canon formation, while simultaneously insisting upon the need for elucidating the conceptual constituents of any given text to be incorporated into a canon—those concepts indeed being the rule according to which orthodoxy is established.

In seeking to form an American Religious canon of poetry, then, we must understand both the orthodoxy that defines and animates this coherent tradition and mode of knowing; and also establish both why and how these texts, specifically, possess significance and utility for a community of readers. In this commentary, I hope to achieve the former through a close study of the original contextures defining Emersonianism, and the latter by demonstrating the ways in which—and means by which—the iterations of such theological knowing within the central poems of the American Religion hold spiritual significance for adherents to this mode of belief and thought.

Bloom’s approach, throughout his own exercise in canonicity, is palpably Emersonian: consistently, he seeks to choose books that work. His criteria for inclusion are sublimity and representative nature—standards reasonably appropriate (and appropriable) for the forming of a literary canon like that of the American Religion. Essentially, Bloom offers a principle of selection governed by the autonomy of the aesthetic, a criterion that grants any strong imaginative work potential eligibility for inclusion. Bloom explains, Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism and is founded upon a reading that clears space for the self, or that so works as to reopen old works to our fresh sufferings. The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yields to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows HOW to borrow. Ultimately, therefore, Bloom identifies the Canon (an achieved anxiety) with the notion of Influence. Tradition, Bloom writes, is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion. Although a sense of survival anxiety does not seem to manifest noticeably within the body of Emerson’s writing, the element of aspiration is certainly there—and the essayist’s visionary optimism does seem to substantiate Bloom’s assertion that the anxiety of influence cripples weaker talents but stimulates the canonical genius.²⁹ Anxious or not, Emerson’s own genius was certainly stimulated by intense reading in the tradition and canon of theological sources the essayist received. Indeed, without his receptivity to such influx, it is uncertain whether the varieties of American Religious experience now extant would have emerged.

One of Emerson’s most crucial influences was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is through Coleridgean mediations of German Idealism, with their strong emphasis on a lived hermeneutic—on reading the Self and the world as text—that Emerson developed many of his own epistemological theories. Indeed, Coleridge’s own writings on scriptural authority help illuminate a sense of the ways in which any ostensibly secular texts, such as those constituting the American Religious poetic mode inaugurated by Emerson, nonetheless possess both coherence and cogency as works of a legitimately theological import.

In his late Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840), Coleridge develops a sequence of convincing arguments for the validity and viability of estimating extra-Biblical texts as sacred writings. Coleridge, it should be said, composed this text after Emerson’s early period of intellectual germination, and did so as a thinker thoroughly reconfirmed in his Trinitarian Anglican faith, as an attempt to square his creedal convictions with the wisdom-imparting texts of secular humanism. Even so, his insights regarding scriptural authority provide a helpful framework within which to situate Bloom’s, and my own, re-visioning of an American Religious canon of poetry. Concerning his reading of the Christian Bible, in Letter I, Coleridge writes:

I have met everywhere more or less copious sources of truth, and power, and purifying impulses. . . . I have found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my feebleness? In short, whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit, even from the same Spirit, which remaining in itself, yet regenerateth all other powers, and in all ages entering into holy souls, maketh them friends of God, and prophets (Wis

7

).³⁰

The quotation from the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom seems to reinforce an argument for the inspiring presence of the Spirit in authors outside of the authorized Biblical canon. Coleridge’s own words, in fact, substantiate this point. Letter II opens with the recapitulation, "in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together; that the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and that whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit."³¹ Presumably, extra-Biblical texts do find Coleridge, if to a lesser degree than Biblical ones. Similarly, a myriad of mystical texts found Emerson; and the strongly inspired poetry of the American Religion, Bloom would suggest, continues to find Americans (albeit, in differing degrees of awareness and receptivity) to this day.

Coleridge’s hermeneutics, as expressed in his Confessions, are pragmatic in their essence and aim, privileging as they do the utility of Scriptural text as incitement towards a moral end. Near the conclusion of Letter IV, Coleridge eloquently summarizes his own test for subjective canonical validity by appealing to the critical moral faculty within each reader personally—an affirmation of the critical authority of the Self that would have resonated strongly with Emerson. Respecting these [extra-Canonical texts], Coleridge writes, "decide for yourself: and fear