Atmosphere and Religious Experience in American Transcendentalism

Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-7-2020 1:00 PM Atmosphere and Religious Experience in American Transcendentalism Thomas Sorensen, The University of Western Ontario Supervisor: Stanley, Kate, The University of Western Ontario Co-Supervisor: Schuster, Joshua, The University of Western Ontario A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English © Thomas Sorensen 2020 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Sorensen, Thomas, "Atmosphere and Religious Experience in American Transcendentalism" (2020). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 7265. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7265 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ii Abstract I propose a new intellectual history of how the aesthetic obtains religious value in the American literary tradition. According to the account that prevails from Perry Miller to Tracy Fessenden, the Transcendentalists collapse scripture and literature into a single secular category. I argue instead that the Transcendentalists redraw the distinction along aesthetic criteria. A text’s sacred status has little to do with who wrote it when, and every- thing to do with a particular aesthetic quality expressive of divine inspiration. Scholarship has neglected two concepts instrumental to this development: the religious sentiment and atmosphere. Unitarian and Calvinist norms held all religious practice to the test of scripture and empirical reason. The Transcendentalists found scripture too polyvocal, reason too limited, to ground religion. They championed an alternative standard: the religious sentiment, an intrinsic spiritual impulse. Like other impulses, the religious sentiment compels expression and satisfaction, both of which proceed not only from devotional practices, but from divinely inspired literature as well. The second concept, atmosphere, develops primarily through Emerson’s essays and lectures to explain how the religious sentiment manifests in aesthetic form. Inspired literature is intensely atmospheric. And only intensely atmospheric literature can satisfy the religious sentiment. Ultimately, I hope to lay the methodological foundations necessary for a robust scholarly inquiry into atmospheric form among such twentieth-century poets as Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, all of whom continue to associate atmosphere with a height- ened clarity of mind and depth of experience. iii Summary for Lay Audience The Transcendentalists make literature religious. First, they say that we all have a faculty called the “religious sentiment.” The religious sentiment is like hunger, except where hunger makes us crave food, the religious sentiment makes us crave spiritual fulfillment. Just as we get more and more hungry the longer we go without eating, so the religious sentiment craves more and more the longer we go without spiritual fulfillment. Prayer satisfies the religious sentiment. So does reading the Bible. But what makes the Transcendentalists so revolutionary is that they say art can satisfy the religious sentiment, too. Not all works of art—only art that is divinely inspired. To make this argument, they needed a new concept for some aesthetic quality that only inspired art can have. They found their concept in “atmosphere.” By “atmosphere,” they meant more or less the same thing we mean today when we say, “this restaurant has a nice atmosphere,” or “old hous- es have more atmosphere than the new cookie-cutters”: a feeling, a mood, haunts about a certain place or object. For the Transcendentalists, atmosphere is not spiritual. Neither is it material. It is both spiritual and material. Just as a prism refracts a beam of light into shapes and colours that play upon the wall, so matter refracts spirit into atmosphere. Just as the shapes and colours are not just light or just prism, so atmosphere is not just spirit or just matter, but something that happens when spirit and matter come together. Now, the Transcendentalists wrote a lot of literature. And they wanted their literature to satisfy the religious sentiment. So they developed ways of writing atmospherically. I consider what some of these ways of writing are, and how they work. iv Acknowledgements The greatest challenge I faced in writing this dissertation involved refining my deviant new-critical tendencies into a more historically-informed formalism. I was des- perate for models to emulate—formalists are hard to come by these days. I consider my- self lucky to have found two in my supervisors Joshua Schuster and Kate Stanley, who showed me how I could observe disciplinary standards without compromising my princi- ples. Prof. Stanley taught me that method does not necessarily inhibit the spontaneity necessary to read and write, but can actually enhance it. Her calm and welcoming tem- perament sets the perfect tone for thought and discussion. Prof. Schuster convinced me to renounce some of my more tenacious old-soul prejudices: it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be fashionable, I now realize. I still return to The Ecology of Modernism (2015) as an example of how wow-appeal can be more than just a gimmick, how it can enhance the reading experience without tarnishing clarity of expression. I am conscious of a hypothetical reader which functions as a kind of conscience, admonishing me when I write something fluffy or self-indulgent. I anticipate how it might react or not react, and this helps me decide what to keep and what to cut. It corre- sponds to no one person I know in every-day life. It is rather a composite perspective made up mostly of past readers who have made an impression on me and whose opinions I care about. The degree to which a personality figures in the composite has nothing to do with whether or not they are likely to read the finished product. The real determinant in- volves the imaginative clarity with which I grasp their sensibility, and the extent to which I have felt charitably and justly evaluated by them. Professors Stanley and Schuster have v both left deep indentations in my hypothetical reader that I’m sure will persist long after graduation. On the merit of her precise feedback and direct personality, Alison Conway’s voice has predominated in my readerly conscience for long stretches of writing, especial- ly throughout the chapter on Jonathan Edwards. Additional thanks are due to Bryce Traister, for generously agreeing to serve as my second reader even after leaving Western, and to Alyssa McLean, for her clear sup- plementary feedback. I owe my fellow graduate students an enormous debt for their con- versation and emotional support: Christine Campana, Timothy Golub, Mikyla Hindson, Ian Hynd, Taylor Kraayenbrink, Jackie Reed, Andrew Sargent, Jeffrey Swim, and Lisa Templin, among others. Without Ryan Harte, I probably would not have gotten my Ph.D. in the first place. And if I had, my dissertation would have struck an inferior standard. I would have con- tinued to reject clarity and system for the familiar post-structuralist arguments, and I would not have learned to admire simplicity and flow in prose. vi Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Summary for Lay Audience………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………..…….….vi List of Appendices……………………………………………………………………….vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Interlude: “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” by Emily Dickinson……………………. 37 Chapter 1. Jonathan Edwards and Liberal Secularity……………………………………43 Interlude: “Sea-Surface Full of Clouds,” by Wallace Stevens…………….……………..79 Chapter 2. The Religious Sentiment and Transcendentalist Secularity…………..….…..99 Interlude: “Kinderszenen,” by Jan Zwicky…………………….………………….……133 Chapter 3. The Concept of Atmosphere in Emerson……………….…………………..145 Interlude: “End,” by Jorie Graham……………………………………………………..186 Chapter 4. Walt Whitman’s Poetics of Atmosphere……………….……………………196 Conclusion: “Rain,” by John Ashbery……………………………….…………………237 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….262 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..278 vii List of Appendices Appendix A: Poems. 1 Introduction In his treatise On the Nature of True Virtue (1765), Jonathan Edwards denies worldly art any relation to religion more exalted than mere analogy: “for who will affirm that a disposition to approve of the harmony of good music, or the beauty of a square, or equilateral triangle, is the same as holiness, or a truly virtuous disposition of mind!” (105- 106). By the 1840s, many of the Transcendentalists felt comfortable calling Edwards’ bluff. John Sullivan Dwight includes a virtuous disposition foremost among the “practical effects” of a “love of beauty”: “It disposes to order. It gives birth in the mind to an in- stinct of propriety. It suggests imperceptibly, it inclines gently, but irresistibly, to the fit action, to the word in season” (“Religion of Beauty” 3). By the time Walt Whitman pub- lished Leaves of Grass in 1855, art could take a seat at the very heart of religion: “the priest departs, the divine literatus comes” (CPP, 932). How do we get from Edwards to Whitman? How, in the United States

Load more