Books, Arts & Manners: The Continuing Myth

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, by John McAleer (Little, Brown, 748 pp., $27.40)

The leadership, administrative and pedagogical, of Yale University seems to be at odds over the question of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s place in the continuum of the American experience. President A. Bartlett Giamatti and the highly esoteric critic Harold Bloom epitomize the two most polarized views of Emerson’s meaning for us today: the one deploring the gentle Sage’s elitist— almost fascist—concept of human power; and the other approvingly recognizing in Emerson the semblance of a gnostic icon for moderns.

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, by John McAleer (Little, Brown, 748 pp., $27.40)

The leadership, administrative and pedagogical, of Yale University seems to be at odds over the question of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s place in the continuum of the American experience. President A. Bartlett Giamatti and the highly esoteric critic Harold Bloom epitomize the two most polarized views of Emerson’s meaning for us today: the one deploring the gentle Sage’s elitist— almost fascist—concept of human power; and the other approvingly recognizing in Emerson the semblance of a gnostic icon for moderns.