Emerson's "Self-Reliance," Sweeney, and Prufrock

F 0. MATTHIESSEN has recorded both Eliot's sustained distaste for and the fact that Eliot is deeply indebted to the whole New England tradition of which Emerson is a part.' Emerson's faith in the infinite capacity of the human soul must have seemed naive to Eliot; his tendency to deny the normal bonds of community, friendship, and family in favor of a mystical oneness of all things must have been uncongenial; his scorn for history and the great literature of the past was in direct contradiction to Eliot's own views as expressed in Tradition and the Individual Talent; and above all, his ignorance of human sin and evil (e.g., his conversion of evil into good in Compensation) must have seemed downright perverse.2 Nonetheless, as Perry Miller has shown,' Emerson is very much a child of New England and the Puritan mentality which also shaped Eliot. Though Emerson's individualism is opposed to the Puritan concern for the body politic, and though his lack of a sense of evil made possible a direct approach to nature un

American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy