The Complicity of Imagination Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Cambridge studies in American Literature and Culture
- Introduction: Antebellum America and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century England
- 1 Cultural Predicaments and Authorial Responses
- 2 “A Seraph's Elequence” Emerson's Inspired Language and Milton's Apocalyptic Prose
- 3 Margaret Fuller's “The Two Herberts,” Emerson, and the Disavowal of Sequestered Virtue
- 4 “As if a green bough were laid across the page”: Thoreau's Seventeenth-Century Landscapes and Extravagant Personae
- 5 Melville's Mardi and Moby-Dick, Marvelous Travel Narratives, and Seventeenth-Century Methods of Inquiry
- 6 Surmising the Infidel: Melville Reads Milton
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
3 - Margaret Fuller's “The Two Herberts,” Emerson, and the Disavowal of Sequestered Virtue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Cambridge studies in American Literature and Culture
- Introduction: Antebellum America and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century England
- 1 Cultural Predicaments and Authorial Responses
- 2 “A Seraph's Elequence” Emerson's Inspired Language and Milton's Apocalyptic Prose
- 3 Margaret Fuller's “The Two Herberts,” Emerson, and the Disavowal of Sequestered Virtue
- 4 “As if a green bough were laid across the page”: Thoreau's Seventeenth-Century Landscapes and Extravagant Personae
- 5 Melville's Mardi and Moby-Dick, Marvelous Travel Narratives, and Seventeenth-Century Methods of Inquiry
- 6 Surmising the Infidel: Melville Reads Milton
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
Summary
I have been reading the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and of Sir Kenelm Digby. These splendid, chivalrous, and thoughtful Englishmen are meat which my soul loveth, even as much as my Italians. What I demand of men, – that they could act out all their thoughts, – these have. They are lives; – and of such I do not care if they had as many faults as there are days in the year, – there is the energy to redeem them. Do you not admire Lord Herbert's two poems on life, and the conjectures concerning celestial life? I keep them.
Margaret Fuller to EmersonI have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and leap, blind force for the sake of force.
Margaret Fuller, MemoirsDante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.
Margaret Fuller to Caroline SturgisWhile Margaret Fuller's alienation from “provincial” American culture has been compellingly delineated and her flight from “feminine” sentimental fiction to “masculine” republican history has been provocatively posed, her sense of being out of place in her own age has gone unremarked, although it is everywhere apparent in the nostalgia that pervades her depictions of seventeenth-century English culture. In the first epigraph to this chapter, her admiration of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Sir Kenelm Digby – both courtiers and pious philosophers in the age of James I and Charles I – reveals the scope of the active life that she herself craves (“meat which my soul loveth”).
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Complicity of ImaginationThe American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture, pp. 87 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997