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American Renaissance and Us Samuel Otter (bio) Whether we know it or not, whether we have read it or not, nineteenth-century Americanists have in common F. O. Matthiessen’s 1941 American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. We have inherited the literary quintet—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—whose intellectual relationships Matthiessen so meticulously, even madly, articulated and whom he placed at the center of a revised national literary tradition that he was instrumental in consolidating. Our field has been transformed by the reaction to American Renaissance in the intense debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Critics portrayed [End Page 228] Matthiessen as elite and formalist, suppressing his leftist political views and his personal (especially sexual) life to further an argument about American literary democracy and great writers, which became implicated in the Manichean struggles of the Cold War. His major book and his life, ending in suicide at forty-eight, were understood as failures, embodying the contradictions and compromises of an American consensus ideology. American Renaissance became a foil—necessary, skewed—in the argument for a more explicitly historical and political criticism.1 Responding to Matthiessen’s centering of judgment on the five authors, white and male, and seizing on his assertion that these writers shared a “devotion to the possibilities of democracy,”2 critics redefined the field to emphasize race, slavery, social revolution, class, and gender and to include writings that reflected the diversity of literary production in the nineteenth-century United States. In a more muted exchange of opinions, several critics since the 1990s have reassessed Matthiessen’s legacy, using his 1948 travel meditation From the Heart of Europe, the insights of gay studies, and his religious faith to argue for the complexity of his stances in the discord among liberals over communism, the intricacy of closeted expression in the 1940s, and the importance of Christianity in his effort to imagine alternatives to mid-twentieth-century liberalism and capitalism.3 For over seventy years, Matthiessen’s canon, scholarship, politics, sexuality, and historical predicament have influenced nineteenth-century American literary studies. As Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs recently wrote, American Renaissance has been the field’s “center of gravity.”4 But centers of gravity tend to be more felt than perceived, more the object of reaction than analysis. And so, preparing remarks for a C19 conference panel on what scholars of nineteenth-century literature hold in common, or not, I decided to reread Matthiessen’s book. Or, to be honest, I decided to read it. Over the years, I had sampled Matthiessen’s accounts of particular works and of the relationships among the five writers, interpretations that have become part of the texture of thought in the field, but I had never read the book from cover to cover. My sense of American Renaissance was deceptively vivid, produced more by the contours of debate than by sustained encounter. Reading American Renaissance from beginning to end, I was surprised by several things. Matthiessen intends a complex argument about aesthetics and history. He refuses a choice between the two and treats literary language as a medium of relation. In a sentence that has sometimes been read as [End Page 229] an evasion of history but instead points to a distinctive attachment, he writes that “an artist’s use of language is the most sensitive index to cultural history” (xv). Drawing on Coleridge and I. A. Richards and especially on the “dramatic hyperbole” of Emerson’s “Language” chapter in the essay Nature (30), Matthiessen argues that organic form and symbol-making became, in the hands of his writers, vehicles for thinking through a democratic intimacy between words and things, mind and experience, and for manifesting a peculiar verbal action. Matthiessen viewed his writers as grappling with the strange materiality of language: its rootedness in facts; its historical registers; the ways in which it conveys its users’ ambitions and desires and also exceeds individual expression. Matthiessen’s interests in language were not only individual and historical but also palpable: a concern with rhythm, with the physical basis and sonic qualities of words, extends across the chapters. Matthiessen investigates rhythm in prose and poetry and in...
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