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Overview
Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson explores the American writer's essays as mythic prose poems, suggesting a new approach to the practical criticism of Emerson's works. Richard O'Keefe uses the archetypal model - a critical tool seldom employed on American Romantics, yet frequently applied in the study of British Romantic poets such as William Blake - to contemporize methods of examining Emersonian texts.Synopsis
Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson explores the American writer's essays as mythic prose poems, suggesting a new approach to the practical criticism of Emerson's works. Richard O'Keefe uses the archetypal model - a critical tool seldom employed on American Romantics, yet frequently applied in the study of British Romantic poets such as William Blake - to contemporize methods of examining Emersonian texts.
Booknews
O'Keefe explores Emerson's essays as mythic prose poems, locating in them an American version of Blake's fourfold myth of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Apocalypse. The presence of these recurrent mythic metaphors, particularly in "Circles" and the Divinity School "Address" leads him to conclude that Emerson is less a Transcendental sage than a radical existentialist poet, visionary, and prophet. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)