Thoughts on Modern Literature

[Dave Monroe]

   "Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must
consider literature ephemeral, and easily entertain
the supposition of its entire disappearance.  In our
ordinary states of mind, we deem not only letters in
general, but most famous books parts of a
pre-established harmony, fatal, unalterable, and do
not go behind Dante and Shakespeare, much less behind
Moses, Ezekiel, and St. John.  But man is critic of
all these also, and should treat the entire extant
product of the human intellect as only one age,
revisable, corrigible, reversible by him."

--R.W. Emerson, "Thoughts on Modern Literature" (1840)

http://www.emersoncentral.com/thoughts_on_modern_literature.htm

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/modernlit.html


		
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