Letters in New England" (1880). As a result of this journey, so full of surprises— not the least gratifying of which was the discovery, at the very end of it, long after the first draft of my book was completed, of Stanley Cavell's moving essay "Hope against Hope," American Poetry Review 15 (Jan.-Feb. 1986): 9-13—I have come to share Cavell's belief that Emerson is our most important writer and that the prevailing "condescension" towards him "helps to keep our culture, unlike any other in the West, from possessing any founding thinker as a common basis for its considerations." Condescension, it should be noted, also defines the prevailing attitude towards our most important political tradition, populism.

Part of the trouble, in Emerson's case, is that his early admirers admired him for the wrong reasons. They confused his affirmations with moral uplift, his hopefulness with a belief in progress. Emerson's assimilation to the genteel tradition, as Santayana called it, can be traced in Kenneth Cameron, Emerson among His Contemporaries (1967), although this enormous compendium also contains earlier assessments in quite a different vein, which show how deeply some of Emerson's contemporaries were troubled by what they took to be his fatalism. A more manageable compilation, Milton R. Konvitz, ed., The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1972), ranges from the earliest commentaries to the latest critical opinion at the time of its publication. For the genteel view of Emerson, see also Edwin D. Mead, The Influence of Emerson (1903).

When the genteel tradition came under critical fire, so did Emerson's reputation. Van Wyck Brooks set the tone of dismissal in America's Coming-of-Age (1915), and his subsequent efforts to make up for his youthful "impudence" in "bearding the prophets" only made matters worse. His Life of Emerson (1932) tried to evoke the freshness and innocence of a bygone age, when the country was new and everything seemed possible. But Brooks's revised portrait of Emerson, as sentimental as his earlier portrait was carping and sophomoric, left it unclear why a more sophisticated and disillusioned generation of Americans should take any but a nostalgic interest in the "Orpheus" of the nation's infancy. The same question was left unanswered by Lewis Mumford's more discriminating version of nineteenth-century literary history, The Golden Day (1926); by F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941); and by the many studies guided by the fascination with innocence as a persistent theme in early American culture: R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (1955); Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (1971); Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (1981); Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (1984); and Irving Howe, The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (1986), among others. In varying degrees, all these critics admired Emerson's vigor of expression and recognized it as the product of reverence and wonder, but by identifying these emotions so closely with the "American newness," they made it impossible to explain why Emerson should have had any continuing appeal except to those who remained intellectually and emotionally retarded. Although it pains me to disagree with Alfred Kazin, a literary historian whose work (usually informed by such a nice balance

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