Ralph Waldo Emerson Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Eduardo Cadava

Critical Essay by Eduardo Cadava

SOURCE: "The Nature of War in Emerson's 'Boston Hymn,'" in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3, Autumn, 1993, pp. 21-58.

In this excerpt Cadava discusses the relation between historical events and Emerson's poem, "The Boston Hymn," focusing on Emerson's response to the Emancipation Proclamation, abolition, and the moral necessity for the Civil War as factors in the poem's creation. Cadava also links Emerson's presentation of God and use of natural imagery to Puritan concepts.

Less than five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Emerson announces a crisis in the structures of political and linguistic representation. "Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant," he writes, "Representative Government is misrepresentative; Union is a conspiracy against the Northern States which the Northern States are to have the privilege of paying for; the adding of Cuba and Central America to the slave marts is enlarging the area of Freedom. Manifest...
(read more)