...experience, or a worship of dead forms. Thus his famous complaint and proposal at the beginning of Nature: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why...

...months short of his graduation from Harvard University. At the beginning of the book Emerson claims that "foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes." He then articulates in the form of a question the Transcendentalist Imperative: "Why should not we...

...far as Emerson was concerned: fathers (and fathering countries, like England) are to be forgotten. 'Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? . . . The sun shines today also . . . There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.'8 Emerson, and many...

...des ehemaligen kolonialen Mutterlandes, um zu einem originären künstlerischen Ausdruck zu gelangen: „The foregoing generations beheld God and nature...also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" 7 Diese rhetorisch geschickte Aufforderung zur einem künstlerischen Neubeginn verstellt den Blick...

..."Our age is retrospective," he observed in Nature. "It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. . . . The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" But while Emerson's formulation called for rebellion instead of reverence, it sustained the convention...

...readers to cease their retrospection, to stop looking through the eyes of the foregoing generations. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" asks the first paragraph.1 In the last sentence, Emerson holds out the promise that each of his readers...

...the opening lines of Nature. "It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. . . . The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their...original relation to the universe? . . . Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?"8 In one respect a long line of earlier presidents had a...

...the "direct treatment of the 'thing.' " 30. In the introduction to Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres...God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes" (Essays 7). 31. See Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound...

...the vision-obsession of the work, and suggest a vision trapped in the past (a major Hitchcock motif): "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres...beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes."4 The allusion here, of course, is to St. Paul, but the specific emphasis is on the contrast...

...(1836), Emerson's spectacular philosophical debut, define the central problem he set for his readers: "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"30 The universe, according to Emerson, comprised "Nature and the Soul." By "nature," then,...