What aims, claims, and conceptions justify the importance we ascribe to “English”’? We need to be able to answer.
—F. R. Leavis
The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections is another demonstration—alongside The Comic Sense of Henry James, A World Elsewhere, and The Performing Self—of how sensitive a reader of local texts Richard Poirier can be.[1] Whoever takes the trouble to read this new book, which ruminates on a variety of current topics in criticism, will be struck with how ingeniously he can elicit from a Stevens poem or a passage in George Eliot the inarticulate struggle that underlies the creation of the form of the work as we have it. But in the present instance, Mr. Poirier, a professor at Rutgers, is after larger game. What holds his six rather miscellaneous essays together, in a doubtful unity, is a critique of the idea—enunciated recently by Secretary of Education William J. Bennett—that the humanities are in decline and that only some kind of critical renewal can restore literary studies to a vital role in the life of American culture. Mr. Poirier’s view of the value of literature to society produces some surprises in this “Emersonian” meditation.
Let me say at the outset that Poirier is not an Emersonian in any obvious sense of that term. Much that compelled Emerson into expression, including the deep spiritualism of his Transcendental faith, is of no interest to our author. Poirier’s book merely reflects “a way of
