Comparing Evil in Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville Essay -- comparison

Lionel Trilling once said, A proper sense experience of evil is surely an attribute of a great writer. (98-99) Although he make the remark in a different context, one would naturally bloke Hawthorne and Melville with the comment, while Emersons might be one of the last names to mind. For the new(a) reader, who is often in the habit of assuming that the most profound and crisp apprehension of reality is a sense of tragedy, Emerson seems to have lost his grip. He has often been charged with a lack of vision of evil and tragedy. Yeats, for example, mat that Whitman and Emerson have begun to seem superficial, precisely because they lack the Vision of Evil (qtd. in Matthiessen 181). There is no doubt that Emerson was a yea-sayer. He did celebrate the daylight and hope in preference to blackness and despair. At the same time, however, he was not unaware of the existence of evil. He personally went through the suffering of unusual poverty and a series of deaths of his beloved one s, and his own wellness was constantly threatened. He knew life was hard and full of tribulations. But Emerson spy the key to the perplexing reality in absolute faith in human nature and divinity A human being is able of banishing whatever evil with the guidance of divinity that sometimes seems to accomplish the scarce cause at any cost, even by an evil agent. end-to-end Self-Reliance echoes his strong conviction in human nature and God deposit thyself every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine saving has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events...And we are new men, and must take on in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny and not bush league and inv... .... Self-Reliance. The American Tradition in Literature. Ed. Sculley Bradley et al. Vol. 1, 4th ed. newfound York Norton, 1983. 1036-1048. -----. The American Scholar. The American Tradition in Literature. 1080-1092. -----. Experience. The American Tradition in Literature. 1126-1135. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown. The American Tradition in Literature. 672-683. Hoeltje, Hubert H. Hawthorne, Melville, and Blackness, American Literature, 37 (1965) 279-285. Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance. New York Oxford & University Press, 1941. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York Norton, 1967. -----. Billy Budd. The American Tradition in Literature. 997-1054. Sherman, Paul. Emersons Angle of Vision Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1952. Trilling, Lionel. The oppose Self. New York Viking Press, 1955.