Volume 52, Number 14 · September 22, 2005
American Jeremiad
By Christopher Benfey
The American Classics: A Personal Essay
by Denis Donoghue.
Yale University Press, 295 pp., $27.00
The generation of American writers that came of age around 1840—the men and women who initiated what we now think of as a national literature—aspired more to youthful vigor than to the 'classic' status of ancient Greece and Rome, so dear to the generation of the Founding Fathers. A sense of expanding frontiers, buttressed by expansive ideas borrowed from European Romanticism, impelled them. They wrote enthusiastically of 'Young America,' spelled nature with a capital 'N' (and sometimes without an 'e,' like some pagan divinity unleashed from the Black Forest), and refused to be, in Emerson's pejorative word, 'retrospective.'[1]
Review, 3880 words
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