Interpretations of Poiesis and Religion:

Santayana on Goethe and Emerson

with Stevens Postmodern High Romanticism as Guide
David A. Dilworth
State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook
Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination
Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.
It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering dust and time.
There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of a westward evening star,
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Nights moonlight lake was neither water nor air. (OP 135-36)

1. SANTAYANAS ANTI-ROMANTICISM AND WALLACE STEVENS

POSTMODERN HIGH ROMANTICISM
In this paper I employ the phrase postmodern high Romanticism as a heuristic for
appraising Santayanas interpretation of the two major literary authors, Goethe and
Emerson, as well as for determining prior to that his relation to Wallace Stevens, who
is generally considered the United States greatest 20th-century poet.1 I construct the concept
1

Carroll, J.: Stevens and Romanticism, 2007, pp. 87-102. Carroll cites Stevens LWS, p. 350 (hereafter LWS
stands for The Letters of Wallace Stevens, 1996) on the cycle from romanticism, to realism, to indifferentism, back
to romanticism which is the highest form of imaginative fulfullment, indicating how this sheds light on Stevens
view of the nature of poetry and his own mission as a poet. Citing Stevens words, The major poetic idea in the
world is and always has been the idea of God (LWS, p. 378) in connection with his project of creating a new

of postmodern high Romanticism from my reading of Stevens, who came to see himself
as continuing the line of the high Romanticism of Emerson, and through Emerson, of
Goethe.2 As is well known, the trajectory of Santayanas writings moved in a contrary
direction, impugning Romanticism and downgrading the reputations of Goethe and
Emerson. Stevens, I will argue, synthesized the contrary directions of Emersons
Romanticism and Santayanas anti-Romanticism in his concept of the supreme fiction,
while ultimately tilting in the direction of a visionary high poetry associated with Emerson.3
To put this in a nutshell, as a student at Harvard and in his early poetry Stevens was
greatly impacted by Santayanas personality and philosophy, and he celebrated the old
philosopher in Rome at the end of his life with a famous poem of that title (CP 508). At the
same time, in another late poem, Looking Across the Field and Watching the Birds Fly
(CP 517), Stevens explicitly endorsed the cosmic idealism of Emerson. Stevens wrote many
other late poems to the same effect. His gradual maturation as a high Romantic poet, I will
argue, involved a conscious departure from Santayana. Such a turnabout provides much
food for thought in itself, as well as furnishing the heuristic of the present papers
reappraisal of Santayanas all-purpose indictment of Romanticism and his specific
downgrading of the stature of Goethe and Emerson.
In his early career Stevens wrote that Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame (A
High-Toned Old Christian Woman, CP 59). Joel Porte among others has made a
convincing case that the agenda of Stevens first collection of poetry, Harmonium (1924),
was impacted by Santayanas views communicated to him personally when he was a
student at Harvard. Stevens also found these views articulated in Santayanas
contemporaneous publication, IPR, of 1900.4 In Understanding, Imagination, and
Mysticism Santayana wrote that the single idea of the essays of IPR was that religion
and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached
to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it
merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry. 5
romanticism, a new belief, i.e. a poem equivalent to the idea of God (LWS, pp. 369-70), Carroll argues that
Stevens genius was neither social nor ethical in character, but lyric, mythic, and metaphysical. But for
Stevens,belief itself is fictive, a matter of poiesis. The older romantics, such as Emerson, Wordsworth, and
Shelley, believed in a Supreme Mind or Spirit, whereas Stevens held that the divine mind does not fully exist, or
at least is not fully realized, until it is depicted in the images of poets (Carroll, ibid., p. 90). (But let us add that we
do find instances of this more radical pantheism in Emerson, and before him in Goethe.) Carroll goes on to point
out that Stevens poetry progresses through a dialectic of tonal opposites, between the pure poetry of the new
romanticism and common poetry; in the latter mindset he sometimes disparages the ideal of the romantic; in
the former, The whole effect of the imagination is, in Stevens own words, toward the production of the
romantic (Two or Three Ideas, p. 849), and The imagination is the romantic, (Adagia, p. 903)both
citations from Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, 1997. The same oscillation between pure poetry and
common poetry is noted by Helen Vendler in her review of Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems, Serio, N. (ed.).:
2009, in The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, August, 23, 2009
2
When a student at Harvard, his mother gave him a complete set of the works of Emerson. This gift was perhaps
the most important he ever received. Emerson exercizes a deeper conceptual influence on Stevens poetic
cosmology than any other writer, and Emerson provides the most incisive formulations of the ideas that govern
this cosmology (Carroll, op.cit., p. 95).
3

Porte, J.: Santayanas Interpretation of Poetry and Religion: An Introduction, in Santayana, G.: Interpretations
of Poetry and Religion, 1989, pp. xiii-xxxi. (Hereafter cited as IPR.)
4
Santayana, G.: Preface to IPR, p. 3.
5
Porte, J.: op. cit., pp. xxv-xxvii.

In the conclusion of IPR Santayana rearticulated his aesthetic faith which, as Joel
Porte indicates, was redolent with the views of John Ruskin, Mathew Arnold, Walter Pater,
Ernest Renan, and others.6 Thus, Santayana held high poetry was religion without
practical efficacy or metaphysical illusion. High poetry and lofty religion were
illuminations of ideal essences expressive of harmonies of the human spirit. Santayana
brilliantly articulated this theme all the way to his late theoretical writing, The Realm of
Spirit. But if we fast-forward a bit in his career, this humanistic conclusion in turn
presupposed Santayanas bottom line skeptical Platonism and materialism which
undergirded his speculative articulations and also his closely aligned culture criticism. The
young Stevens absorbed all of this directly from his mentor Santayana.
The impact of Santayanas ideas can be traced to Stevens Sunday Morning and other
early poems of his first collection, Harmonium (1923), which feature the life of the poetic
imagination as replacing the fictions of heaven and hell and authorizing the poet to write a
poetry of the modern earth in which death is the mother of beauty. Stevens
Harmonium consisted of earthy anecdotes and invectives against swans (that is, against
biblical orthodoxies), promoted the poetic life over the mentality of the unimaginative
masses who lack the quirks of imagery, and satirized his own comic self in its realistic
life after forty. In the main, Harmonium, with its word wizardry, comic irony, and gaiety of
language remained within the orbit of Peter Quinze at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, A
High-toned Old Christian Woman, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, The Monocle of Mon
Oncle, The Comedian as the Letter C, and other symbolic expressions of Santayanas
philosophy. Indeed, in Portes estimate, Stevens was Santayanas truest disciple, his most
constant ephebe.7
Unfortunately, however, Portes way of conjoining Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens
stops with his discussion of Stevens early poetry. He does not account for Stevens
trajectory of high visionary poetry in his later career.8 Stevens wrote to the latter effect in
6

Carroll, J., Wallace Stevens Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism, 1987, Chapter Two, Evanescent
Symmetries, pp. 29-62, analyzes such key poems as Peter Quinze at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, The SnowMan, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, The Monocle of Mon Oncle, and The Comedian as the Lettter C, while
indicating that the Harmonium collection (published in 1924) does not go beyond the assumptions of Santayanas
hedonistic aestheticism. See Cook, E.: A Readers Guide to Wallace Stevens, 2007: The overall order [of
Harmonium] conceals Stevenss growing sense of frustrating and malaise, most evident in the long poem, The
Comedian as the Letter C, which was rewritten and much expanded in the summer of 1922 (LWS, p. 229), but
appears about a third of the way through Harmonium (p. 29). See her related commentary on The Snow Man,
pp. 35-36.
7
Porte, J.: op. cit., p. xxix. At the same time, Porte discounts much of Santayanas early polemical writing against
Emerson. He concludes his Introduction to the MIT Press critical edition of IPR (pp. xxx-xxxi) by asserting that
Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens shared the same project of naturalistic, skeptical idealism. All three, he says,
promoted the ideal harmonies of imaginative interpretation of the world in which Santayanas sense of relevant
fiction became in effect Stevens supreme fiction that usurps the role of traditional religion and makes widows
wince in A High-Toned Old Christian Woman. Daniel Fuchs, Wallace Stevens and Santayana, 1967, has a
convincing analysis of Stevens Sunday Morning as resonating with the diction and tone of Santayanas early
philosophic writings. But the issue here is whether Stevens remained a naturalistic, skeptical idealist ala
Santayana; certainly Porte is way off in attrbuting that position to Emerson.
8
Fuchs, D.: art. cit., 1967, attempts to stretch Santayanas influence onto the later-phase Stevens; but arriving at
Esthetique du mal (1944), he acknowledges that the linkage between Santayana and Stevens breaks down;
significantly, he makes no attempt to go into The Auroras of Autumn (1947) or beyond that, the poems
constituting the vintage phase of Stevens new Romanticism. Joseph Carroll, Wallace Stevens Supreme Fiction:
A New Romanticism, 1987, p. 30, lists studies of other Santayana-inspired interpreters of Stevens such as those of
J. V. Cunningham, Yvor Winters, Louis L. Martz, Helen Vendler, Joseph Riddell, Alan Perlis, and Frank Doggett,

his poetry and Letters.9 Following a twelve year hiatus in which he did not publish any
poetry, Stevens painfully resumed his career with Ideas of Order (1936), The Man with
the Blue Guitar (1937), and Parts of a World (1942). It was a gradual metamorphosis in
idealistic sensibility. Especially with Credences of Summer (1946) and The Auroras of
Autumn (1947), Stevens wrote the scene had shifted to his envisioning an enthroned
imagination (a superhuman cosmic imagination) that in the midst of summer can imagine
winter, and in the midst of night can imagine day. In contemporaneously written Adagia
he declared that the exquisite pleasure of the poetic imagination consisted in believing in
a fiction knowing that it is a fiction, while associating such a supreme fiction with the
idea of God.10 Reality, Stevens mused in one of his last poems, is an Activity of the Most
who have attempted to see an unbroken poetics between Stevens Harmonium (1924) and his later poetry. Simon
Critchleys recent book on Stevens, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, though not
indebted to Santayanas influence, is an example of a like tendency to prioritize Stevens early hedonistic gaiety
of language (as in Harmonium) while egregiously misreading his later-phase poetry. Stevens himself, in a letter of
1935, indicated that he regarded Harmonium as something he had moved beyond: when Harmonium was in the
making there was a time I liked the idea of images and images alone, or images and the music of verse together. I
then believed in pure poetry, as it was called (LWS, p. 288.) Later in his career Stevens came to explore another,
metaphysical, idea of pure poetry as he moved beyond the style and intellectual fare of Harmonium. Beginning
with Farewell to Florida, Ideas of Order (1936), the next poetry collection he published after a twelve year
hiatus, shows Stevens transitional struggle to achieve a post-Harmonium trajectory in the direction of his finalphase Emersonian cosmology.
9
See Bates, M.: Stevens and the Supreme Fiction, 2007, pp. 48-61. In his prose essay Two or Three Ideas
(1951) Stevens speaks of the loss of the gods dispelled in mid-air (Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, p. 844).
In his own final-phase project of writing high visionary poetry, The idea of pure poetry, essential imagination, as
the highest objective of the poet, appears to be, at least potentially, as great as the idea of God (LWS, p. 369).
Essential imagination has various synonyms in Stevens later poetry: these include essential unity (Wallace
Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, p. 195), The essential poem at the center of things (ibid., p. 377), pure
poetry, - the pure idea (ibid., p. 231), pure principle (ibid., p. 361), the first idea (ibid., p. 350), the central
heart and mind of mind (ibid., p. 229), the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect (ibid., p. 372), the
imagination that sits enthroned (ibid., 360), and the supreme fiction(ibid., p. 329). In The Figure of the Youth
as Virile Poet (1942), The idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea (ibid., p. 674). In
this Emersonian poetic cosmology, The mind that in heaven created the earth and the mind that on earth created
heaven were, as it happened, one (Adagia, ibid., p. 913). The creator is not a person but only a generative
source; thus in A Primitive Like an Orb (1948), The essential poem at the center of things produces all the
phenomenal appearances of sea, land, and sky but this essential poem is itself something seen and known
in lesser poems, meaning all actual poems. The central poem is the poem of the whole, / The poem of the
composition of the whole (ibid., pp. 377-78). This primitive or archetypal central poem is an orb or planet,
a huge, high harmony, a miraculous multiplex of lesser poems, a vis, a principle,a nature, a patron of
origins, and a skeleton of the ether (ibid., pp. 377-80)
10

See Bates, op. cit., 2007: In his poem Of Modern Poetry (1940) Stevens describes the purpose and character of
his modern poetry as The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice (Wallace Stevens: Collected
Poetry & Prose, p. 218). This presages what will suffice finally stated in Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
(1951)Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being
there together is enough (ibid., p. 444). In LWS, p. 444, Stevens wrote: It is not the individual alone that
indulges in the pathetic fallacy. It is the race. God is the centre of the pathetic fallacy. For Stevens, romantic
visionary poetry was the highest form of imaginative achievement, the norm against which he measures all other
forms of imaginative experience. His new romanticism left behind the historical experience of realism,
aestheticism, symbolism, and modernism, and it incorporates the modern belief that all metaphysical ideas are
merely constructs of the imagination. Stevens strove to fashion fictions of the imagination through which the
essential poem becomes a living presence. He went the final step of embracing what he called the nicer
knowledge of / Belief, that what it believes in is not true (ibid., p. 291). This became his notion of thesupreme
fiction, the central theme in the second half of his career. In a retrospective note on his Collected Poems in 1954,
he wrote that poetry explores the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could
propose to themselves a fulfillment (LWS, p. 820). The supreme fiction involved not an object of belief but the

August Imagination. This poem also repised the theme of his major effort and Kehre,
The Auroras of Autumn, that featured the innocence of an enthroned cosmic
imagination.11 Stevens went on in his last years to ring the changes on this high visionary
poetry which, breaking with Santayanas worldview, indisputably situated his postmodern
high Romanticism in the Emersonian tradition of the Romantic Sublime.12
The Emersonian trajectory of Stevens high visionary poetry, I suggest here, is a critical
fulchrum for reevaluating Santayanas vaunted culture criticism intertwined with his
materialistic ontology, much of which centered on his denunciation of Romantic modernity.
Santayana was decidely not a high Romantic. Santayana in fact always featured himself as
a critic of Romanticism which he often indicted together with the other three Rs of
incessant process of poetic discovery.
In his Adagia (1930-1955?), there are any number of similar relevant musings of Stevens which he
converted into his poetry. After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as
lifes redemption (ibid., p. 901); It is the belief and not the god that counts (ibid., p. 902); Perhaps there is a
degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation,
accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet (ibid., p. 906); Realism is a corruption of
reality (loc. cit.); Poetry is a purging of the worlds poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present
perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life (loc. cit.); God is a symbol for something that can as
well take other forms, for example, the form of high poetry (ibid., p. 907); The poet must not adapt his
experience to that of the philosopher (ibid., p. 909); God is in me or not at all (does not exist) (ibid., p. 911);
The imagination consumes & exhausts some element of reality (loc.cit.); The mind that in heaven created the
earth and the mind that on earth created heaven were, as it happened, one (ibid., p. 913).
Bates argues that after the war Stevens interest in a supreme fiction increased. He explored the notion
of a central poem in a series of postwar lectures, namely, Three Academic Pieces (1947), Effects of Analogy
(1948), Imagination as Value (1948), and The Relation Between Poetry and Painting (1951). In the late 1940s
and early 1950s, Stevens speculated that essential imagination, the source of our fictions, may lie outside the
consciousness of any individual. Canto VII of The Auroras of Autumn (1948) raises the questions: Is there an
imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent . . . / . . . which in the midst of summer stops / To
imagine winter? / When the leaves are dead, / Does it take the place of the north . . . ? / . . . And do these heavens
adorn / And proclaim it . . . ? (ibid., p. 360). Interrogatively it advances a daring, quasi-religious proposition, that
a transcendent crown and mystic cabala is responsible for order and seasonal change in the universe. Final
Soliloquy of an Interior Paramour (1951) contains Stevens perhaps most famous line, We say God and the
imagination are one (ibid., 444). (We refers to Stevens and his muse or interior paramour.) Stevens lifted it
from his Adagia notebook, the complete entry of which is:
Proposita:
1. God and the imagination are one.
2.The thing imagined is the imaginer.
The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one. Hence, I suppose, the imaginer is
God. (ibid., p. 914)
In Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour Stevens and his muse are both active and passive. In its reference
to central mind, this version of the supreme fiction most resembles the heavenly imagination that sits
enthroned of Auroras of Autumn of canto VII of The Auroras of Autumn. The central mind has arranged the
rendevous, supplying Stevens with an encompassing vision of reality.
Another key poem of Stevens metaphysical idealism is Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds
Fly(1952). Bates interpretation of it is as follows. Mr. Homburg, who stands for Emerson, at first seems to
correspond to Santayanas description of romantic dreamers who thinks that reality may be like themselves, their
own transcendental self and their own romantic dreams indefinitely extended. Hence Stevens first maintains an
ironic distance from what seems to be the worlds pensive nature, a mechanical / And slightly detestable
operandum, free / From mans ghost, larger and yet a little like, / Without his literature and without his gods. . .
Stevens finds it irritating rather than exhilarating because Mr. Homburg expresses it incautiously (excluding
human agency and natures blunt laws). (The words mechanical . . . operandum appear to go back to The
Auroras of Auroras, cited above, canto VII, Is there an imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is
benevolent . . . / . . . which in the midst of summer stops / To imagine winter? As well, the worlds pensive
nature appears also to reprise the giant of the weather (CP, p. 385) and the pensive giant prone in violet space
(CP, p. 387) of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and similar allusions in other poems). Mr. Homburg gradually

Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution. The evidence is that modern Romanticism,

understood as somewhat inclusive of the other three Rs, rather became the overall target of
his career-long culture criticism. Romanticism merged in his mind with the genteel
tradition and other manifestations of the progressively striving Protestant voluntarism of
modern Europe, as expressed paradigmatically in his interpretation of Goethes Faust and
of the young Emerson as the Puritan Goethe.
Santayana opted out at an early age. To make a long story short, the trajectory of his
career reveals him as a committed Epicurean sage in retirement from the world within the
world; he lived an abstemious rational life, enjoying the pleasure of his writing and
warms to this notion of a daily majesty of meditation, / That comes and goes in silences of its own and speaks of
an element, A thing not planned for imagery or belief, which isThe transparency through which the swallow
weaves, Too much thinking to be less than thought, / Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch. / A daily majesty of
meditation (CP, p. 440). A new scholar (Stevens) finally seems prepared to accept Mr. Homburgs idealism,
amended so as to accommodate human agency and recognition of natures blunt laws.
To fine tune this a bit more, the basically Emersonian position expressed here might be labeled an
objective idealism, the philosophic articulation of which is found in such authors as Schelling and Peirce. One of
Stevens last poems collected posthumously, Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination, is a good
example of such a form of objective idealism.
11
11

Carroll, J.: Wallace Stevens Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism, Chapter Five, A Landscape of the Mind,
indicates that Stevens was developing various preliminary adumbrations, or crystal hypotheses, to his idea of
God in poiesis as the supreme fiction in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942). See also Leggett, B. J.:
Stevens Late Poetry, 2007, pp. 63-75. Stevens himself set The Auroras of Autumn following upon Credences
of Summer as a marker for the shift in orientation seen in his later poems. From Harmonium (1924) through
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) Stevens poetry tended to privilege the human imagination over external
reality the world as it is is not accessible to us as it is in itself, but as only as it is constructed by the imagination.
Credences of Summer, however, signals a change in his attempt to depict a reality beyond the mind. From the
imaginative period of the Notes I turned to the ideas of Credences of Summer, noting that At the time when
that poem was written my feelings for the necessity of a final accord with reality was at its strongest, and
explaining that reality was the summer of the title of the book [Transport to Summer] in which the poem
appeared (LWS, pp. 636, 719).
Credences of Summer depicts a moment of accord with a reality independent of the mind: Lets see the
very thing and nothing else. . . / Without evasion by a single metaphor (Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry &
Prose, p. 322). It attempts to describe a world in which the sound of a bird is not part of the listeners own sense
(ibid., p. 326), a world complete in itself that does not require the human imagination. It ends with the summer
night as the fiction of an inhuman author (loc. cit., p. 326) the meditation of a cosmic imagination the
theme he then pursued in The Auroras of Autumn.
While Credences of Summer (1946) is a poem of stasis, the realization of a perfect moment Beyond which
there is nothing left of time (ibid., p. 322), The Auroras of Autumn (1947) breaks down such moments by its
depicting the flux of the northern lights. It symbolizes the serpent of the aurora borealis as the master of the
maze / Of body and air and forms and images, / Relentlessly in possession of happiness (ibid., p. 411) To the
crucial next line, This is his poison: that we should disbelieve / Even that, Marianne Moore in 1954 delivered
the acute commentary: The poison in the meditations of the serpent in the ferns is that we should disbelieve that
there is a starry serpent in the heavens on which to fix the grateful mind. It is ultimately a poem of Stevens
Emersonian belief. Cantos II, III, and IV all begin with Farewell to an idea, recalling Stevens concept of the
human idea of order in Ideas of Order and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. The humanizing functions of the
mother and father in canto V finally break down, degenerating into a loud, disordered mooch (ibid., p. 358), and
by the end of canto VI all human ideas of order have been destroyed. The source of these orders, the human
imagination, depicted in the poem as a single candle, is helpless in face of a destructive universe aflame, as
depicted in the aurora borealis. The scholar of one candle looks up at An Artic effulgence flaring on the frame /
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid (ibid., 359). But at this point the cosmic imagination of Credences of
Summer reappears. In canto VII, the auroras represent not only a universal destroying flux but also an
imagination that sits enthroned in the northern skies which in the midst of summer stops / to imagine winter
(ibid., p. 360). It meditates(ibid., p. 363) reality into and out of existence innocently, not maliciously, as Stevens
takes great pains to emphasize in the poems finale. The cosmic imagination experiences all pleasures and all

nurturing a spiritual tranquility of mind within and despite the material mutations of the
modern times.13 And he acted out this Epicurean mindset at key junctures of his career,
flouting the northern European establishments all the way down to his final years in
Mussolinis Italy. Like the Epicurus he described in TPP, He defended free-will because he
wished to exercise it in withdrawing from the world, and in not swimming with the
current.14 Or again, as he intimated in PP, he walked the primrose path of Epicurean
wisdom all his life.15
In rejecting Romanticism, Santayana for a time became an unintential ally of American
left-progressive and Marxist cultural critics in his day and now, perhaps, of various
multicultural critics of our day? who defined themselves as post-Romantics. This
trajectory, it goes without saying, involved his re-focusing the topic of aesthetic
Romanticism into a discourse on cultural politics. In this regard Santayana and Stevens
again parted company. Stevens understood himself to be a new Romantic, and concerned
himself with writing a poetry of the American sublime. He commenced this project in the
second phase of his career beginning with a second volume of poety, Ideas of Order (1936),
then with The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), and Transport to
Summer (1947), (which includes Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), Esthetique du
mal (1944), and Credences of Summer (1946).) In Parts of a World, and especially
Owls Clover and The Man With the Blue Guitar, he decisively rejected the political
progressives reduction of poetry to realistic politics. Though Santayana came also to reject
the progressivist agenda, he left on the table his anti-modernity brief with its own conflation
of romantic aesthetics and politics.16
On the positive side of this ledger, Santayanas career-long interests included a broader
range of cultural and theoretical topics than the average practicioner of philosophy in his or
our day. Together with his outstanding literary style, these interests can be appreciated as
giving the lie to certain strains of professional philosophy in the contemporary academy
that trade narrowly in the currency of logical and linguistic analyses, formalistic models of
artificial intelligence, and the like. But on the negative side, he appears to have been one of
the inventors of another unpropitious strain of 20th and now 21st c. philosophizing, which
pains; the aurora borealis symbolizes tragedy and desolation but also change and death as a part of an innocent
earth (ibid., p. 361). Earlier Stevens poems depict unreal gods as projections of the human imagination; now the
situation is reversed; we and our world, it seems, are part of a larger imagination (Leggett, B. J.: op. cit., p. 65).
12
Carroll, J.: op cit., 1987, p. 213, indicates that the culminating poems of Stevens high visionary poetry came
after the death of his best friend, Henry Church in April of 1947; they were expressed in The Auroras of Autumn,
The Owl in the Sarcophagus, and A Primitive Like an Orb in 1947 and early 1948. Leggett, B. J.s Stevens
Later Poetry, op.cit., pp. 65-75, discusses, in addition to The Auroras of Autumn (1947), 23 shorter poems in
Stevens collection The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and 17 poems of The Rock (1954) and the Opus Postumous in
which Stevens thematized the cosmic imagination.
13
Seaton, J.: George Santayana as Culture Critic, in Under Any Sky, 2007, pp. 111-120.
14
Santayana, G.: Three Philosophical Poets, 1910, p. 30.
15
Santayana, G.: Persons and Places, 1986, p. 426: At thirty . . . I had travelled. I had learned something of the
pleasures and manners of mankind, and for myself I had made some progress in the primrose path of Epicurean
wisdom. I had now for ever in my fancy a lovely picture of ancient Greece, and a lovely picture of modern
England; and having begun by fully admitting that all was vanity, I could not be angry with the primroses for
fading or with the path for being short. I accepted them as vain but beautiful, transitory but perfect; and I was no
ready to enjoy them than to give them up.
16
See Fries, A.: Stevens in the 1930s, 2007, pp. 37-47. See also Santayana, G.: The Genteel Tradition at Bay
(1931), pp. 153-96 in The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, 1967.

consists in labeling philosophies as to their national, even ethnocentric differences. In this

respect I think we should acknowledge that Santayanas culture criticism amounted to its
own form of protopostmodern historicist psychologism that is, cultural psychologism.
Somewhat myopically and distortionally, he wielded his club of literary psychology
against virtually all the literary and philosophical forms of modernity, while blatantly
employing his own. I refer, for example, to his writing which traded in the coins of
German philosophy, French philosophy, British or American character and
opinion, the genteel Tradition, English Liberty, Last Puritan, and so on, a long list
of psycho-sociological labels which were the products of his own literary psychology (as
perhaps typified by the subtitle of The Last Puritan, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel.)
Meanwhile of course, and paradoxically, Santayana cultivated and justified his own
philosophic self-image as free of any of these cultural identifications. Even the Spanish
were not Spanish enough for him. His detached culture criticism took the form of a
skeptical aestheticism, expressive of a self-styled cosmopolitan image in terms of which he
claimed to be able to live under any sky and to philosophize in the light of eternity. 17
But here, I think, his writings simply reenacted his foundational Epicurean temperament
which he often expressed in bantering, ironic terms of disaffected cultural neutrality and
narcissistic enjoyment of his own ataraxia of mind. He brought this objective Epicurean
standpoint to bear on his wholesale rejection of the progressive trajectories of Protestant
modernity, whether in philosophical or literary forms.
With specific regard to his myopic view of Protestant America, his self-proclaimed
alienated sense of being in Boston, but not of it eventuated in a distinct cultural animus
with respect to turn-of-the century New England. His early writings reveal him as
consciously cultivating an iconoclastic image, designed to provoke his Yankee milieufor
example, with outrageous portraits of Shakespeare, Browning, Walt Whitman, and
Emerson. In tilting with Emerson and Whitman he recklessly challenged the greatest
exponents of democratic individualism in the annals of political theory.18 As he prepared
to leave America in 1912, never to return for the next forty years, his parting shot was his
California lecture, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, a theme featuring his
17

In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under
whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have the same philosophy (Santayana, G.:
Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. x) cited as frontispiece in Flamm, M. and Skowronski, K. (eds.): Under Any
Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, 2007. See the review of this conference volume by David A.
Dilworth, Santayanas Place in World Philosophy, Limbo, Number 28, 2008, pp. 159-173.
18
Kateb, G.: Democratic Individualism and the Claims of Politics, in Political Theory, vol. 12, 1984, pp. 331360; and Emerson and Self-Reliance, 1995. Kateb cogently analyzes Emersons Politics, Whitmans Song of
Myself together with his prose work Democratic Vistas, and Thoreaus Civil Disobedience, as having achieved
the most advanced theoretical framework for post-Revolutionary War democratic individualism in the 19th
century. According to Kateb, this theoretical framework, which involves a dialectic of political-democratic and
transcendental individualism, has never been been eclipsed in modern political theory. Santayanas laudable
chapter on English Liberty in America in Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), which distinguishes
between democratic and fierce liberty, insightfully (but unoriginally) retails the essential terms of the same
theoretical framework. However, having already neglected the transcendentalist political genius of Emerson and
Whitman in his earlier writings, his analysis lacks the full sense of the dialectic Kateb elaborates. In Soliloquies in
England and Later Soliloquies(1922), Santayanas essay Society and Solitude (pp.119-22) hews closer to
Emersons position, as well as taking over the title of the latters own essay Society and Solitude which appears
in Emersons book of that same title, Society and Solitude (1870). See also Santayans 1915 essay The
Indomitable Individual appearing in Obiter Scripta (1936, pp. 88-93). In the main, the design and contents of
Soliloquies in England, also seem imitative of Emersons English Traits of 1855.

four favorite American Romantic fetish dolls, Emerson, Whitman, William James, and
Josiah Royce. (But it is telling that Santayana never took the measure of arguably the two
greatest figures of the genteel tradition, Emily Dickinson and C. S. Peirce.) Sojourning in
England and then on the Continent he rang the changes on these polemical themes for
approving British readership. Significantly, they continued to preoccupy him into his old
age, as for example in his projects of writing his autobiography and his novel, The Last
Puritan, even when his actual years on American soil had receded into the distance.
In overall effect, Santayana made his bantering anti-Americanism a distinct part of his
publishing career. His anti-Americanism was part of the wider front of his anti-modernity,
his overall indictment of Protestant modernity. Although an ex-Catholic, he posed as a
defender of the moral symbolism of the old faith of Dante; and he found a deeper layer than
medieval Christendom in the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome.19 As we learn from TPP
and DL, he considered the truest of the pagan philosophies to be the naturalism of Epicurus,
with its background in Democritus and its poet in Lucretius. These classical materialistic
philosophic predelictions were his strategic weapons against the northern European cultural
symbolic of Protestant Romantic modernity.
Now, in this paper I will limit myself to the narrower band of focusing on two
representative targets of his culture criticism, namely, his way of interpreting Goethe and
Emerson, respectively. Santayana deliberately featured these two literary geniuses as major
conduits of modern Romanticism. In EGP, he labeled them as absolute egotists. 20 As
late as PP, he described the young Emerson as a sort of Puritan Goethe. 21 Strategically,
they stood for the German and American varieties of Romantic modernity, against
which he set his classical Epicurean worldview.
The crux of this consideration will be Santayanas skeptical materialism. He seems to
have remained on the same page with Goethe and Emerson in promoting his version of the
life of the spirit, namely, his valorization of the contemplative enjoyment of the realm of
essences notwithstanding the psyches material weightedness in its worldly life.22 And in
broader historical perspective, he appears to have shared this orientation with many other
genuine Romantics such as Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Wordsworth, Emerson, even
Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, and the poets such as Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens.
In the final analysis, however, he was the anti-Romantic, or post-Romantic, par excellence.
He departed from all these thinkers and writers in insisting on his materialism, in terms of
19

A discussion of Santayanas bios theoretikos which I am here identifying as falling within the parameters of
the Epicurean paradigm is found in Krzysztof Piotr Skowroski, Santayana Today: Problems and Hopes, in
Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, op.cit., pp. 94-101.
20
Santayana, G.: Egotism in German Philosophy, 1971, p. 39. In a separate study this writer would like to analyze
Santayanas possible adherence to Nietzsches anti-Romanticism in The Birth of Tragedy (1870-71). The parallels
between these two laughing philosophersare striking; however, they diverge with respect to Goethe: Nietzsche
portrays Faust as breaking with the modern Romantic culture, whereas Santayana regards it as its paradigm.
Santayana went on to portray Nietzsche as the ber-Romantik in EGP.
21
Santayana, G.: Persons and Places, p. 178: the young Emerson, a sort of Puritan Goethe, the Emerson of
Nature, before he slipped into transcendentalism and moralism and complacency in mediocrity, in order to flatter
his countrymen and indirectly to flatter himself. In the present writers opinion, sentences such as these, so many
years removed from his earlier life in America, witness Santayanas continued failure ever to come to terms with
Emersons career-genius namely, the full range of his prose and poetry articulated over 40 years.
22
See Porte, J.: Artifices of Eternity: The Ideal and the Real in Stevens, Williams and Santayana, pp. 11-8, and
Dilworth, D.: The Life of the Spirit in Santayana, Stevens, and Williams, pp. 16-22, both appearing in Overheard
in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society, Number 23, 2005.

which his life of the spirit remained an epiphenomenal doctrine spirit as spasmadic
and decidedly wind-blown. Thus, as his career unfolded, he came to reveal himself as a
Lucretian litterateur who took pleasure in his own ostensibly apolitical ataraxia, playing
the role of a skeptical aesthete enjoying a narrow-banded natural life free from religious
superstitions and the madding credulities of the secularizing modern world.
Needless to say, the many shades of differences among the above list of genuine
philosophic and literary Romantics would have to be fine-tuned. Santayana shared
something with Nietzsche, whose chief influences, however, were Emerson and
Schopenhauer. He shared something with Proust, whose chief influences were Emerson,
Schopenhauer, and Ruskin. And Stevens, I have suggested, though initially influenced by
Santayana, evolved as a high Romantic visionary poet in his own unique way.
Stevens postmodern high Romanticism appears to contrast with that of Emerson who,
in the standard account, was a Romantic Neoplatonist in a sense associated, for example,
with Schelling and Wordsworth, while tapping into further resonances of Plotinus,
Hinduism, and the Persian poets. But, on Santayanas own analyses, it remains extremely
difficult to pin Emersons polysemous sense of the Unattainable, the Flying Perfect down
to any doctrinal tenet. He was essentially both a poet and a philosopher (not just a
philosophical poet), and precedent to Santayana after him he rejected the
monological significations of the mystics in favor of the polysemous variations of
imaginative poiesis.23 A precedent to both Santayana and Wallace Stevens, Emersons
exemplary declaration against the dogmatic mystics can be construed as postmodern in
its emphasis on the poets role in providing endless notes toward the Supreme Fiction.
At any rate, so elusive are the rhetorically and poetically brilliant writings of Emerson that
it is impossible to straightjacket them within a single philosophical line.
In like manner, Goethes Romanticism, which traces back to Spinoza, is equally
overwhelmed by his polymathic and lyrical genius, and resists a single philosophic
summation. His vitalistic sense of natura naturans, a clear precedent for Emersons
eludes any of its contemporary idealistic frameworks, exhibiting rather his own contention
as to the primacy of poiesis over philosophical dialectics. If anything, Santayana, while
sincerely appreciating their literary geniuses, appears in other passages to have made the
mistake of pinning Goethe and Emerson down to doctrinal tenets, making
transcendentalists and indeed absolute egotists out of them so as to fit his anti-romantic
and anti-modernity cultural template.24

23

Emerson, R. W.: in The Poet, Essays and Lectures, 1983, pp. 363-64: But the quality of the imagination is to
flow, and not to freeze. . . . Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to
one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all
language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses
are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal
one . . . And the mystic must be steadily told,All that you say is as true without the tedious use of that symbol as
with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric.universal signs, instead of these village symbols,
and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in
making symbols too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
24
Kromphout, G.: The Modernity of Emerson and the Example of Goethe, 1990, focuses precisely on the
modernity of both authors, but without engaging Santayanas cultural criticism.

Stevens, we saw, honored Santayana as one who lived the life of the imagination, 25 and
remembered him in his poem To an Old Philosopher in Rome. However, as Harold
Bloom and others have pointed out, the key to his poetic remembrance of the old
philosopher in Rome is Stevens identification with Santayana as a surrogate for
expressing his own near-death condition. The relevant lines here are So that we feel, in
this illumined large, / The veritable small, so that each of us / Beholds himself in you, and
hears his voice / In yours, master and commiserable man, / Intent on your particles of
nethod-do, / Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness. / In the warmth of your bed, at the
edge of your chair, alive / Yet living in two worlds. In such remarkable poetic lines,
Stevens transformed Santayanas professed materialismThe bed, the books, the chair,
the moving nunsinto a symbol of Stevens own continued approach to writing notes
toward the supreme fiction,as in the poems further lines that declare, The human end
in the spirits greatest reach, / The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of
the unknown.
In the end, therefore, Stevens must be seen here, and in his late poetry in general, as
writing visionary idealistic poetry in departure from Santayana. His belief in the supreme
fictions of the imagination rather recuperated the trajectory of Emersons idealism over
against Santayanas Epicurean materialism. We can say that Stevens accomplished this by
combining Santayanas avowal of the religious equivalence of the highest poetry with
Emersons ubiquitously expressed idealistic sense of a connatural, co-creative, co-operative
poetic ground of mind and reality. The final outcome of this postmodern synthesis of
Emersonian poiesis Stevens expressed in the terms of God and the imagination are one in
his poem Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, and in many other late poems devoted
to the theme that Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination. And the
precedent of Stevens return to Emersons poetic idealism traces back to Goethe, among
others, so that in the final analysis Stevens career has to be seen as acknowledging
Santayanas early influence while eventually subsuming it into another trajectory altogether.
2. SANTAYANA AND EMERSON
While keeping in mind the question of the philosophic value of Santayanas skeptical
materialism, let us now take note of his ambivalent relation to Emerson. Though Goethe is
the earlier figure and a powerful influence on Emerson I will start with Emerson in
view of Santayanas earlier treatment of him in IPR (1900) and in The Genteel Tradition in
American Philosophy (1911); his treatment of Goethe came later in TPP (1910) and again
in EGP (1916).26 Santayana set out in IPR to dismiss Emersons as a dilettantish mystic
25

Stevens, I think, shed light on Santayanas sublimated Epicurean aestheticism when he wrote in his prose essay,
Imagination as Value (1948): Most mens lives are thrust upon them. . . There can be lives, nevertheless, which
exist by the deliberate choice of those that live them. To use a single illustration: it may be assumed that the life of
Professor Santayana is a life in which the function of the imagination has had a function similar to its function in
any deliberate work of art, or letters. See Stevens, W.: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the
Imagination, 1951, pp. 147-48; Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, op. cit., pp. 733-34.
26
Santayana, who never saw Emerson, wrote on Emerson as early as 1886. Writing for a school essay competition
under the pseudonym of Victor Cousin, his The Optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, already depicts Emerson
as champion of cheerfulness and prophet of a fair-weather religion; this essay is the precedent for his
treatment of Emerson in IPR, 1900, and in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911). The 1886

and cosmic optimist one lacking of course his own sense of what later became his
realm of matter. The damaging effect of this repression of the protean Emerson has
been noted by Stanley Cavell, among others, when he wrote:
Of all the moments in the history of what I am calling the repression of
Emerson in American philosophy, none seems to me more decisive, apart from the
professionalization of philosophy itself, than Santayanas marking him as a pillar
of the Genteel Tradition. . . . What interests me here is that when, in The Genteel
Tradition, Santayana describes Emerson as a cheery, childlike soul, impervious
to the evidence of evil, he does not show (there or anywhere else I know that
mentions Emerson) any better understanding of Emersons so-called optimism
than, say, his contemporary H. L. Mencken shows of Nietzsches so-called
pessimism he merely retails, beautifully, of course, but essentially without
refinement, the most wholesale view there is of him.
In recent years this charge of cheeriness has been under attack by, among
others, Stephen Whicher and Harold Bloom, and a more sophisticated picture has
emerged according to which Emersons early optimism is tempered by a mature or
more realistic acceptance of lifes limits and ravages, signaled most perfectly in
Fate, the opening essay of The Conduct of Life, published two decades after his
first volume of essays.27
Cavells charge against Santayanas self-serving skulldudgery with respect to Emersons
alleged cheery optimism is essentially correct, and, I suggest, can be supplemented on two
scores. The first of these requires us to realize that the provenance of Santayanas
retailing interpretation of Emerson in IPR is traceable to Henry James Jr., who had his
own self-serving agenda in impugning Emerson and the American Transcendentalists. 28 A
essay, which shows the young 23-year-old Santayana working with Emersons Compensation (1841),
Considerations By the Way (1860), Experience (1844), and the poem Brahma(1857), appears in James
Ballowe, George Santayanas America, 1967, pp. 71-84. In May 1903 he delivered an address at Harvard during
Emerson Memorial Week, Emersons Poems Proclaim the Divinity of Nature, with Freedom as His Profoundest
Ideal, which also appears in Ballowe, pp. 84-96.
27
Cavell, S.: Emersons Transcendental Etudes, 2003. (References to Whicher and Bloom on p. 254, fn. 8.)
28
28

Porte, J., and Morris, S. (eds.): Emersons Prose and Poetry, 2001, p. 608. Extending the literary animus of The
Bostonians, in which he characterized the American Transcendentalists in curmudgeon terms, Henry James went
on directly to feature Emerson in a review article of James Eliott Cabots two volume Memoir of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1887). James piece, appearing in Critical Portraits (1888), effectively extended the theme of his novel.
The review begins by featuring Emerson as the final and perfect flower of seeds of patriarchal rigidity going
back through the generations of his Puritan ancestry. This heritage, James argues, transparently suffused
Emersons character and his writings. And in this context James repeats a contemporary strain of criticism of
Emersons supposed optimism: There he could dwell with ripe unconsciousness of evil which is one of the
most beautiful signs by which we know him. His early writings are full of quaint animadversion upon the vices of
the place and time, but there is something charmingly vague, light and general in the arraignment.
James disingenously goes on to say: We feel that his first impressions were gathered in a community from
which misery and extravagance, and either extreme, of any sort, were equally absent. What the life of New
England fifty years ago offered to the observer was the common lot, in a kind of achromatic picture, without
particular intensifications. In such armchair-sketched sociological observations, James glossed over Emersons
own literature of personal and philosophic grief as expressed in such essays as The Tragic, Experience, and
Fate, and in poems memorializing the death of his first wife (Ellen Tucker, 1831), his two younger brothers
(Edward 1834, Charles 1836), and his five year old son Waldo (1842), as well as his commitments to abolition and
other critical issues.

decade later, in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy Santayana praised Henry
James for hisclassical understanding of Emerson and the genteel tradition, when in fact it
was itself a polemical piece of his (Henry James) own literary psychology; and the
younger Santayanas account, as Joel Porte has emphasized, seems very derivative from
Henry James.29
The second of these considerations of Santayanas account of Emersons cheery
optimism concerns his overlooking not only Emersons Fate (1860) one of his most
celebrated essays, the impact of which can even be traced to the first writings of Nietzsche
but of an earlier writing, The Tragic, of the early 1840s. The Tragic was Emersons
House of Pain lecture that went through various redactions and formed the background
not only of Fate but also of several of his key poems which dealt with the series of
personal losses Emerson experienced in the death of his first wife Ellen (in 1831), his two
younger brothers, Edward (in 1834) and Charles (in 1836), and his beloved son Waldo (in
1842). The evidence is that Emerson deeply encountered the tragic sense of life in the
various stages of his careerand, moreover, philosophically addressed it more directly than
any author after Schopenhauer and before Unamuno. 30
Slightly to digress, Henry Jamess attack on the American Transcendentalists came out in another context in
his remarks on Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a minister and civil rights advocate who published a
full-length biography of the feminist Margaret Fuller and who became the eventual editor of the first edition of the
poems of Emily Dickinson in1890. In 1862 Higginson had taken command of the first battalion of black soldiers
to do battle for the North. Henry Jamess own brother Wilky fought in the 54 th Massachusetts the most famous
black regiment and was wounded in the massacre of Fort Wagner, in Charleston Bay. Yet Henry James, who sat
out the carnage in Newport, Rhode Island, years later characterized Higginsons activities as agitations on behalf
of everything, almost, but especially of the negroes and the ladies.
According to Charles R. Anderson, Introduction to Henry James: The Bostonians, Penguin English Library,
1984, 7-31, James disliked the feminists and that seems to be the reference to his dislike for the people around
Emerson. Anderson provides readings of the novels characters resemblances in real life which caused a
controversy at the time. Even his brother William James questioned the close resemblance of the characters of The
Bostonians with real life persons.
29
Santayana, G.: The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, lecture in California, August 25, 1911,
published in Winds of Doctrine, 1913, p. 54: Mr. Henry James has done it [freed himself from the genteel
tradition] by adopting the point of view of the outer world, and by turning the genteel tradition, as he turns
everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended,
to be compared with other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the genteel tradtion in
the classic way, by understanding it. William James. . . eluded the genteel tradtion in the romantic way, by
continuing it into its opposite. All this is disingenuous. Santayanas first literary reference to the genteel
tradition is: The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion.
The one is th sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is
all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition. Later the chief fountains of this tradition are
Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an
agonised conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.. Santayana depicts these as
opposites, but says he agrees with the second as a method. Earlier he stated that Emerson, Poe, and Hawthorne
evaded the genteel tradition. He goes on to depict Emerson as in a cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the
evidence of evil, and who had no system.
30
30

Taken by itself, The Tragic (1844) can be read as a prescient rejoinder to the charges of Henry James and
Santayana against Emersons cheery optimism. It stemmed originally from his lecture course on Human Life,
read in Boston, 1839-40; it was published in the Dial (April 1844), and collected posthumously in The Natural
History of Intellect and Other Papers (1893). Though originally uncollected, it was the obvious predecessor to
his major essays Experience (Essays: Second Series, 1844) and Fate (from The Conduct of Life, 1860), in which
he thematised the problem of human pain, evil, and fate in tension with the affirmation of life and energies of man,
and reiterated it in his final philosophic works The Natural History of Intellect (1870) and Poetry and
Imagination in Letters and Social Aims (1876).

In impugning Emersons philosophic credentials, by featuring him as an icon of both

Puritanism and Transcendentalism, Henry James Jr. and his disciple Santayana had their
own agendas. They repeated a strain of interpretation derivative from the critical refrain of
Emersons Concord neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of Emersons friend, Henry James
Sr.an interpretation later repeated by Santayanas Harvard student T. S. Eliot who, also
self-imagingly, sought to dismiss Emerson.31 As mentioned above, the left-progressives of
the 1920s and 30s such as Van Wyck Brooks who had also been Santayanas student at
Harvard coopted his remarks on the Genteel Tradition for their own political purposes.
Both Henry James and Santayana ended up damning Emerson with feint praise, lauding
his personal post-Puritan piety while downgrading him for not having a distinct literary
The Tragic begins with the sentences: He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the
House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in
man on felicity. The first long paragraph is a veritable catalog of the cruel cares of human life. It ends with the
remark that no theory of life can have any right, which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease,
poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear, and death.
In The Tragic, Emerson goes on to ask, What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature? The
bitterest to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny, one in which the
universe is indifferent if not also mal-adapted to human nature. This belief, he says, lays at the foundation of the
old Greek tragedy, East Indian mythology, and the predestination of the Turk. It is a terror, however, that has been
progressively superseded by civilization, and can no longer coexist given the rational accomplishments of higher
civilization. The antique tragedy, founded on the belief in Destiny as an immense whim, can never be reproduced,
Emerson says, in that it has been displaced by the long-civilized doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, or
Optimism, which holds that the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he is a
part. He contends that historical reason and faith have introduced irreversibly better public and private traditions.
But these traditions of rational reflection continually thwart the will of ignorant individuals, and this in the
particulars of disease, want, insecurity, and disunion.
Emerson goes on to say that the essence of tragedy does not seem to him to live in any particular list of
evils. After enumerating famine, fever, inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness, and the loss of friends, he finds the
proper tragic element in Terror. But Terror most appears to certain natures that are not clear, not of quick and
steady perceptions, depressants, persons with natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and
disheveled desolation. Frankly then it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a low region. It is superficial;
for the most part fantastic, or in the appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in
the heart of the sufferer it is always another person who is tormented. Panic, or terror, then, is full of illusion.
He supports this contention with an astute observation, namely, that the most exposed classes, soldiers, sailors,
paupers, are nowise destitute of animal spirits. The spirit is true to itself, and finds its own support in any
condition, learns to live in what is called calamity, as easily as in what is called felicity, as the frailest glass-bell
will support a weight of a thousand pounds of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same.
With this compensating thought and in keeping with his insistence on the progressive achievements of human
civilization, Emerson segues to a series of historical reflections. He first cites the countenances of sublime
tranquility of the Egyptian sphinxes as very old symbols of the higher register of the human mind. To this he adds
the ideal beauty of the genius of Greek civilization, which, he says, was true to human nature, too. Learning
these historical examples, our own lives demand of us an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes and ears, and free
hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and the genius of our life. Accordingly, we must walk as guests of
nature, not impassioned, but cool and disengaged. All melancholy, as all passion, to the contrary, belongs to
the exterior life, where a man is not grounded in the divine life by his proper roots. If a man is centred, he
discerns the impassable limits of perversity and profligacy, and can respond to deal with it: He sees already in
the ebullition of sin, the simultaneous redress.
This pragmatic consideration is another application of Emersons logic of compensation. There are particular
reliefs to human calamities, he says, for the world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of exaggeration.
Time is the consoler, the rich carrier of all changes: it dries the freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new
costumes, new roads, on our eye, new voices on our ear. Time, in the metamorphoses of Nature, acts as a drying
wind into the distressed seed-field of our thoughts.
Again there is a positive aspect of the law of polarity that Temperament resists the impression of pain. He
details how this is true in individual cases of sufferers. Most suffering is only apparent to the outside observer, who
cannot see the self-adapting strength, the mysterious counterbalance Nature supplies in individual cases.

style (as Henry James charged!) nor a coherent worldview (Santayana). (But did they, or
any of his other critics, have a more cogent philosophic resolution of the problem of
evil?) But my point there is that Henry James and Santayana egregiously misreported
Emerson, by way of failing to take note of Emersons The Tragic and Fate and his
overall fundamental binary of fate and power. Neither writer dealt with the fact that the
dialectic of fate and power subtended the considerable amount of Emersons mid- and
late phase works such as The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), The
Natural History of Intellect (1870), and Letters and Social Aims (1876), which, together
with a second volume of poetry, amounted to an enormous literary and philosophic
accomplishment on Emersons part.32
However, as I have observed the issue is Santayanas own skeptical materialism. In
his later theoretical career, Santayana articulated his own ontological categories of
existence and essence, the realms of which stylistically involved his constant
oscillation between the two poles of matter and spirit. His realm of spirit played the
twin Epicurean roles of supplying the transcripts of animal action and of care-free flights of
the contemplative imagination. But mutatis mutandis, these polarities corresponded to
Emersons binary of power and fate. Power for Emerson connoted the active forces of
intellect, of aesthetic and religious imagination, and of moral character, as these could play
productive roles in counteracting and transforming the brutal resistances and contingencies
of the physical world. In his later writings Emerson continued to develop this positive
humanism set within the metamorphoses and polarities of Nature. Power for Emerson
also connoted his central teaching of the connaturality, or affinity of mind and nature
therefore of the minds ability, thanks to its evolutionary past, to adapt to and co-operate
with nature which seems to subsume Santayanas doctrine of animal faith in a wider
framework. It can be said that Santayanas full-blown doctrinal formulations in his
Realms of Being established a like binary of fundamental concepts. His formulations
even retained Emersons sense, articulated in the essay Fate (1860), of the Beautiful
Necessity of both living in a contingent world and reverencing its gifts of possible human,
rational and especially spiritual, prospects and prosperity. The crucial difference, however,
is that Emerson framed this binary of fate and power in idealistic metaphysical terms,
whereas Santayana did so in the terms of his epiphenomenalist epistemology.
Already in his maiden work, Nature (1836), Emerson framed the debate between
Idealism and Materialism head-on. In The Transcendentalist (1842 ) and later in such
other writings as Nominalist and Realist (1844 ), Emerson clarified that both idealistic
and materialistic worldviews were natural human speculations, but concluded that the
former is to be preferred for its valorization of the higher reaches of the imagination.
For his part, Santayana sought to impugn Idealism for its pathetic fallacy, namely, its
imaginative projection of human consciousness and emotion onto the nature of things. But
it should be noted that in TPP he also characterized the naturalistic conception of things,
which he found paradigmatically expressed in Lucretius De Rerum Natura, as a great
work of imagination, greater, I think, than any dramatic or moral mythology.33 The issue
then becomes one of kinds and degrees of imagination, and the relative merits of the
idealistic and materialistic imaginations. Their relation, according to Emerson, is
31

Emersons Prose and Poetry, op. cit., p. 681.

Arvin, N.: The House of Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense, The Hudson Review, vol. XII, 1959, pp. 37-58.
33
Santayana, G.: Three Philosophical Poets, 1910, p. 21.
32

asymmetrical. The materialist Santayana is the perfect example can be on occasion an

idealist, but the idealist cannot reciprocate. In Emersons words in The Transcendentalist,
Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a
materialist.34
In passing, it should be noted that Emersons later-phase poetic idealism embraced the
evolutionary perspective that had its brilliant reformulation in the later metaphysical
writings of C. S. Peirce, who acknowledged Emersons influence on his own objective
idealism.35 In the final analysis, I suggest, Santayanas realm of matter, essentially
consisted in the field of action of animal faith. This doctrine did not, and could not,
refute Emerson or Peirce. Animal faith and animal action remain phenomenological, or
quasi-empirical descriptions that account for pragmatic behavior but fall short of satisfying
the theoretical issues connected with Emersons and Peirces consideration of the scientific
and aesthetic connaturalities of mind and nature. 36
34

35
35

Emerson, R. W.: The Transcendentalist, in Essays and Lectures, 1983, p. 193.

Charles Sanders Peirce, in one of his most significant metaphysical essays, The Law of Mind (1892), referring
first to his theory of spontaneous variation in nature, which he classified under the phenomenological rubric of
Firstness, wrote: I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all
the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism
which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. Peirce went on to acknowledge that his
system had its provenance in the atmosphere of Transcendentalism he had breathed as a young man:
I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies that I was born and
reared in the neighbourhood of Concord I mean in Cambridge at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their
friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from
Boehm, and from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous monism of the East. But the atmosphere of
Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having
contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the
disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified
by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations. (The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, vol. 1-6 co-edited by Hartshore, C. and Weiss, P., Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 1931, 6.102.) On this passage his biographer Joseph Brent astutely comments: Peirce left us
to decide whether he was actually unaware of the long idealist (and realist) infection, or had simply been hiding it
from the incredulous gaze of his nominalist and mechanist fellow scientists. The latter seems far more likely
(Brent, J.: Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, p. 209).
The trail of transmission of metaphysical ideas from Emerson to Peirce goes back to 1870, when we can
presume that Peirce was well apprised of the contents of Emersons The Natural History of Intellect. As a step
toward graduate education, the new young president of Harvard Charles Eliot took an existing program called
University Lectures and reorganized it into two sequences of lectures, each running a full year, and costing one
hundred fifty dollars, the equivalent of a years undergraduate education. These series of courses ran sequentially.
There were seven lecture courses in the philosophy series; besides Emerson, the other lecturers were Francis
Bowen, John Fiske, C. S. Peirce, James E. Cabot, Frederic Henry Hedge, and George Fisher. Emerson was next to
last; he gave three lectures a week starting April 26, under the title The Natural History of Intellect. The total
enrollment was nine. The series was dropped after the first year. Four took the sequence through to the end.
Emerson continued; lower fees were set for each separate course, and some thirty people came to hear him.
(Richardson, R. D. JR.: Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 1995, pp. 562-63.) Emerson gave sixteen lectures between
April 26 and June 3. Bowen led off on seventeenth-century philosophy, followed by John Fiske on Positivism, and
Peirce on the British logicians. Cabot and Hedge came next with roughly concurrent lectures, Cabots on Kant,
Hedges on theism, pantheism, and atheism. Fisher on Stoicism was the last. Emerson was paid $8.75 for each of
his sixteen lectures. (Rusk, R. L.: The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1949, p. 442.)
36
See Randall, J. H., JR.: George SantayanaNaturalizing the Imagination, in Lachs, J. (ed.): Animal Faith and
the Spiritual Life, 1967. Lachs, J.: Are We All Materialists or Idealists After All? in Under Any Sky:
Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, op. cit., pp. 9-13, revisits this issue in astute fashion. He parses the
counterclaims of idealists and materialists, concluding, via his endorsement of Santayanas doctrine of animal faith
in the continuous field of action, that even Hegel was a materialist. In passing, he refers to the steadfast realism

Indeed, to cut to the philosophic chase, a case can be made that Santayana was in fact
no materialist at all, but added his own version of natura naturans to a time-honored
metaphysical tradition going back to the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. As a skeptical
Platonist and Epicurean naturalist, he was certainly not a Democritean determinist; nor did
he subscribe to the mechanistic postulate of Galileo and Newton (so exhaustively rejected
by Goethe, Emerson and Peirce). His realm of matter, which perforce centered on the
activity of the living animal, is rather replete with the characteristics of Aristotelian
entelechy and Peircean habits of nature in the two forms of arrested and plastic tropes
of animate psyches.37 Thus he was not aligned with any sense of objective nature
presupposed in epistemologically reductive empiricism or in the factical empirical sciences;
of the latter, Santayana said that he wishes them joy but they will never get to the bottom of
things. His sense of the bottom of things his realm of matter turned out to be
indistinguishable from that of Schopenhauers sense of the inner nature of things, namely
the Will, as he himself came to acknowledge in his autobiography.38 But in that case his
ontology of the realm of matter fell considerably short of Schopenhauers grand
theoretical system which combined Platonic, Kantian, and Eastern mystical concepts and
issued forth in a metaphysics of art and metaphysical of morals quite at variance with
Santayanas skeptical aestheticism.
3. SANTAYANA AND GOETHE
A decade after IPR (1900), Santayana published TPP (1910), which featured the three
philosophical poets Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. In a powerful conclusion he argued to
the non-reducible insights of the three philosophical poets and the need for the arrival of a
new poet who could synthesize the essential insights of all three. Dantes supernaturalism,
he concluded, proves to be chimerical; and Lucretius Epicurean worldview yields too few
naturalistic palms other than a conservative hygiene of body and mind and freedom from
supernaturalistic anxieties. For its part, Goethes Faust repesents a self-absorbed
transcendental subjectivity associated with the errors of German idealistic philosophy and
of Romanticism generally an argument further developed in his chapter on Goethe in
TTP (1910) as well as in EGP (1916, and repeated somewhat mechanically thereafter).
of Peirces system, one that without his ever thinking that he had to give up his realism. . . [held] that on the last
analysis everything . . . is mind (p. 11). Lachs seems to suggest, from Santayanas materialistic perspective, a
criticism of Peirce here, but does not pursue the issue. For his part, Peirce, a committed Emersonian (and follower
of Schelling) in his later-phase metaphysics,and therefore a precedent for the later-phase Stevens,developed a
wider set of categories both embracive and rejective of Hegels idealism and of the principle of materialism as
well. Santayanas plastic version of materialism can be read as close to Peirces in certain respects, but
ultimately his epiphenomenalism and skeptical Platonism are no match for the theoretic comprehensiveness of
Peirces Emersonian objective idealism, especially on the big-ticket issues of the poetic grounds of science and
art. (Cf. Ibri, I., Reflections on a Poetic Ground in Peirces Philosophy, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society, Vol. 45, 2009, pp. 273-307).
37
Santayana, G.: The Realm of Matter: Book Second of Realms of Being, 1930, chapters six, Tropes, seven,
Teleology, and eight, The Psyche.
38
Santayana, G.: Persons and Places, 1986, p. 239: The Will of Schopenhauer was a transparent mythological
symbol for the flux of matter. There was absolute equivalence between such a system, in its purport and sense for
reality, and the systems of Spinoza and Lucretius. This was the element of the ancient sanity that kept me awake
and conscious of the points of the compass in the subsequent wreck of psychologism. But conversely, in many
transparent respects, Santayanas concept of the realm of matter retailed Schopenhauers concept of Will.

Here it can be noted that Santayanas anti-modern instinct already expressed itself in his
reaction against Goethe. As Gustaav Van Kromphout has cogently spelled out, Goethe was
the first progenitor and the greatest embodiment of modernity itself, and it was his
example that Emerson perceptively absorbed. In this respect Emerson was greatly
influenced by his Transcendentalist colleague, Sarah Margaret Fuller, a leading translator
and scholar of Goethe in 19th century New England before her tragic death by shipwreck in
1850 (another sumerged element in Emersons Fate of 1860). 39
Santayanas polemical interpretation of Goethes Faust took the form of his own
literary-psychologistic fusion of the personality of the poetic genius of Goethe and of the
hero of his tragic-comedy. (Santayana does not give much play to Mephistopheles, who
presumably represented another aspect of Goethes creative imagination. Santayana, in fact,
plays the Mephistophelean role of destructive ironist in his study.) In reality, of course, the
polymathic and multi-tasking genius of Goethe contained so much more than even his
career-long masterpiece, Faust, expressed. But here, as again in EGP, Santayanas agenda is
to conflateGoethes personality and career-work as evidence of modern Romanticism,
and, with that, the degeneration of modern European culture. In both writings, IPR and TPP,
he portrays Faust as a theory of radical experience, arrogant and egotistical in its
endlessness and purposelessness and, of course, as the very mother of all Germanic
transcendental egotisms. The problem here is that Santayana indulged in this
overwrought description as a strawman for his own doctrinal promotions of his recently
published The Life of Reason and other early writings. In net effect, he transformed, for his
own polemical purposes, Goethes brilliant, timeless literary masterpiece into a piece of
historicist prose doctrine. (This in contrast with Emersons account of Faust as a
universally representative work of human civilization, about which more below). 40
Santayanas account, strategically limited to Faust, does not profess to take the measure
of Goethes lyrical genius, his novelistic and dramatic power, wealth of aphoristic writings,
and extensive nature studies, nor even the full range of subtleties of his conception of Faust
as portrayed in Johann Peter Eckermanns Conversations of Goethe, a work praised by
Nietzsche as the greatest work of German prose. It was Goethes more far-ranging genius
that exercised a powerful influence on the early phase of American Transcendentalism,
through the studies of Margaret Fuller, co-editor of Emersons The Dial transcendentalist
literary magazine, as well as through Emerson himself (who learned German to read
Goethe in the original) and other early American Transcendentalists. 41
Contrary to Santayanas radical empiricist interpretation of Goethes Faust in TPP, a
literary reading more faithful to the text should account for Fausts spiritual development
(Entwichlung) in Part Two, which involves his transcendence of the mundane adventures of
Part One and his synthesis of the Gothic world and Greek classicism, and finally his
rejection of the devils magic and his salvation by divine grace, in Part Two. A key passage
39

Kromphout, G.: Emersons Modernity and the Example of Goethe, Chapter One, Goethes Modernity, is a
comprehensive discussion of Goethes influence on Emerson. For his part, Emerson critiqued Goethes modernity
and distinguished it from New England Transcendentalism, in Thoughts on Modern Literature, in The Dial,
October 1840 (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, pp. 1147-68), and again in Goethe: OR, The Writer, in
Representative Men of 1855 (ibid., 746-61). But Kromphout is cogent in showing how Goethes influence was
ubiquitous and pervasive in Emersons career.
40
Emerson, R. W.: Goethe; Or, The Writer, ibid., pp. 746-61.
41
Wayne, T. K.: Goethe, 129-30, and Sarah Margaret Fuller, 121-23, both in Encyclopedia of
Transcendentalism, 2006, pp. 129-30 and pp. 121-23, respectively

presaging this effect already comes at the beginning of Part Two when Faust vows to
pursue the highest human existence (zum hchsten Dasein).42
Part Twos surprising ending which features, against the medieval tradition, Fausts
salvation, also symbolically expressed Goethes musings on his immortal entelechy which
he propounded on various occasions to Eckermann.43 The theme dovetailed with Goethes
central tenets concerning productive agency (die Tat). And the interpretive key to this
poetically symbolized final signified is the mysterious Eternal-Feminine, itself the final
form of the metamorphoses of many female avatars in the course of Fausts birthing
(Entstehen, genesis) into eternal life. By the end of Part Two the Eternal-Feminine (das
Ewig-Weibliche) symbolizes the supreme fiction of the co-operating divine activity in its
42
42

Faust, Part Two, lines 4679-4685:

Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig,
therische Dmmerung milde zu begrssen;
Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht bestndig
Und armest new erquickt zu meinen Fssen.
Beginnest schon, mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
Du regst und rhrst ein krftiges Beschleissen,
Zum hchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.

43
43

How strong and pure the pulse of life is beating!

Dear Earth, this night has left you still unshaken,
And at my feet you breathe refreshed, my greeting
To you, ethereal dawn! New joys awaken
All round me at your bidding, beckoning distance,
New stirring strength, new resolution taken
To strive on still towards supreme existence. (transl. David Luke)

To reinforce this interpretation of the ending of Faust, Part Two, which culminates in the concept of Fausts
salvation by the Eternal-Feminine, we can draw upon Goethes own musements on his (Leibnizian) entelechy (that
is, the souls incessant appetition for its own internal perfection by nature and grace).
This key passage should be correlated with the following passages from Conversations of Goethe which
change the focus of our attention from the character of Faust to that of Goethe himself. Before commencing the
Second Part of Faust, Goethe in 1813 described death as a natural process of dissolution in which the dominant
monad releases its subordinate monads from this union. There is a natural hierarchy of monads, he opined, some
having a stronger potential than others to participate in the creative process as well as to maintain themselves in
existence. I myself, he added, am sure that I have existed a thousand times already and may hope to return a
thousand times again. (Conversation with Falk, 25 January 1813, cited in David Luke, Faust, Part Two).
Then, well into the composition of Faust, Part Two, in 1828 Goethe spoke as follows to Eckermann:
Every Entelechy [soul] is a piece of eternity, and the few short years during which it is bound to an
earthly body do not make it old. If this entelechy is of a trivial sort, it will exert scarcely any influence
during its period of bodily obscuration; on the contrary, the body will predominate, and when the body
grows old, the entelechy will not hinder its decay. But if the entelechy is powerful, as it is in all men of
natural genius, it will pervade and animate the body, and not only will it have a strengthening and
ennobling effect on the physical organization, but its superior spiritual strength will also be such that it
will constantly try to assert its privilege of perpetual youth. That is why fresh periods of unusual
productivity may still be seen to occur in exceptionally gifted men even when they are old; they seem
from time to time to undergo a temporary rejuvenation, which is what I should like to call a repetition
of puberty. (Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 249, entry for 11 March 1828.)
In the following year Goethe spoke in a similar self-referential vein to Eckermann, combining his Leibnizian
sense of entelechy with his hero Fausts philosophy of incessant striving for highest Dasein, and both rooted in
the nature of things:
Man should believe in immortality, he has a right to, it is natural for him, and he may rely on
religious assurances. . . . For me, the conviction of our survival is derived from the concept of activity,
for if I continue unceasingly active till the end of my life, nature is under an obligation to provide me

productive, loving, forgiving, grace-conferring power over against and beyond

Mephistopheless avowal to bring everything back to Eternal-Emptiness (das EwigLeere).44 Thus Fausts incessantly Romantic strivings (Streben, Entstehen) and
development (Entwichlung), as well as those of his pre-human counterpart, the idiot
savant Homunculus (symbolic of Goethes scientific proclivities and of mankinds origins
in the organic evolution of the world), fuse with the generative love of the EternalFeminine. All this goes way beyond Santayanas interpretation of false endlessness.
In Part One, the famous line 1238 contains Goethes hermeneutical principle, as he
portrays Faust as tweaking the New Testament to his own purposes. Fausts interpretation
of the Bible boldly displaces any metaphysics of Logos, Sinn, or Kraft in the words: In the
with another form of existence when my present form can no longer keep pace with my mind. (Ibid.,
Conversations of Goethe, entry for 4 February 1829.)
(In passing, we can note that this conversation sheds light on Faust, Part Two, lines 11958 ff., where the
angels describe Fausts spirit-energy as an entelechy that captures the physical elements powerfully. Faust is
still active in his 100th year).
Goethe then ramified the basic thought in conversation with Eckermann six months later: I have no doubt of
our survival, for the entelechy is indispensable to nature; but we are not all immortal in the same way, and in order
to manifest oneself as a great entelechy in the future state, it is also necessary to be one. (Ibid., p. 331, entry for
the following 1 September 1829).
In passing, we can note that in a manuscript variant of Scene 23 of Part Two written at this time, Fausts soul
or immortal part is called Fausts entelechy. In the finally published Scene 23, Fausts entelechy detaches itself
from its earthly substance and moves into a noumenal realm of transfiguration, accompanied by a Mystical Choir
in excelsis.
There is another revealing conversation with Eckermann that speaks of his character Fausts active striving for
highest Dasein in contrast to the negative action of his counterpart Mephistopheles. Goethe often spoke of
daemonic powers powers of inspiration from higher influences evident in geniuses such as Dante, Raphael,
Moliere, Shakespeare, and Mozart. The passage in question is remarkable for its imaginative alchemy and
philosophical assertion. The Daemonic, Goethe said, is that which cannot be explained by Reason or
Understanding; it lies not in my nature, but I am subject to it. . .
It manifests itself in the most varied manner throughout naturein the invisible as in the visible. Many
creatures are of a purely daemonic kind; in many, parts of it are effective.
Has Mephistopheles, said I [Eckermann], demonic traits, too?
No, Mephistopheles is much too negative a being. The Daemonic manifests itself in a thoroughly active
power. Among artists it is found more among musicians less among painters. In Paginini, it shows itself in a
high degree; and it is thus he produces such great effects. (Ibid., p. 392; entry for March 3, 1831; cf. pp. 394-95.)
I submit that all this is indispensable contemporary witness to Goethes own final sense-constituting purpose
to bring Part Two to the religious and Leibnizian symbolisms that he did. At the same time he seems to have
intertwined these religious and Leibnizian images with a broader sense of Nature, indicative of his long-standing
adherence to the pantheism of Spinoza. At all events, to some extent Goethe distanced himself from his hero Faust
in the course of the play. Fausts burial scene, in which his grave is being laid out, unbeknownst to himself, by
comical lemur-zombies, is witness to that. His salvation, wholly unexpected by himself, comes from on high in
a scene in which Mephistopheles is finally bested.
44
44

In the first Faust Study scene of Part One Mephistopheles introduces himself as the spirit of perpetual
negation whose only element is that of life-destroying fire (lines 1335-78), and Faust recognizes him as the
strange son of chaos, the arch-enemy who raises in cold rage his clenched satanic fist against life (1379-85). To
bring Fausts soul down into the fires of hell, he takes him on all kinds of lowlife adventures. Fast-forwarding to
the scene in which Faust is being laid in the grave prior to his souls redemption, Mephistopheles utters a
triumphant repetition of his own philosophy:
Why bother to go on creating?
Making, then endlessly annihilating!
Over and past! Whats that supposed to mean?
Its no more than if it had never been,
Yet it goes bumbling round as if it were.
The Eternal Void is what Id much prefer. (11595-11164) (trans. David Luke)

beginning was the Deed.45 In the dramatic finale of Part Two we come to see that it too
harbingered the Eternal-Feminines merciful power at work in the universe over and above
but in co-operation with human activity. It works to save not only Fausts immortal part,
his soul or entelechy but Mephistopheles as well!
True to his own interpretive agenda, Santayana reductively underplayed the literary
ingenuity and intuitional networking of these related scenes. He rather depicted the scene of
Fausts salvation as just another one of his episodes along a horizontal line of endlessly
discontinuous experiences characteristic of the modern Romantic mind. Here is the case
of the critic (Santayana) replacing the author (Goethe). Let us rather let Goethe have his
own last word on the interpretation of Faust, Part Two. In Conversations with Goethe,
Eckermann reports as follows: We then spoke of the conclusion, and Goethe directed my
attention to the passage:
Delivered is the noble spirit
From the control of evil powers;
Who ceaselessly doth strive will merit
That we should save and make him ours:
If Love celestial never cease
To watch him from its upper sphere;
The children of eternal peace
Bear him to cordial welcome there. (lines 11934-11941)
In these lines, said he, is contained the key to Fausts salvation. In Faust
himself there is an activity that becomes constantly higher and purer to the end,
and from above there is eternal love coming to his aid. This harmonizes perfectly

Mephistopheles key lines concerning the Eternal-Void are expressed in the subjective case (Ich liebte mir
dafr das Ewig-Leere). As we have seen, it is to be trumped by the last lines of the entire play, das EwigWeibliche / Zieht uns hinan (Eternal-Womanhood / Draws us on high). Goethe clearly intended this final
confrontation of das Ewig-Leere (The Eternal Void) and das Ewig-Weibliche (Eternal-Womanhood) which, in
logical form, represents the sublation of Mephistopheles negativity in the higher positivity of Fausts salvation.
But again, we must note that Faust, for all his incessant labors and magical adventures, did not achieve his own
salvation. He is redeemed through the loving intercession of Gretchen, who personifies the Eternal-Feminine more
decidedly than Helen of Troy and all the other human and mythological female characters of the play.
45
45

Faust, Part One, lines 1224 ff. :

In the beginning was the Word; why, now [das Wort]
Im stuck already! I must change that; how?
Is then the word so great and high a thing?
There is some other rendering,
Which with the spirits guidance I must find.
We read: In the beginning was the Mind. [der Sinn]
Before you write the first phrase, think again;
Good sense eludes the overhasty pen.
Does mind set worlds on their creative course?
It means: In the beginning was the Force, [die Kraft]
So it should bebut as I write this too,
Some instinct warns me that it will not do.
The spirit speaks! I see how it must read,
And boldly write: In the beginning was the Deed. [die Tat]. (trans. David Luke).

with our religious views; according to which we can obtain heavenly bliss, not
through our own strength alone, but with the assistance of divine grace.
You will confess that the conclusion, where the redeemed soul is carried up,
was difficult to manage; and that, amid such supersensual matters about which we
scarcely have even an intimation, I might easily have lost myself in the vague if
I had not, by means of sharply-drawn figures, and images from the Christian
Church, given my poetical design a desirable form and substance. 46
These are Goethes own words in 1831 on the final signified of his Faust. And
according to Goethes own paralipomena, his earliest plans for Faust, dating from 1770-75,
already included a conception both of the Helena story and of Fausts salvation, both of
which became significant features of Part Two (which was only begun around 1816).
Goethes plans here were unique, running against the grain of the received tradition. His
salvation of Faust explicitly traversed the medieval chapbooks and puppet plays which
featured Fausts selling his soul to the Devil; it also reversed Thomas Marlowes similar
portrayal of the perdition of Faust, a traditional denouement that was revived by Thomas
Manns Dr. Faustus.
Santayanas misreading of Goethe is no more apparent than here. But the bigger issue of
interpretation becomes that of placing his Faust within the general framework of his
idealism. According to Van Kromphouts well documented analysis, Goethes way of
thinking reversed Plotinian emanationism and Spinozan pantheism by considered nature as
completing spirit; in Emersons analogous version, spirit achieves natural embodiment
in the sense that the world realizes the mind. In ontological focus, both writers
emphasized co-operative ripeness and fruition, a theme played out constantly in their
respective poetics of the fullness of time in the eternal moment (Der Augenblick ist
Ewigkeit). As Goethe said to Eckermann: Every moment has infinite worth because it is
representative (Reprsentant) of all eternity. Similar passages occur in Emerson; the point
governs one of his favorite poems, Days.47 Another mode of essential (ontological)
46

Eckermann, op. cit., p. 413.

Kromphout, G.: op. cit., Ch. Three, The Critique of Idealism, is built on a preceding chapter which documents
Emersons deep assimilation of Goethes nature pantheism, itself an organic rerendering of Spinoza. He shows
that both Goethe and Emerson are on the same page in spelling out the implications of their Idealism which,
while investing in Platonic and Neo-Platonic tropes, is ultimately not emanationistic in the traditional sense.
Kromphout cites Goethe to the effect of inverting the hierarchical order of Plotinian emanationism. This
interrpretation accounts for much that is most characteristic of Goethefor instance, his identification of truth
with fruitfulness (Was fruchtbar ist, allein is wahr); his claim that the essence of human nature requires
productivity of expression; that the historical realization of an Idea is the only test of its truth or falsehood; his
indifference to anything unlikely to advance (frdern) his development. Unlike Hegel, to Goethe nature is not a
defection (Abfall) from the Idea, but rather its necessary incarnation. Spirit and matter are co-dependent.
Kromphout says that Emersons text occasionally reflects Goethes influence in this regard, as when he speaks of
the co-operation of Man and Nature. Cf. Emersons Days creep by, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised
things . . . ending with a celebration of the arrival of inconceivably remote purpose and lawsof Spiriton
the shores of Being and into the ripeness and domain of Nature (cited in Kromphout, ibid., p. 47.). In his address
The Method of Nature of 1841, Emerson, wrote: The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last
victory of intelligence. . . An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen
(Emerson, Essays and Lecutres, p. 122). In Nature (1844), Man carries the world in his head, the whole
astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain,
therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets (ibid., p. 548); or again, The world is mind precipitated,
and the volitile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of
the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized,
47

productivity is action (die Tat), as in Fausts struggle to translate St. John in lines 1224-37.
Im Anfang war die Tat reaches fruition at the end of Part Two, where deficiency (das
Unzulngliche) and ineffability (das Unbeschreibliche) find their culminating divine
realization in event and deed (hier wirds Ereignis . . . / Hier ists getan, lines 12106-9).48
As Emerson came to appreciate, the entirety of Faust, Parts One and Two, was Goethes
self-expression of his own power of archetypal poiesis featuring the realization of essential
Ideas in nature. Its fantastic characters (Chirons, Griffins, Sirens, Sea Nymphs, Phorcyads,
Leda and her daughter Helena, Proteus, Nereus, Galatea, and a score of others), he wrote,
are eternal entities, as real today as in the first Olympiad. Emerson goes on to praise
Goethes productive imagination as follows: Much revolving them he writes out freely his
humour, and gives them body to his own imagination. And though that poem be as vague
and fantastic as a dream, yet it is much more attractive than the more regular dramatic
pieces of the same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from
the routine of customary images,awakens the readers invention and fancy by the wild
freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shock of surprise. 49
But Faust was not only Goethes phantasmogoria of imagination, as he wrote in the
Prelude; it also represented his basic philosophy. The ultimate surprise and final signified
turn out to be Fausts salvation through the intercession of Gretchen, signifying his central
doctrine of the fruition of creative striving. But even there, it should be noted that just as
Mephistopheles proclaims her eternal damnation in the closing scene of Part I, a surprising
voice from on high Ist gerettet! (She is saved! line 4612) announces her salvation,
preparing the way for Fausts salvation at the end of Part II.
Faust, then, was not a radical empiricist endlessly episodic tragedy, but rather an
expression of the metamorphoses and prosperous issues of productive activity. It evades the
normal conventions of continuous plot and moral character-formation in its time-free
profusion of symbolic correspondences, its multidimensionality of chthonic, terrestrial, and
celestial horizons, and its kaleidoscopic free play of wit and irony. All of this Santayana, of
course, could relate to as literary work, but the exigency of his portrayal of Goethes work
as symbolic of modern Romanticism in contrast with the preferred cultural symbolics
man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated (ibid., p. 55).
48
48

Faust, Part Two, final lines:

Alles Vergngliche,
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulngliche,
Hier wirds Ereignis;
Das Unbeschriebliche,
Hier ists getan;
Das Ewig-weibliche,
Zieht uns hinan.

All that must disappear

Is but a parable;
What lay beyond us, here
All is made visible;
Here deeds have understood
Words they were darkened by;
Eternal Womanhood
Draws us on high. (12104 ff.) (trans. David Luke)
49
Emerson, R. W.: The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode, p. 133.

of Lucretius and Dante in TPP straightjacketed his interpretation. He reduced it to the

terms of his cultural psychologism. And he misinterpreted the final signification of Faust as
a whole, which consisted in the interplay of the terms of Streben, Entwicklung, Sehnsucht in
the linkage between the lines of Im Anfang war die Tat of Part One and the final lines of
Part Two, hier wirds Ereignis . . . / Hier ists getan.
In EGP (1916), Santayana had a chance to do better with Goethe. However, his account
of Goethe there begins with labeling him an instinctive egotist and ends with his
grouping Goethe and Emerson together as absolute egotists,both figures falling prey to
his culturalistic mis-interpretations that converted literary genius into historicist,
sociological categories.
4. CONCLUSION
Santayanas mis-interpretation of Goethes Faust imposed a historicist straightjacket of
modern Romanticism on a timeless literary masterpiece. Like his polemical account of
Emerson, his interpretation of Goethe and of both as symbols of his bte noire, northern
European Protestant modernity enacted his own anti- or post-Romantic philosophy
originally formulated in the terms and presuppositions of his Epicurean life of reason, an
advocacy which later flowered in the production of his SAF and the four volumes of his
Realms of Being.
But I have stressed above that his own account of human experience, comprised of the
two factors of skepticism and animal faith, also apotheocizes the life of the imagination,
though on an epiphenomenal ground. Santayana ostensibly agreed with Goethes and
Emersons vitalistic conceptions of nature (natura naturans), their anti-dogmatism, antirationalism, anti-empiricism, and their attendant senses of spontaneity and open-ended play
of the imagination, and not in terms of a progressive politics of either a bourgeois or
Marxist sort, but in pursuit of the ideals of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. His
naturalism was a function of his synthesis of pragmatism, which he inherited from W.
James, and idealism, which he inherited from Royce, and never an extravagant
metaphysical doctrine. But Santayana went crucially beyond James and Royce in adding his
skeptical Platonism to his naturalistic perspective. This combination of skeptical Platonism
and materialistic naturalism converged in his bottomline Epicureanism. To be sure, it is a
rare combination. My thesis has been that this rare philosophic combination allowed him
consistently to advance both his life of reason and life of the spirit as strategic
components of his anti-Romanticism.
But we have seen that these two trajectories of the life of reason and of the
spiritual life the latter in the form of endorsing the highest poetry that takes the place
of religion were already the front and center idealistic contributions of Goethe and
Emerson. In its own way Santayanas philosophy shadowed their Romanticism of
experience free of the dogmas of the past and grounded in a vital naturalism. In this respect
Santayana can be regarded as a proto-postmodern who opened the door to Wallace
Stevens, who certainly went on to write his share of the highest poetry, featuring the task
of the pure imagination to write the mythology of modern earth which supplanted the
exhausted traditional imaginations of heaven and hell. Stevens may even be regarded as the

poet Santayana hailed at the conclusion of TPP who would unite the idealism of Dante, the
naturalism of Lucretius, and the romanticism of Goethe.
Stevens early-phase poetry was profoundly indebted to Santayanas sublimated
hedonistic aestheticism. But in the end Stevens parted company from Santayana. The final
phase of Stevens poetic career rather has something in common with the final signified
of Goethes Faust, Part Two. Stevens consciously re-rendered Goethes and Emersons
Romanticism in the terms of the exquisite truth of belief in a fiction knowing that it is a
fiction, or again, of the life of the pure and radiant imagination the sphere of
poiesis that ambiguously aligns with the divine imagination, as in one of Stevenss most
potent poetic lines, God and the imagination are one. 50 The redemption of Faust in
Christian symbolism effected by the decidely un-Christian Goethe has much of the same
postmodern high romantic flavor.
To summarize, my thesis has been that Santayana downplayed Emerson and Goethe for
his own self-imaging purposes as a rising philosopher and cultural critic. He was hopelessly
not at home in Boston and increasingly articulated an unheimlich anti-modern bias in a
strange mixture of brilliant prose writing combined with nattering nabobs of negative
cultural criticism. In so doing he contributed as much as any prominent figure of his day to
the nationalization of philosophy which has the baneful effect of reducing philosophy to
culture studies as multicultural identity politics. In this he appears to have taken a page
out of Henry James Jr.s own literary project at the expense of Emerson and the
Transcendentalists of the generation before him.
On the positive side, however, Santayana played a significant transitional role in
promoting, however unintentionally, the postmodern high Romanticism of Wallace Stevens.
Stevens came to re-express Santayanas teaching that the highest poetry is religion
without practical efficacy and metaphysical illusion. But Stevens ended by endorsing
Emersons idealism as he transformed Santayanas equation of high poetry and religion in
his depiction of the poetic imagination as consisting of notes toward the supreme fiction.
The peculiarity of Stevens postmodern high Romanticism is that it expounds this radical
final signified, namely, that Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination, not
as an object of belief but as the activity of the co-operating divine and human imaginations.
This was an idealistic expression of poiesis or Poetry is the supreme fiction,
madame that goes in another direction than the old philosopher in Romes Epicurean
worldview.
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50

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majesty of meditation, / That comes and goes in silences of its own (CP, pp. 517-18). Cf. note 12 above.

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