...Independence," Emerson had conjured up a time, "when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation...something better than the exertions of mechanical skill."64 He had told the nation in ringing sentences: We have listened too long to the courtly muses...

...this continent will ... fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than . . . mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long...to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." 5 As in language and literature, so also in history: Americans early generated a great deal of historical...

...British, for the influence of European culture prevailed long after the revolution. Later, however, "The millions that around us are rushing into life,...Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves."6 Of greater concern are the preliminary stages of emergence, that is, a literature's emergence...

...free from our doctrinal inheritance and opening ourselves fully to the experience of the New World. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." We must overcome our longings for distant baubles and come to appreciate, he writes, "the near, the...

...inferiority of US art. Despite the intellectual nationalism of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson t"Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close"). a fundamental disbelief in frontier culture persisted throughout much of the nineteenth century. 7...

...years after Emerson's oft-quoted ringing 1837 assertion in his "The American Scholar" address that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," Nathaniel Parker Willis perceived danger emerging from the march of American technology.13 Writing...

...England is the South African equivalent of Emerson's earlier call for a distinctly American literature: Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . . We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . We will walk on our own feet;...

...affectation and artifice. His 1837 address, "The American Scholar," captures his goals most clearly. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close," Emerson stated in his opening paragraph, and after summarizing what the true scholarly habitus ought...

...oration delivered in the summer of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson assured the young scholars in his audience: "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." Two years later, the nationalistic Democratic Review called the propensity to imitate foreign nations...

...ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation...to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . . Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation...