...country is continually "awakening" from the slumber of derivativeness. Emerson complains in 1836 that "the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" (Nature, I).1 Moore was herself a persistent critic of her culture's tendency, as she writes in "Poetry,"...

...expressed the typical American inability to comprehend the significance of tradition when he said, "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"3 Of course, we do enjoy an original relation to the universe, but it is never absolute....

..."critical" and "historical," and turned to the aesthetic impulse in humans to determine what is truth.] Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of...to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we have an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight...

...the eyes of those earlier generations, as though God and Nature were no longer directly accessible. "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" he asked. "Why should not we have ... a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"...

...enriching" stimulus toward a new American culture and, eventually, a new American language and literature. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes," Emerson wrote in the opening passages of Nature, seeking to express the birthright for his generation....

...the sepulchers of the fathers," he asserts in the first lines of Nature, and famously goes on to ask "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" 32. Emerson, Journals, undated entry of September 1842. (7). Emerson's scorn for retrospect, sepulchers,...

...I could count on, truth that spoke to my heart, that registered in my brain, that made some sense? "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Emerson asked. "Why should not we have... a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"...

...role of the natural world order in religion. In his essay on "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? .... Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us and invite...

...to a distinct imaginative, and more specifically literary, culture for the United States by asking: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" As opposed to Lincoln's political path, for Emerson neither the fixed Constitution nor any other institution...

...saying that our forefathers beheld God and nature "face to face; we, through their eyes," Emerson asks, "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" This "also" — as in the next assertion, that the "sun shines to-day also," which presupposes an earlier...