American Errancy is a wide-ranging study of the connection between
ideology and the sublime in the work of twentieth-century poets, all
American with two, or perhaps three important exceptions. The poets
chosen are in debate with the Romantic individualism of Emerson - some
reject it outright, but the remainder have devoted substantial work to
adjusting to the changed circumstances of their century. The link
between Romantic individualism and ideological contexts has preoccupied
much criticism of American literature in the last twenty years. For the
most part, critics arraign this tradition, suggesting that the writers
abscond from difficult political dilemmas to the realm of transcendence.
In consequence, the sublime as category for thinking about literary
texts has been largely abandoned. Emerson's transcendence is considered
at best naive, at worst as providing the nascent corporate capitalism of
the late nineteenth century with an iconography with which to execute
its agenda.Justin Quinn argues that this critical approach distorts the
achievement of poets in the twentieth century: many of the poets
discussed extend the tradition of Romantic individualism, but they are
not ideologically naive in the above sense. Their work anticipated
historicist criticism of the 1980s and 1990s as they began to
'socialise' the sublime, and to explore the ways in which the
inheritance of Romantic individualism could engage with ideological
contexts. For some of the poets, these explorations supported their
oppositional politics (i.e., Allen Ginsberg); for others, paradoxically,
the explorations supported conservative politics (i.e., A. R. Ammons);
others rejected the Emersonian inheritance outright (Eliot, Hill), but
that rejection itself has left an enduring mark on their work.
