Eternity and the Tired Child: The Voices in Emerson’s ‘Immorality’

Abstract

Notes that, though Emerson’s late essay “Immorality” has had a troubled textual history, in the Centenary Edition it employs a typically Emersonian rhetorical strategy. Demonstrates how, by using dialectic, Emerson counterpoints affirmative and negative responses to the idea of immorality, then resolves the conflict poetically by a radical redefinition of the term. Finds Emerson’s resolution is like the structure of an ode: His redefinition is the epode of his prose ode, in which he proposes that immorality is available in the immanence of the here and now.