Abstract
In a recent review of a new translation of the classical Buddhist text The Tannisho into English, the reviewer notes:
One reason for the popularity of the Tannisho in the American context is the pragmatic approach to behavior within a legitimate spiritual tradition. The layman in American society must contend with the hostile presence of fundamentalists on one hand, and in the “godless garden” of relativity on the other. A strange combination but a threat to religious authority and belief, nevertheless.1
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Notes
Elson B. Snow, “Shin Buddhism’s Essence: The Tannisho,” rev. of The Tannisho, trans. into English by Ryukya Fujimoto, Wheel of Dharma (April 1994), p. 8.
Thoreau“ in Stephen E. Whicher (ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 388.
Thoreau,“ p. 390.
J. Donald Adams, “Speaking of Books,” The New York Times Book Review, April 12 (1959), 2 quot. in Phillip L. Gerber, Robert Frost ( Boston: Twayne, 1982 ), p. 35.
A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode,“ Partisan Review 26 summer (1959), 451, quot. in Gerber, Robert Frost,p. 64.
All Frost poems, except where noted, are quoted from Selected Poems of Robert Frost, intro. by Robert Graves (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, amp; Winston, 1966 ).
The Transcendentalist“ in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson,p. 193.
The Transcendentalist,“ p. 193.
Thoreau,“ p. 392.
The Divinity School Address“ in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson,p. 102.
Nature in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 31.
Nature in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson,p. 36.
Richard Poirier, Robert Frost, The Work of Knowing ( New York: Oxford Univ. P., 1977 ), p. 245.
Poirier, p. 245. Also see pp. 246–248 in which Poirier quotes at length from James on the problem of design in nature from the point of view of Pragmatism. James here tries to offhandedly assert the practical value of superimposing terms like “God” upon the “mere rationalistic principle” of the idea “Design.” Although this passage may have influenced the construction of Frost’s “Design,” James’ attempt at justifying faith is not convincing. And see Donald J. Greiner, “The Indispensable Robert Frost” in Philip L. Gerber (ed.) Critical Essays on Robert Frost (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 234, for another assertion of the influence of James’ Pragmatism on “Design.”
John F. Lyman, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost ( New Haven: Yale Univ. P., 1960 ), p. 159.
Compare James’ thoughts on the philosophic question of design in the passage quoted in Poirier to those on the same question in a passage from Emerson’s “On the Relation of Man to the Globe” which is quoted in George Montiero, Robert Frost amp; The New Englund Renaissance (Lexington: Univ. P. of Kentucky, 1988), p. 34. Here Emerson voices again the holistic philosophy of “Each and All.”
The first version of “Design,” “In White,” which is reproduced in Poirier, pp. 248–249, names the flower as the “blue Brunella” (10), a variant of its Latin name Prunella.
One is reminded of the unforgettable metaphor of the spider in Hume’s discussion of the argument from design. But one also remembers the moral lesson taken by Edward Taylor in his “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” and Whitman’s use of a spider’s activity as a spiritual metaphor in “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
This figuration also inverts the traditional use of the heal-all as a domestic remedy for minor ailments.
In his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost’s characteristic separation of man from non-human nature is tempered by an Emerson-like communion with the night woods. But the poem stands on the brink of communion with overtones of resignation, death, and the claims of the materialist. Compare this poem with Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm” in which the transformed scene is called “frolic architecture” (28). Frost comes closest to a kind of uncharacteristic metaphysical revelation in “For Once, Then, Something” where, for an instant, he sees “something white, uncertain,/ Something more of the depths…” (9–10).
The text is Zohar,the thirteenth-century primary work of Jewish mysticism. The quote is from The Wisdom of the ZOHAR, An Anthology of Texts,arr. by Fischel Lachower and Isaiah Tishby, trans. from the Hebrew by David Goldstein, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford Univ. P., 1991), p. 586.
The parable is attributed to Rabbi Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. This version is taken from Adin Steinsaltz, The Sustaining Utterance, Discourses on Chassidic Thought (North Vale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1992 ), p. 28.
William Connolly, “Why John Dewey Doesn’t Work,” rev. of John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority, The New York Times Book Review,April 10 (1994), 28.
Quoted in Connolly, p. 28.
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems ( San Francisco: City Lights, 1958 ), p. 29.
Compare Ginsberg’s transformation of the locomotive and all it represents of the materialist drive to a perhaps more “poetic” similar transformation in section nine (65–72) of Emerson’s “The World-Soul.”
Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems,p. 30.
For my examination of the probable effect of the issues discussed in this paper upon recent American poets, see Bruce Ross, “Refiguring Nature: Tropes of Estrangement in Contemporary American Poetry,” Analecta Husserliana XXXVII (1991), 299–311.
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Ross, B. (1997). Robert Frost’s “Design” as Deconstruction of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Rhodora”. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Passion for Place Book II. Analecta Husserliana, vol 51. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2549-1_2
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