@article{1477551,
      recid = {1477551},
      author = {Corrigan, John Michael, },
      title = {American Metempsychosis : Emerson, Whitman, and the New  Poetry /},
      pages = {1 online resource (254 p.)},
      abstract = {The "transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were,  but men and women are only half human." With these words,  Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates  the formation of American individualism: to evolve and  become fully human requires a heightened engagement with  history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history's  chronology in themselves-because their own minds and bodies  are its evolving record. Whereas scholarship has tended to  minimize the mystical underpinnings of Emerson's notion of  the self, his depictions of "the metempsychosis of nature"  reveal deep roots in mystical traditions from Hinduism and  Buddhism to Platonism and Christian esotericism. In essay  after essay, Emerson uses metempsychosis as an open-ended  template to understand human development.In Leaves of  Grass, Walt Whitman transforms Emerson's conception of  metempsychotic selfhood into an expressly poetic event. His  vision of transmigration viscerally celebrates the poet's  ability to assume and live in other bodies; his American  poet seeks to incorporate the entire nation into his own  person so that he can speak for every man and woman.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1477551},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823242375},
}