Famous Quotes | Emerson said that the “scholar...
Emerson said that the “scholar is man thinking.” Had Southerners of that era taken seriously the famous lecture entitled “The American Scholar,” they might have replied by saying that the gentleman is man talking. The accomplished Christian gentleman of the old South was the shadow, attenuated by evangelical Calvinism, of his Renaissance spiritual ancestor, who had been the creation of the rhetorical tradition, out of Aristotle through Cicero distilled finally by Castiglione. By contrast, the New England sage, embodied in Ralph Waldo Emerson, took seriously what has come to be known since the Industrial Revolution as the life of the mind: an activity a little apart from life, and perhaps leading to the fashionable alienation of the “intellectual” of our time.- Allen Tate
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Categories: Critic, North, The (U.S.), South (American)