'That Spiritual Pepys'

In 1848, James Russll Lowell published the book-length poem A Fable for Critics. It’s the work of a cocky young man. Lowell was twenty-eight and he’s taking on some of the literary panjandrums of the age, many now long-forgotten. He is carving out his territory. Poe he famously describes as “three-fifths genius . . . and two-fifths sheer fudge.” The satire is mild, never savage (which is disappointing). Of Emerson, who remained his friend, he writes: “He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid The comparison must, long ere this, have been made), A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist; All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what; For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.” Emerson was a supremely silly man. He had a minor gift for prose at the sentence level – he occasionally packs an essay into a sentence -- but…