Cursory Observations on Poetry and Cheerfulness (with an excursion on rhyming tetrameter couplets)

Abstract

Perhaps ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise into History, cheerfulness, as an emotion reflective of “the human condition,” has been considered more superficial, more temporary, and less fundamental than melancholy. At best, as when Anna exhorts her son, melancholy from exile in Siam, to “whistle a happy tune,” cheerfulness is a brave defense against the more basic condition. But Emerson demands cheerfulness of a true democracy, upgrading it to a civic emotion of the highest importance. It is in this spirit that cheerfulness can be called the affect of the Fancy.

It is characteristic criticism of Emerson to say that he lacks a sense of tragedy; for otherwise how can he seem so persistently to preach cheerfulness? But suppose that what Emerson perceives, when he speaks of his fellow citizens as existing in a state of secret melancholy, is that in a democracy, which depends upon a state of willingness to act for the common good, despair is a political emotion, discouraging both participation and patience. So when Emerson asks of the American Scholar that he and she raise and cheer us, he is asking for a step of political encouragement, one that assures us that we are not alone in our sense of compromise with justice, that our sense of an unattained self is not an escape from, it is rather an index of, our commitment to the unattained city, one within the one we sustain, one we know there is no good reason we perpetually fail to attain.

Stanley Cavell¹