ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century American culture—especially that literature—used to seem to us the only ideal place of encounter and work. It was exalting to feel ourselves uprooted and primordial while in the midst of the fraternal commotion of an extremely rich, complacent, and complex civilization. In its very marrow, in the tortuous paths that cross it like a forest, it is nothing else than a study of the poetics of the five greatest nineteenth-century American writers. Such is Matthiessen's happy assumption, to take departure from a fact so obvious that no one had noticed it: the five most significant works of that nineteenth century appeared in the compass of a brief five years. The American tendency to find a spiritual meaning in every fact precedes and includes even the Transcendentalism of Emerson. Melville wrote that there is seen the deep inspiration in the same obscure life-giving forces which the abstract American lust for the ideal has atrophied under the most diverse forms.
