ABSTRACT
Ralph Waldo Emerson was forced to recognize, earlier enthusiasm could look like illusion — the product of quixotic "moods" and not of divine illumination. For opposed to Emerson's universe of sacrament, Poe inhabited a universe of sacrifice and death. In the mid-nineteenth century, an even more decisive deconstruction of Transcendentalist enthusiasm took place at the hands of writers like Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. In anticipation of Melville after him, Emerson came to "deconstruct" the aspirations of the Transcendentalist self. With the ebb of psychic power - as in Coleridge's "Dejection" or Emerson's "Experience" - identity seemed more like a hollow shell than a potent, creatively-driven self. Dionysius is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche. Dionysius, Walter Otto explains in Dionysius: Myth and Cult, was "the genuine mask god."
