ShiningKnight Posted August 15, 2004 Report Share Posted August 15, 2004 He Paves the Road with Iron Bars "Get into the railroad car," wrote Waldo Emerson in 1832, "and the Ideal Philosophy takes place at once. Matter seems compromised." Emerson was a bel inconnu who "snickered at embarrassing moments." He had "the mouse in his chest." It was TB. The doctor was called Dr. Frisbie. Waldo "had no taste for comedy," wrote Gay Wilson Allen in the biography, and disliked complex trope. In Rome, he thought Pope Gregory XVI was "millinery and imbecility." Nature grew slowly out of letter and ser- mon and jour- nal, as when he saw "a trail of glowing cinder beside the track; the hissing steam made the traveler stand back." Passing freight cars full of timber "darted by like trout." Current history, art history, and historiography address material culture and see lies and myths, "objects and stories" in a thing such as a tea-kettle, which by contrast is also for Waldo Emerson a loco- motive. Where he wrote, "Hitch your wagon to a star," "wagon" may have meant "railway car" (OED 5b), while "trees and men whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary." Harriet Martineau wrote of Waldo, "In coaches or steamboats or any where else that he saw people of colour ill-used, he did what he could and said what he thought." Yet Duane Coltharp calls Emerson's train "a celebration of capitalist power." This detail can be found through libarts.wsu .edu /English/ Archive/Journals/ESQ /Index.hotmail. I sat in my auditor's seat listening to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Cather- ine Corman, and Jennifer Roberts holding forth on background to all this. I did the reading. ("Objects and stories" above is Ulrich's coining.) Waldo had a "bias toward the concrete," wrote Robert D. Richardson, Jr., in the biography; in the subject's words, the "din and craft of the street." In Liverpool, he "went to the railroad and saw Rocket and Goliath and Pluto and Firefly, the vulcanian generation," he said in Journal Q (1832). In this nation, where whistles soon blew twice a day for Waltham and for Boston, the first engine names were Best Friend, West Point, and E. L. Miller, although the cowcatcher patent, #8996, wasn't until 1852. As it were a house, a canal, a statue, a picture, here in America, the railroad creates "an American sentiment," Waldo wrote; the solid enough ground of Nature — we can't get out of it — is stuff: "He paves the road with iron bars"; but this material, or Commodity, alone is "mean and squalid"; while "the mind is a steam-shop where power is generated no matter for what uses." And, wrote Lee Rust Brown, "The transparency can see through the object to a whole of which the thing is a fragment," as Carlyle was shown the railway cars: rolling stock: flatbeds, passengers, cabooses — flanged vehicles along a stream of worker song all day "for the sugar in my tay" by the destitute. "These are our poems," Carlyle said. Indeed by 1849 Waldo under duress of writing lecture and essay himself surmised he had on the terrain of Nature become a train: "I am a literary runner and Lyceum Express." Caroline Knox He Paves the Road With Iron Bars Verse Press In line 29, the phrase, "objects and stories" is part of the subtitle of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book The Age of Homespun (New York, 2001). Sam Knox provided a midrash on Commodity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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