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This thoughtful study (fruit of considerable reading, as the extensive notes and bibliography testify) aims to combine a sophisticated critical approach to a particular literary phenomenon with psychological insights into the analysis of symbol and myth. The blend is not new—the
author generously acknowledges many other writers in the same field, most notably Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams and Harold Bloom—but his own carefully evolved method of applying hermeneutical amplification to the detailed study of particular texts creates a useful conjunction likely to stimulate those engaged in either discipline. He is at pains to make clear that he is not concerned to fashion any kind of psycho-history of those authors whom he treats: ‘not because the connections are not there, but because they are oblique, tortuous, and usually beyond the scope of the literary critic’. His aim, rather, is to show a tendency among certain nineteenth-century American writers to follow ‘the pattern of unity-division-reintegration’ and to consider them as part of that continuing Romantic movement ‘to turn metaphysics into a phenomenology of consciousness’ which culminated in the twentieth century with Jung's theory of individuation.
For the English reader this should be valuable, since the American nineteenth century Romantic tradition is strangely out of fashion on this side of the Atlantic today. Three of the works which Martin Bickman chooses to discuss, Poe's Eureka, Emerson's Plato and Whitman's Passage to India, could possibly have engaged our grandparents, but may not be familiar to students of literature or psychology in Europe now. One is grateful, therefore, for the clarity with which the author uses them to illustrate that neo-Platonic paradigm or ‘central and persuasive pattern of thought’ which both affirms and resolves the One and the Many, and envisages mankind as travelling from an undifferentiated state of primordial wholeness to a higher level of consciousness through an asce