The Audacious American Trinity

No matter how far I stray, I return always to the Audacious American Trinity: Father Emerson; Thoreau, his black sheep son; and the ever elusive Holy Ghost poet Walt Whitman.

Lurking in the shadows, of course, is Herman Melville: a Gnostic nay-sayer with Shakespearean ambitions and, nearly, Shakespearean size, who keeps me honest.

But those 19th century ecstatics of the Eastern seaboard, two of whom were alumni of Harvard College (can anyone imagine such daimonic genius to emerge from the classrooms of Harvard now?), and the mysterious third, from the New York island and an autodidact entire, summon me into their presence again and again and again.

I sometimes regret that I did not devote my whole life to their study, and then it occurs to me that, in fact, I did. Everything else has been a kind of punctuation, a pause and caesura, but one that fertilizes the American soil from which I have sprung. That soil, Appalachian and, so, somewhat poor and thin, is in need of enrichment from the peat bogs of coastal regions and the silt-rich Father of Waters (and, hence, the frequent visitations from Faulkner and Twain).

But, at the last, my estate will be handled by the firm of Emerson, Thoreau, & Whitman; my mortal remains commended to their care.