Baldwin answered Emerson’s call for an American poet by centering the national lie

Evidence

In the dank corners of Paris, a young Baldwin worked relentlessly to make himself into the kind of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined in 1844, one who “shall draw us with love and terror,” who sees through our comforting illusions, “chaunt[s] our own times and social circumstance,” and speaks of the unique genius that is America. For Emerson, “America is a poem in our eyes” and what was needed, required even, was a poet to bring that vision to the page. Baldwin’s vision of America was bound up with the lie that resided at the country’s core. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 158

Categorization

• XREF: Links Emerson’s poet-call to Baldwin’s counter-vision; connects to any work on the American jeremiad or the poet-as-moral-witness tradition.