Search

“The american scholar” descends to us as literature, but for the more than two hundred auditors who filled the First Parish Church in Cambridge on August 31, 1837, as for the speaker himself, the address was a singular dramatic occasion. “An event without any former parallel in our literary annals,” James Russell Lowell recalled years later: “What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!” In the provincial Boston world of 1837, Lowell's “event” — a picturesque memory exhumed from the literary scrapbook and fondly patronized — gave promise of being an “event” in Michel Foucault's sense as well: “not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.” “The young men went out” from the church, remarked Oliver Wendell Holmes, “as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”