Wilder Cites 'Independence' Theme of American Classics

Classical American literature is indigenous to America and largely free of foreign influence, Thornton Wilder declared last night in the first of four Charles Eliot Norton lectures.

Totally New View

Early settlers chose the American continent and "burned their boats behind them," Wilder said. Out of their independence grew the writings of Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Emily Dickenson, which expressed a "totally new view of the human situation."

The Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry spoke before an enthusiastic audience of 800 in New Lecture Hall.

The new continent was one of "surprise, shock, triviality, and grandeur," and it required a new language. The American classicists, said Wilder, found this new language by inventing an American "grand style."

Of them all, Melville best exemplified this style in his consistent use of concrete language and novel phraseology. Wilder described Melville's symbolism as still disputed by scholars but strong because of its specific imagery. "The fireside talks" of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilder said, are a modern example of the "grand style."

Americans Discard Conventions

The American classics, Wilder claimed, speak to a cosmic "man," unlike much Continental literature of the 18th and 19th centuries which addressed particular nationalities. It is a literature which discarded the conventions of "time secession," recognizing that experience is not regulated by a chronological order of events, and thus opening a new sphere of psychological narration.

It is a literature, Wilder believes, whose core is the independent and imaginative spirit of pilgrims and immigrants, of free men "committed to an idea, not an environment."

Wilder will give the second lecture of the series, entitled "Thoreau, or the Bean-Row in the Wilderness," Wednesday. "Emily Dickinson, or the Articulate Inarticulate" will follow on November 29, and the final lecture, "Walt Whitman and the American Lonliness," will be given December 9.

All the talks will be held in New Lecture Hall.