A Comparative Hermeneutic: Coleridge, Emerson, and Peirce on the Inexhaustibly Re-Ebullient Potency of the Creative Imagination

In this chapter, Emerson is “christened” as an “American Coleridge.” It incorporates Peirce’s contributions into a comparative hermeneutic of the creatively re-ebullient imagination, famously thematized by Coleridge and later advanced by Emerson. Coleridge’s Romanticism was deeply embedded in a Platonic-Kantian-Christian worldview that grounded the poetic within a supersensible moral faculty. Emerson, moving beyond the Aqua Regia, the golden solvent of theological liturgy and Coleridge’s churchmanship, instead pursued a bottom-line semiosis of an immanent monistic imagination. He prioritized a principle of Beauty, diverging from Coleridge’s dialectical tension between aesthetic and moral consciousness. Emerson’s works inscribed the imaginative trajectory of “Man Thinking” – “Land-Lord, Sea-Lord, Air-Lord” – within the historical context of “Young America.” The Enlightenment-oriented, polymathic Peirce expanded upon Emerson’s immanent trajectory, evolving a post-Romantic cosmosemiosis that integrated and transformed both Coleridge’s and Emerson’s premodern Romantic conceptions of the creative imagination.