ABSTRACT
The major premise of this study is that a literature predicated upon contact with unconscious sources of energy cannot operate without conscious patterns designed to uncover and assimilate that energy. In other words, the unconscious energies embodied in myth entail what Kenneth Burke calls a "machinery of transcendence" — literary forms whose function is to transform unconscious energy into conscious creation. 1 If plot, as Northrop Frye asserts in The Anatomy of Criticism, is displaced myth, 2 what we need to analyze is the mechanism of displacement. That is what I propose to do in this study, taking Emerson as my primary example of literary self-consciousness dedicated to regrounding thought in the hidden energy of the unconscious. It is one of my aims to see Emerson as the great psychologist of his age, portraying in his addresses and essays many of the themes which take on more concrete form in the romances and 52poems of his contemporaries.
