While Nietzsche contemplated the primordial poem of mankind, Emerson considered how America might best be conceived as a work of human imagination and creation: “America is a poem in our eyes.”74 Bloom described Emerson as giving voice to the “American swerve,” where “tradition is denied its last particle of authority, and the voice that is great within us rises up” : Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting of an aim.
