Transcontinental Concord

Richard E. Brantley, author of Anglo-American Antiphony: the late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson, draws parallels between the Romantic literary ideologies of the European and American poets. In attempting to reconcile science and faith (what Brantley calls "empiricism and evangelicalism") he recalls the writings of the Amercans Tennyson and Emerson claiming:

They ground transcendentalism in the world, balance religious myths and
religious morality with scientific reverence for fact and detail and ally
empirical assumptions with "disciplined" spirit. Above all, they share the
simultaneously rational and sensationalist reliance on experience as the avenue
to both natural and spiritual knowledge. (1)

Brantley states the the Anglo-American world is typified by this "empirical/evangelical dialectic." The joining together of science and faith "produces harmony through the opposition of voices, the resulting accord is not only more agreeable but more complex than than mere homophony or univocity alone could be" (2).

The ideologies of Blake and Coleridge compliment this choir of contradiction and produce not discord but sublime concord whose melodies have survived for all those, regardless of which side of the Pond they reside, who allow themeselves to tune-in.