Sculling to the Over-Soul: Louis Simpson, American Transcendentalism, and Thomas Eakins's "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull"

Abstract

THOMAS EAKINS'S UNCANNY PORTRAIT OF HIS SCULLING FRIEND FROM BOYHOOD, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), has long been considered one of those exacting naturalistic representations in the painter's sports genre which includes boxers, wrestlers, baseball players, hunters, and myriad rowers.2 Given the escalating interest by art historians such as Barbara Novak and John Wilmerding in God-drenched landscapes expressive of American Luminism, moreover, this portrait of the athlete-as-artist by Eakins (1844-1916) has generated new interpretations of its Philadelphia terrain and, more compellingly, its tactics of self-representation (Fig. 1). A poem based upon this painting by American poet Louis Simpson (b. 1923), entitled Champion Single Sculls -Eakins's original title for the painting-ironizes yet endorses, in its own witty way, Eakins's democratized and all-but-transcendental use of sculling as an American meditation promoting unity of body and soul. Simpson's poem, then, not only illuminates Eakins's poetic of the body but also provides insight into the lingering ideology of American Transcendentalism, especially as this idealist philosophy of the subject has been transmitted from Emerson, through Thoreau and Whitman, to contemporary poets such as Kinnell, Ammons, and Simpson himself. The narrative practice of the poem concisely refigures the legacy of the Emersonian tradition, as well as the Pound/Eliot complex of Modernism in its own quest for a unitary image of selfhood, as my dialectical reading of the poem (and painting) will outline. Eakins's painting of Max Schmitt in a Single Scull has been carefully, if rather simply, described in Lloyd Goodrich's catalogue to his critical study, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (1933):