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6. George Bush
George Bush (1796-1859) was born in Norwich, Vermont, but attended school in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the family had moved. Here the precocious boy had access to the library of Dartmouth College and spent much time in study. He graduated from Dartmouth with high honors in 1818, and, after attending the theological seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, was ordained by the Presbyterian Church. He taught for a year at Princeton College and for four years (1824-1828) had charge of a church in Indianapolis, Indiana. The association ended when a question arose concerning the orthodoxy of his views.
From 1831 until 1848 Bush held the professorship of Hebrew and Oriental Literature at the University of the City of New York. In 1832 his first work, a Life of Mohammed, appeared, and a year later he published his Treatise on the Millennium, in which he argued that the age had already passed. His controversial Anastasis; or the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, Rationally and Scripturally Considered (1844) attacked the orthodox view of the survival of the physical body. The work provoked counter arguments and hostile reviews. In 1845 he acknowledged his belief in the doctrines of Swedenborg and thereafter was a propagandist for the New Church, in which he took orders in 1848. His first wife, the daughter of Lewis Condict of Morristown, New Jersey, had died in 1827, and in 1849 he married Mary Fisher of New York. In 1854 he moved to Brooklyn, having been for several years associated with the New Church of that [page 310:] place. He died a few months after his retirement to a farm near Rochester, New York.
Bush wrote several volumes of commentary on books of. the Old Testament and edited some of Swedenborg's works. A Reply to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Lecture on Swedenborg (1846) emphasized the value of Swedenborg's theological system, which he believed Emerson had underrated. Mesmer and Swedenborg (1847) was an attempt to show that mesmerism corroborated the doctrines of Swedenborg. A late work was Priesthood and Clergy Unknown to Christianity (1857). Bush edited the Hierophant (1842-1843), a religious monthly, and the New Church Repository and Monthly Review (1848-1856).(1)
When Poe became acquainted with Bush's Anastasis, he was struck by the similarity of its thesis to ideas in his own “Mesmeric Revelation,” which had appeared in the Columbian Magazine for August, 1844.(2) In a hypnotic trance Poe's protagonist contrasts the “rudimentary” body of earthly existence with the more refined and less restricted “ultimate” body assumed after death. [page 311:] On January 4, 1845, Poe wrote to Bush, enclosing a newspaper in which “Mesmeric Revelation” had been reprinted. He asked for Bush's opinion of the article, stating that it contained “some thoughts which are original with myself & I am exceedingly anxious to learn if they have claim to absolute originality, and also how far they will strike you as well based.”(3) No reply from Bush is known.
“There can be no doubt,” Poe wrote in April, 1846, with reference to the controversy provoked by Anastasis, “that up to this period the Bushites have had the best of the battle.” But, he continued, Bush's logical arguments are based on “imaginary axioms.”(4) These observations comprise the significant critical comment of the “Literati” sketch of Bush, which appeared a month later. Most of the sketch is given to a factual account of Bush's literary career and to friendly personal remarks.(5)
A passage in Griswold's “Memoir” reinforces the suggestion of the detailed personal description in the “Literati” sketch that Poe was personally acquainted with his subject and provides evidence of Bush's opinion of a work by Poe. Reporting a conversation he had with Poe concerning Eureka (1848), Griswold stated that he told Poe that “our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will admit to be of all the professors, in temper one of the [page 312:] most habitually just, thinks that while you may have guessed very shrewdly, it would not be difficult to suggest many difficulties in the way of your doctrine.”(6)
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 310:]
1 Woodbury M. Fernaid, ed., Memoirs and Reminiscences of the Late Prof. George Bush, Boston, 1860, particularly Fernaid's “Biographical Sketch,” pp. 1-38; R. W. Griswold, The Prose Writers of America, 4th ed., Philadelphia, 1857, pp. 354-356; the sketch by Harris E. Starr in the Dictionary of American Biography; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880), II, 226; the National Cyclopaedia, VI, 350; Appletons' Cyclopaedia; the review of Mesmer and Swedenborg in the Democratic Review, XX, 102-108 (February, 1847); “Claims of Swedenborg,” New York Mirror, III, 281 (February 7, 1846); and Clarence Hotson, “George Bush; Teacher and Critic of Emerson,” Philological Quarterly, X, 369-383 (October, 1931).
2 II, 67-70; Works, V, 241-254.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 311:]
3 Ostrom, op. cit., I, 273.
4 Democratic Review, XVIII, 270; Works, XVI, 97-98.
5 Godey's, XXXII, 195 (May, 1846); Works, XV, 6-7.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 312:]
6 Literati (1850), p. xxvii.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)