SOURCE: “Making the Sublime Mechanical: Henry Blake Fuller's Chicago,” in American Studies, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Spring, 1973, pp. 83-93.

In the following essay, Szuberla examines Fuller's use of the urban modern landscape in The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession.

“We need Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote in a journal entry, “and cities give the human senses not room enough.”¹ That cities stifle the human senses has seemed a self-evident truth for a diverse number of American thinkers. This commonplace of agrarian thought, expressed by Jefferson, Henry Adams, Frederick Jackson Turner and others, reinforces the native notion that this country's open spaces and virgin land generate freedom and spiritual redemption. And so, Emerson's presumptive use of the all inclusive “we”—no less than Turner's famed frontier thesis—implicitly denies that writers, artists, or the ordinary city-dweller could experience the city as a place where the human senses are liberated...