Emerson, said Matthew Arnold, addressing an American audience, ‘was your Newman, your man of soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination’. Any close resemblance between the two is not, however, easy to establish and need not be attempted. But Emerson compares with the great ecclesiastical leader at least in his power to command a devoted following. He also was an eloquent prose writer, although his poeticizing rhetoric is harder to appreciate in our day than it was in his own. Like Carlyle, moreover, whom he greatly admired, he is a prophet whose message no longer stirs us. But no American religious thinker of his time had anything like his influence or enjoyed such general esteem.

Born, in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard University. At first, though an omnivorous reader, he showed no special intellectual promise. In 1819 he began to keep a journal whose entries testify at once a youthful romanticist ardour and a New England conscience. He himself entered the Unitarian ministry, but doubts and mental depression, accentuated if not brought on by the deaths of his young wife and his two favourite brothers, Charles and Edward, combined with his own none too robust physical health to cause him to abandon it in 1832. Free now of professional responsibilities he was able to visit Europe, and whilst in Britain he met Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, the last of whom alone seriously impressed him.

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

Explicit or implicit in nearly everything Emerson wrote is the conviction that nature bats last, that nature is the law, the final word, the supreme court. Others have believed - still believe - that the determining force in our lives is grace, or that it is the state - the polis, the community - or that it is the past. More recently it has been argued that the central force is economics or race or sex or genetics. Emerson's basic teaching is that the fundamental context of our lives is nature. Emerson's definition of nature is a broad one. Nature is the way things are. Philosophically, Emerson says, the universe is made up of nature and the soul, or nature and consciousness. Everything that is not me is nature; nature thus includes nature (in the common sense of the green world), art, all other persons, and my own body.

Emerson has been called many things, but except by theological stalwarts outraged by the Divinity School “Address,” “radical” has seldom been one of them. Disposed by taste and training to the rule of gentlemen, he was appalled by the Jacksonian rabble even as he saw it impelled by a feeling of human worth much like his own. Emerson's practical politics were instinctively conservative; the political coloring of his writings is harder to assess. It was once commonplace to observe that the literary Emerson had no politics at all and little sense of history as progressive or teleological. Nature and the Soul were timeless; only the outward costumes and idioms changed. More recently, Emerson has been historicized by embedding him within an American world “poised,” as Carolyn Porter has said, “on the verge of the most accelerated capitalist development in modern history.” Surely no contemporary registered the new economic forces more acutely than Emerson did. Yet if the Emerson of the 1940s and 'SOS was construed as loftily indifferent to the currents of the age, the Emerson of the 1980s and '90s has been portrayed as ideologically captive to them.

I wonder if I am the only reader of Emerson who weeps over the death of his son in 1842. I have never heard anyone else confess to this reaction, although the story of how Emerson's “Experience” refers to Waldo Emerson's death is told briefly by Emerson himself, in the willfully perverse third paragraph of the essay. Then it is narrated repeatedly by twentieth-century scholars and critics, who treasure this moment as the most dramatic autobiographical reference in Emerson's published prose: 'In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, - neither better nor worse.'

Chapter 10 charts Emerson’s long engagement with Hinduism, from his college years, when he rejected what he thought of as “Indian Superstition,” to the presence of the Vishnu Purāna and Bhagavad Gīta in some of his greatest essays. In “Plato, or the Philosopher,” Emerson draws from these works the idea of a fundamental unity – “The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu” – and credits Plato with absorbing, enhancing, and representing the “unity of Asia and the detail of Europe.” Emerson’s Plato is a representative of Emerson himself, a man who made lists of opposing East-West properties and tendencies on the same pages where he recorded passages from the Vishnu Purāna. Emerson finds a skeptical strain within Hinduism, particularly in “Illusions.” But he also weaves in the contrary vision of deep, but momentary, insight: “by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little.”

Though in some ways Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802–1882) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) are contrasting figures in the history of American Romanticism, scholarship over the past thirty years connects them as writers whose work articulates concerns over race and enslavement. Moreover, critical recognition that each writer engages such matters emerged only in the late twentieth century, after decades of work that effaced each writer’s political resonance. This chapter approaches these issues through some of the signal trends that have informed scholarship on Emerson and Poe over the past thirty years.

In 1833, Waldo Emerson (as he still called himself) gave a talk at the Unitarian chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland. At least one member of the audience remembered it ecstatically: 'The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effect, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner . . . made a deep impression on me. . . . His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard.' The enthusiastic auditor might have added that the go-year-old visiting American speaker did not receive any sort of fee.

When Henry Thoreau began to keep a journal, in October 1837, he almost certainly did so in response to the prompting of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “ 'What are you doing now?' he asked, 'Do you keep a journal?' - So I make my first entry to-day ” (PJ 1:s). Eventually the Journal became the major work of Thoreau’s imaginative life, providing the raw material for his published writings and filling nearly fifty notebooks by the time of his death in May 1862. When Thoreau died, Emerson arranged for the funeral service to be held at Concord’s First Parish Church, and he delivered the eulogy. Emerson expanded his address for the Atlantic Monthly, in August, and reprinted it as the introduction to the volume of Thoreau’s Excursions, which he helped to edit in 1863. Eventually, Emerson’s “Thoreau ” came to stand as the introduction to the twenty-volume Houghton Mifflin “Walden Edition ” (1906) that has been the standard text of Thoreau’s writings for most of the twentieth century.

Thus, Emerson not only called Thoreau into being as a writer but also launched him toward posterity with the first extended account of his life and career. As we shall see, Emerson’s "Thoreau" was hardly the typical laudatory summing-up of a departed friend’s life and achievements. Enormously influential in defining the terms of Thoreau’s reception and of the critical discourse about him in the following century, Emerson’s memorial was also the last word in a long personal struggle between the two men: a struggle to be heard, to be understood, to prevail philosophically, and to realize the high and noble friendship that each aspired to but despaired of ever achieving. During the early years of Thoreau’s literary career, Emerson played a central role as mentor and adviser, giving their relationship a professional, as well as a personal, dimension that further complicated it.