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Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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No one has a better claim than Ralph Waldo Emerson to being the central figure in the whole history of American literature. All artists distill influences from the past to become, themselves, influences on the future, but in Emerson's case the affiliations reach farther back and farther forward and more generally and consequentially in both directions. He inherits, for example, the inwardness of his Puritan ancestors--their struggle to adjust their lives and the world itself to an order above nature, their fear of losing touch with the immanence of the divine, and even their contempt for formalism in religion and their belief that each particular self is at last the only scene of regeneration. Emerson's nineteenth-century reformation of such seventeenth-century motives was decisively influential on poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. His presence and example were deeply felt in American philosophy, religion, music, and education, both during his lifetime and into the twentieth century.
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