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Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the single most influential figure in American literary history More than any other author of his day, he was responsible for shaping the literary style and vision of the American romantic period, the era when the United States first developed a distinctively national literature worthy of comparison to that of the mother country Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickmson were all deeply indebted to Emerson and helped to transmit his legacy As the leading expositor of New England transcendentalism, Emerson also had a decisive impact upon the course of American philosophy and religion Any serious discussion of such "American" traits as individualism, optimism, pietism, glorification of nature and wilderness, egahtarianism, utopianism, and literary expenmentalism must take account of Emerson's pronouncements on these subjects Because he was an eclectic and unsystematic thinker, Emerson has often been criticized as a superficial popularizer But his historical significance is undeniable, and the vitality of his best work still has a way of making his detractors look pedantic by comparison
For the first thirty years of his life, Emerson did nothing to distinguish himself from respectable mediocrity His educational and vocational choices were quite predictable for the son of a Harvard-educated Boston minister of a liberal Congregationalist (later Unitarian) parish Although his father's death in 1811 left the family in straitened circumstances, young Emerson duly attended Boston Latin School, Harvard College (A B, 1821), and (after several years of reluctant school teaching) Harvard Divinity School His undergraduate record was lackluster (he was thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine), and his career as a theology student was still more uneven: his course of study was irregular and constantly interrupted by sickness.
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