Summary

Emerson: An Introduction

The section begins with a poem, about the books that have filled Oliver’s homes and life. She calls the authors strangers but then corrects herself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Concord. Oliver highlights that he can be viewed from the context of his time or reinterpreted in the current time. His family was “poor, devout, and intellectually ambitious” and his childhood was peppered with deaths (66). He began preaching after college, but left to England after some years. There he wrote for the rest of his life. Oliver enjoys literature of the extravagant and possible in life. Emerson regularly invited friends to his house to talk together for hours, and this group of thinkers has been named ‘transcendentalists’.

Emerson explored deep and abstract topics through the domestic, social, and collective world. Oliver give some examples, such as “hitch your...