The Legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s legacy to American literature and culture – and indeed to the world – was one of ceaseless invention and forward momentum – as he put it: “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

The great American writers who followed Emerson were liberated by his work to look around and write about what they saw and how they lived, transforming the everyday into a vital symbol of something higher and more elusive. Henry David Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond became a book that showed the cosmos reflected in the depths of its waters. The poet Walt Whitman said ‘I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.’ Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz and could write of the other side of death. The novelist Herman Melville took a whaling voyage and made it an allegory of American imperialism and the defiance of nature. In the twentieth century the critic Harold Bloom looked back at Emerson’s originality and saw in it the origin of the ‘strong tradition’ of American poets from Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to John Ashbery.

Emerson’s legacy to American literature and culture – and indeed to the world – was one of ceaseless invention and forward momentum – as he put it: “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

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