Emerson and the Rhetoric of Belief

Abstract

Kenneth Marc Harris. Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate, Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978. 194+ xi pp. Joel Porte. Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. 361 + xxix pp. David Porter. Emerson and Literary Change. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978. 232 + xvi pp. William J. Scheick. The Slender Human Word: Emerson's Artistry in Prose. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1978. 162 + xiv pp. R, A. Yoder. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978. 240 + xiv pp. Emerson, despite the reverence given him for over a century, remains an elusive figure in American letters. In his own lifetime he was considered a moral sage and a quasi-religious leader for an entire region of the United States, and later he became the Spokesman for American Ideals, particularly as he popularized individualism and democracy. Still later, beginning in the 1930s, the critical revival of Emerson studies sought to make readers con- scious that Emerson was a man of worthy intellectual ideas as well.1 These studies were not, however, without major difficulties. First, if they hailed Emerson as a thinker, they had to contend with the fact (which was often treated as a reason for his historical importance) that Emerson was hardly original and picked up his terms and ideas, so it was said, from Coleridge, Wordsworth and Kant, as well as from Orientals, Neo-Platonists and hosts of lesser lights, past and contemporary. But more importantly, if readers managed to excuse this "source-hunting" approach, it remained difficult for moderns to take Emerson seriously.