Emerson: A Prophet Not Without Honour
Unlike everybody else in his generation, writes Arnold Whitridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood, loved and castigated the two different, but closely related, strains in American life and represented the national conscience.
Fifty years ago, if any American schoolboy had been asked who was the most important figure in American literature, the chances are that he would have replied “Emerson”. To support that opinion, he might well have quoted Paul Elmer More, a pundit whose name is almost forgotten today, but whose dicta, recorded in the once popular Shelburne Essays, were revered at the end of the century as the final word on all questions of literary criticism and aesthetics.
“It becomes more and more obvious,” says More, “that Emerson, judged by an international or even by a truly national standard, is the outstanding figure in American letters.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes echoed the same opinion when he declared at the age of eighty-nine, “the only firebrand that burns to me as brightly as ever is Emerson.” And Robert Frost went even further when he expressed the belief that, with Jefferson and Lincoln, Emerson was one of the three greatest Americans.
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