Both during his lifetime and since his death, Emerson’s reputation and influence have been enormous. Unlike his contemporary and friend Thoreau, Emerson was acknowledged during his own time as a major thinker and author and as the central proponent of Transcendental philosophy. Because Emerson’s efforts straddled a number of disciplines—among them literature, philosophy, theology, psychology, education, and social commentary—critics and scholars have been anything but unified in assessing the nature of his most important contributions to American thought and letters. Emerson’s writings are so encompassing that they have permitted a wide variety of approaches to their study and understanding. To a large degree, particular reviewers and scholars have expressed the concerns of their own major areas of interest in examining Emerson’s work. But if Emerson’s importance has been widely recognized, few commentators have accepted all aspects of his work as valid, and some—even those who admit his tremendous appeal—have denied that he was a great writer of prose or poetry. Nevertheless, the vast body of literature about Emerson attests to his influence.
The first monographic treatment of Emerson, George Searle Phillips’ Emerson, His Life and Writings (“by January Searle”) was published in London in 1855, more than twenty-five years before its subject’s death. The first biography of Emerson, George Willis Cooke’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, appeared in 1881. Cooke also prepared the first separate bibliography of Emerson’s writings (A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1908). Reviews of Emerson’s writings, articles about him, bibliographies of his work and of secondary sources, biographies, specialized discussions of aspects of his thought, and critical articles and books number in the thousands. Moreover, Emerson is considered in every history of American literature and overall treatment of New England Transcendentalism. It is consequently difficult to discuss Emerson’s reputation and influence briefly, except in the most general terms.
Throughout his life, Emerson’s thought and work generated mixed reactions—sometimes entirely positive or negative, but more often a combination of the two. Many found aspects of his approach radical and unsettling, even when they were moved by his optimism about man’s place in the universe. This dichotomy is found in writings by those of Emerson’s contemporaries inclined to defend Transcendentalism as well as by those who had no particular sympathy with it. When Nature appeared in 1836, for example, Orestes Brownson (Unitarian preacher, editor, reviewer, and writer for The Christian Examiner and the Boston Quarterly Review) wrote about it in the September 10, 1836, issue of the Boston Reformer. He opened the piece, “This is a singular book. It is the creation of a mind that lives and moves in the Beautiful, and has the power of assimilating to itself whatever it sees, hears, or touches. We cannot analyze it; whoever would form an idea of it must read it.” He proclaimed the book “the forerunner of a new class of books, the harbinger of a new literature as much superior to whatever has been, as our political institutions are superior to those of the Old World.” Having defined Nature as “aesthetical rather than philosophical,” Brownson went on to question the logical soundness of Emerson’s denial of the existence of nature as a reality independent of spirit and the human mind: “He all but worships what his senses seem to present him, and yet is not certain that all that which his senses place out of him, is not after all the mere subjective laws of his own being, existing only to the eye, not of a necessary, but of an irresistible Faith.”
The more conservative Francis Bowen, a critic of Transcendentalism, likewise admitted the power of Nature, but expressed a number of reservations. In a lengthy review (“Transcendentalism,” written for the January 1837 issue of The Christian Examiner), Bowen stated, “We find beautiful writing and sound philosophy in this little work; but the effect is injured by occasional vagueness of expression, and by a vein of mysticism, that pervades the writer’s whole course of thought.” He continued:
The highest praise that can be accorded to it, is, that it is a suggestive book, for no one can read it without tasking his faculties to the utmost, and relapsing into fits of severe meditation. But the effect of perusal is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us, uncertain and obscure. The reader feels as in a disturbed dream, in which shows of surpassing beauty are around him, and he is conversant with disembodied spirits, yet all the time he is harassed by an uneasy sort of consciousness, that the whole combination of phenomena is fantastic and unreal.
Bowen charged Emerson with offending good taste, and pointed out that there was nothing original in his ideas. He characterized Transcendentalism as “a revival of the Old Platonic school,” and criticized the “self-complacency” of Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his “English adherents,” who were major influences on Emerson and the Transcendentalists.
Samuel Osgood, writing for The Western Messenger (January 1837), pointed to the peculiar power of Nature to stir the philosophically unsympathetic as well as devotees of Transcendentalism:
The work is a remarkable one, and it certainly will be called remarkable by those, who consider it “mere moonshine” as well as those, who look upon it with reverence, as the effusion of a prophet-like mind. Whatever may be thought of the merits, or of the extravagances of the book, no one, we are sure, can read it, without feeling himself more wide awake to the beauty and meaning of Creation.
But the generally enthusiastic Osgood could not overlook what he perceived as Emerson’s lack of conclusive logic in argument. And Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, herself in many ways the consummate Transcendentalist, in a favorable review of Nature for The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (February 1838), urged Emerson to write another book to clarify the philosophy that the reader could only understand “by glimpses” in Nature, and to expand upon certain of his religious ideas.
