Ralph Waldo Emerson’s immortality in American poetry and prose has never been in doubt. In his philosophy of self reliance, the “American Plato,” it is said, invented the American mind, and maybe the American religion in this nation of sturdy believers. The keeper of the literary canon, Harold Bloom, calls Emerson a “living presence in our lives today.”
This podcast is a short excerpt from Emerson Redux, a full hour show on Ralph Waldo Emerson created in 2006.
A replica of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond
This podcast is a short excerpt from Emerson Redux, a full hour show on Ralph Waldo Emerson created in 2006.
We all half-know Emerson by the other writers he gathered around him in the American renaissance of the 1840s and 1850s – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and most especially Henry David Thoreau, who wrote his masterpiece as Emerson’s tenant on Walden Pond.
To get the feel of Emerson, who can be elusive on paper, I went out to Concord on a brilliant October afternoon with the great biographer Robert Richardson, in the wind-blown woods where Emerson took his walks with Thoreau. I asked Richardson to connect the dots – nature, divinity, spirit, the very wind over our heads, and the voice of Emerson today.
