What do you think?
Rate this book
684 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
Emerson was hoping for a 'visitation of the high muse,' for a visionary experience of life-altering intensity. He was after the sort of experience with which he could lift the reader or hearer "by a happy violence into a religious beatitude, or into a Socratic trance and imparadise him in ideas" (352).Yikes. As much as I tend to appreciate romanticism and what I would term a mythic sensitivity, these types of overt ambitions from a writer seem self-indulgent at best and self-important at worst. Do fans of Blake, for example, tend to enjoy Emerson? - I don't know. Meanwhile, I suppose I just don't like Emerson and reading a biography of him, no matter how smartly rendered, will never suffice to enlighten me about what others see in him. Oh well.