Lawrence Buell began this book when he was 26, he tells us, and now we have it when he is 64. He has had plenty of time to master the enormous quantity of Emerson’s production—the essays, poems, and ten volumes of correspondence, the 16 volumes of journals and notebooks—and not only this but the prodigious amount of scholarly and critical material. As long ago as 1941— with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance—Emerson and Whitman were canonized as the founding fathers of a uniquely American (as distinguished from English) literature. Buell, a longtime Harvard professor, has taken a deep breath and stepped forward with a useful book bringing the general educated reader up to date on where we now stand regarding Emerson.
What emerges is that Emerson was not uniquely American at all, but a major figure in American-European thought who responded to urgent matters that knew no national boundaries. He shared a great deal with Carlyle, Arnold, Nietzsche, and, for that matter, just about every major writer; he wrote in response better than anyone except Nietzsche. Those 19th-century matters have not gone away, and so Emerson, once an icon of cultural respectability—even Boston respectability (see T. S. Eliot’s early poem “Cousin Nancy”)—still speaks directly to us.
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