Ralph Waldo Emerson

Comments & Themes


  • Consider the various ways in which "Each and All" offers a reply to those who claim that Emerson's thinking led directly to Nietzsche's concept of the human "Will to Power".


  • Consider how Emerson's treatment of a kind of meaningful spontaneity that unifies the poet and the flower in Emerson's "The Rhodora" is brought into question in Frost's later poem.


  • Analyze the way in which Emerson's deep understanding of Romantic organicism anticipates Martin Heidegger's later reflections on what he sometimes calls "authentic" human creativity in such essays as "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1950), "The Thing" (1951) and "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954).


  • Consider Emerson's diagnosis of this spiritual malaise of modern man within the context of today's ecological movement and the school of ecocriticsm.


  • Compare "Bachus" with Emily Dickinson's treatment of the same theme in "I taste a liquor never brewed - " (J214, c. 1860).


  • In "Hamatreya" Emerson pleads for the relinquishment of ownership or control over the land, which constitutes another rebuke to the belief that he favoured a pre-Nietzschean Will to Power. The poem anticipates Isaac McCaslin's relinquishment of his inheritance in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1943). Another interesting point of comparison would be Frost's poem "The Gift Outright" (1942).


  • The Poet can be placed within a long line of Romantic reflections on the relationship between language, thought and world which begins in German Transcendental philosophy, runs through Wordsworth's "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads" (1800), Shelley's "In Defence of Poetry" (1821) and leads directly to Whitman's "Preface to the First Edition of Leaves of Grass" (1855) and into the twentieth century in Heidegger's many essays on the same topic, such as "What Are Poets For?" (1950), "Science and Reflection" and "Poetically Man Dwells" (1954). An interesting question is why Edgar Allan Poe, such an avowed Romantic, would want to counter the eloquent argument for poetic inspiration put forth here in his "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). Consider, also, the degree to which Robert Frost echoes Emerson's ideas, though much more succinctly, in his essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" (1939).