Volume 31, Number 18 · November 22, 1984
Mr. America
By Harold Bloom
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter
by John McAleer
Little, Brown, 748 pp., $27.50
Emerson is a critic and essayist who based his work on observation of himself and of American experience. He is not a transcendental philosopher. This obvious truth always needs restating, perhaps more now than ever, when literary criticism is over-influenced by contemporary French heirs of the German tradition of idealist or transcendental philosophy. Emerson is the mind of our climate; he is the principal source of the American difference in poetry and criticism and in pragmatic postphilosophy.
Review, 5673 words
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