Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was a religious seer who rejected historical Christianity in particular and incarnations in general but who never relinquished the prophetic, missionary persona that animated his writings. Although he is indeed a co-father of existentialism with Kierkegaard, for some reason he has not generally been acknowledged as such. --Harold Fromm, Overcoming the Oversoul: Emerson’s Evolutionary Existentialism, Hudson Review, Spring 2004


Recommended reading:
by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

The sage of Concord, by Harold Bloom, The Guardian, May 24, 2003

Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism, by David M. Robinson, American Literary Scholarship, 1998

Mr. Emerson's Tombstone, by Wilfred M. McClay, First Things, May 1998

The drop too much: Emerson’s eccentric circle, by James W. Tuttleton, The New Criterion, May 1996, review of Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, by Carlos Baker

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1891), by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Project Gutenberg

R. W. Emerson's Poems, by Orestes A. Brownson, Brownson’s Quarterly Review, April 1847