Literature Network » Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sage and the self-promoter

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From: Humanities
Date: 20030501
Author:Galvin, Rachel

ON THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON'S BIRTH, WE LOOK AT A FAMOUS LITERARY CONTROVERSY.

"I was simmering, simmering, and Emerson set me to a boil," Walt Whitman once wrote. The two very different men, one known as the Sage of Concord and one described by a contemporary as "Bacchus-browed," shared an unlikely affinity. They exchanged letters in the 1850s, during a time when the nation's literature first developed its own distinctly American voice.

"The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the ...

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