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Open to influence: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Audre Lorde on loss.

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From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)
Date: 20050301
Author:Field, Susan

Astonishing and unanticipated similarities in language, emotion, philosophical creativity, and purpose exist between Ralph Waldo Emerson's remarks about his son Waldo's death and Audre Lorde's remarks about her breast cancer. Both writers experienced and thought about their losses long and hard for the rest of their lives. Fifteen years after Waldo died, Emerson "ventured to look into the coffin" of Waldo as it was being moved to a lot on his own property (JMN 14:154). Lorde struggled with cancer for over a decade before dying of it in 1992. Probably neither Emerson nor Lorde ...

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