Literature Network » Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our stillborn renaissance.(American literature)(Biography)

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From: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and PublicLife
Date: 20080401
Author:McDougall, Walter A.

Waldo--as the seventeen-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson took to calling himself--was one of eight children raised by a stern minister given over to Unitarianism, that "feather-bed to catch a falling Christian." When the pater died in 1811, the household was reduced to a genteel poverty, over which ruled the sternly devout widow and a lugubrious aunt eager to die.

Cold is the only word for it, as the nineteen-year-old Waldo confessed when he wrote, "I have not the kind affections of a pigeon" and "There is not in the whole wide Universe of God ... one being to whom I am attached ...

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