G. F. Maine

Emerson's classic essays on "spiritual potential" and "self-reliance" can inspire
readers toward their own unique paths of self discovery.

He moves his audiences away from conformity, greed, and the pursuit of money
to seek peace, love, and beauty in nature and a soul.

('Waxing eloquent' was surely invented to describe his lengthy paragraphs.)

He did surprise me with "Experience." It is fairly bewildering, dense, and depressing:
"It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have show more made that we exist."

It would be welcome to learn what life experiences influenced this enigmatic change. show less

Emerson is an American prophet and is the genius behind the Transcendentalist movement. He foresaw the spiritual renaissance, the direction that America was heading in and was ahead of his time in how he saw religion (as opposed to how the masses saw it) as were all the Transcendentalists with him. Unfortunately, his writing suffers from his overwrought style. It just does not hold up and is cumbersome, very difficult to get through. Where his genius really comes through is where it is show more tightly woven, like in a perfect sentence or group of sentences, where his writing becomes austere and wise. I also love his response to the Abolitionist movement, which is that he thought that it mattered not if society changes, but the individual does not change.

"All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves." show less

To read the essays is to fall into a lost world of beautiful sentences. The fact that anyone could have thought in such long, beautiful sentences that are both substantial and elegant is one thing; that we have the legacy to read now is nothing short of a miracle.

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