Estimating Emerson

"As 'America's Plato,' it is perhaps not surprising that Emerson has drawn a great deal of critical (in both senses of the word) attention. What is surprising, however, is the fact that so much of the attention was given by writers and thinkers as varied as Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, the James brothers, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, George Santayana, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, John Updike, and William Gass. Estimating Emerson collects for the first time the writing of these and many other notable writers as they consider the impact of Emerson on their life and…