When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit.
Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.
I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.
William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.
It is curious that the two best-known British historians in the United States are Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, each of whom represents, in fact, a different school of serious historical writing, and both of whom seem to have gained for themselves, perhaps without intending to, a special reputation on the American right.
In America, we may acknowledge Washington and Lincoln as great men, and probably Franklin and Jefferson and maybe Franklin Delano Roosevelt and possibly even several more, but we would probably disagree about precisely what it was that made them great, what it was that enabled them to give a lasting direction to the course of events.
For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.