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0f.Emerson opened a new literary plain, transcendentalism. Emerson's ideology was regarded as the core of transcendentalism.
i.He is known as the reputation of "American Renaissance leader' . Emerson was a representative who established American culture. He was the first American to call for an independent culture in both“ Nature”and “ The American Scholar.
ii.He called on American writers to write about America in a way peculiarly of American. He embodied a new nation's desire and struggle to assert its own identity in its formative period.
iii.Former U.S. President Lincoln called him "the American Confucius' ,' the father of the American civilization". In modern times, he is sometimes dismissed as having no sense of evil, and his optimistic philosophy as so much Transcendentalist folly.
b.Emerson's aesthetics places emphasis on ideas, symbol, and imaginative words, which brought about a revolution in American literature in general and in American poetry in particular.
i.He thinks that, poets should function as preachers who gave directions to the mass.
ii.True poetry and true art should ennoble and serve as a moral purification and a passage toward organic unity and higher reality.
c.As an essayist, Emerson was a master of style.
i.His essays have speech-like characteristics and a prophetic tone, a sermon-like quality, often linked to his practice as a Unitarianminister.
ii.Emerson's aim was not merely to charm his readers, but encourage them to cultivate‘self-trust', to become what they ought to be, and to be open to the intuitive world of experience.
1.The ideal individual should be a self-reliant man.
2."Trust thyself," he wrote in“ Self Reliance”, by which he means to convince people that the possibilities for man to develop and improve himself are infinite.
iii.Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for man to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's “Nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic; “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul."
iv.Emerson’S essays have a casual style, for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures.
1.Emerson’s philosophical discussion is sometimes difficult to understand but he uses comparisons and metaphors to make the general idea of his work clearly expressed.
2.Well- read in the classics of Western European literature, Emerson often employed these literature sources to make and enrich his own points but never let them take the full reins of his discussion.
