Romantics and Their Delusions: A Waste of Time or Worthwhile?

Abstract

Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired generations of Americans to take the here and now of their particular New World lives as the occasion to claim and rejuvenate their European cultural inheritance. Adapting a Wordsworthian Romanticism to the broader horizons of North America, and to the explicitly democratic thinking of the new republic, Emerson demonstrated how a host of “self-reliant” individuals could add up to a new kind of society. Nature is the authority to which every person, potentially, can appeal for insight, and a collective founded on Nature had to be something new and true. Could things go astray? Indeed. And Emerson painfully noted all the ways in which one‘s faculties are not up to the task. But he retained his fundamental faith that revelation means looking at the world with fresh eyes.

-Dr. Bruce Greenfield