Dec 21, 2009

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain | Historical Context

Emerson and New England Transcendentalism
Although biographers have debated the different ways in which Dickinson's reading habits affected her work, almost all concur that the single most important author that influenced her poetry was the American philosopher, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). To understand the intellectual climate of Dickinson's time, one cannot avoid an examination of this important American thinker.

Emerson was one of the founders of transcendentalism, a loose but dynamic philosophy which, in many ways, was a reaction to what...