In a review of Emerson's personal character and opinions, we are thus
led to see that his philosophy, which finds no room for the emotions, is
a faithful exponent of his own and of the New England temperament, which
distrusts and dreads the emotions. Regarded as a sole guide to life for
a young person of strong conscience and undeveloped affections, his
works might conceivably be even harmful because of their unexampled
power of purely intellectual stimulation.
* * * * *
Emerson's poetry has given rise to much heart-burning and disagreement.
Some people do not like it. They fail to find the fire in the ice. On
the other hand, his poems appeal not only to a large number of
professed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of readers who find in
Emerson an element for which they search the rest of poesy in vain.
It is the irony of fate that his admirers should be more than usually
sensitive about his fame. This prophet who desired not to have
followers, lest he too should become a cult and a convention, and whose
main thesis throughout life was that piety is a crime, has been calmly
canonized and embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved.
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