Can anyone disagree that Ralph Waldo Emerson is the central figure in American literary and intellectual history? Virtually whatever subject concerns us, Emerson has been there already. Religion, philosophy, the spiritual life, mysticism, poetry, literary criticism, society and solitude, nature and politics, fate and freedom—Emerson’s capacious mind has interrogated and absorbed them all. In memorable aphorisms that have entered the public consciousness, Emerson spoke the language of the poet; and in doing so he enfolded—one might even say in vexation—all of the irreconcilable diversities of life into a benign Oneness, figured as the platonic All or Over-Soul. A central figure in his own lifetime, Emerson has attained in our era a preeminence reflected in the excellent scholarship and criticism published in the past two decades. Harvard University Press has accorded Emerson a “definitive” multi-volume edition of his writings; Gay Wilson Allen has given us perhaps the last word about the externals of Emerson’s life in Waldo Emerson; Hyatt Waggoner has acclaimed Emerson as our central man of imagination in Emerson As Poet; and even Harold Bloom has sanctified the Concord sage by claiming him, in a series of essays, as the spiritual father of orphic verse in Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Amnions, and Merwin. All roads appear to lead back to the questions posed by Emerson, the most critical of which is the status of the individual and his relationship to society.

It is therefore an event of some importance to have Emerson’s view of the individual