Nature and Other Writings

"The mind of Emerson," literary critic Harold Bloom once wrote, "is the mind of America." Indeed, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays contain some of the most memorable and important expressions of American thought. Generations of readers have been stirred by Emerson's ideal of self-reliance, and his vision of nature as a manifestation of the divine spirit has profoundly influenced American naturalists and environmentalists from Thoreau's time to the present. Poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Rob…