Beginning of article  Ralph Waldo Emerson occupies an uncertain
place in literature. While the achievements of other 19th-
century New Englanders and Yankees - Melville, Hawthorne,
Thoreau, Whitman - speak for themselves, are we justified in
seeing Emerson as any more than a talented essayist? But the
school he is associated with - New England transcendentalism -
was certainly influential in the northern USA before the Civil
War.  It was a kind of offshoot of German philosophical
romanticism, impatient with mere "understanding," the mental
faculty used in science or everyday life. Beyond that, thought
Emerson and his followers, there was "reason" by which one
intuits spiritual, metaphysical and other transcendental truths.
Reason allows us to go beyond religious dogma, ethical tradition
or received opinion. With Thoreau this took the form of a
justification of civil disobedience; with Emerson it became a
kind of fuzzy pantheism.  We can see the sort of thing the
transcendentalists were driving at when one cons