In this economical study David Greenham revisits several key texts in the Emerson canon to describe the Concord sage's indebtedness to European Romanticism, or, more specifically, to philosophical Idealism. Scholars have long known that it was not Immanuel Kant himself but his English commentators who most influenced American Transcendentalism; but the author sharpens our view by detailing the transmission of this philosopher's legacy through his immediate successors, most notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis – “as they were interpreted, translated and made available by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle and Frederic Henry Hedge, as well as the French ‘Eclectic,’ Victor Cousin” – who guided Emerson's trajectory from Unitarian clergyman to “Natural Historian,” and thence to original prose stylist (x). To accomplish this, Greenham mines Emerson's early notebooks and lectures, as well as his letters to his redoubtable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, to offer astute readings of such chestnuts as Nature, the “Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience.”

Sifting through Emerson's correspondence with his aunt, his erstwhile spiritual adviser, Greenham dates Emerson's disenchantment with Unitarianism earlier than most scholars, indicating that, given his fascination with natural rather than scriptural revelation, his resignation from the pulpit was “all but inevitable” two years before he even assumed his position at Boston's Second Church in 1829 (23). Of equal importance, Greenham notes, by the spring of 1834 Emerson had actively sought “a complementary way of approaching nature, namely the poetic,” the start of a lifelong attempt to put experience into language (29). In 1826, for example, in a letter to Mary, Emerson noted that “it were fitter to account every moment of the existence of the Universe as a new Creation and all as a revelation proceeding each moment from the Divinity to the mind of the observer” than to believe in the miracles recorded in Scripture, a sentiment that recalls some of the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards's more mystical pronouncements (49, original emphasis).

Focussing on Emerson's absorption of the Unitarian minister Hedge's lengthy and probing review of Coleridge in the Christian Examiner in 1833, where Emerson's friend made clear the crucial distinction between reason and understanding, Greenham observes how for Emerson the self “finds itself in nature, as was construed by the post-Fichteans, but at the same time” seeks to lose itself “in something bigger,” as Coleridge's faith dictated. This, Greenham adds, defines the “central experience” of Transcendentalism (82). This insight leads to the book's most satisfying section, the author's convincing explication of the ever-mysterious passages in Emerson's great essay “Experience” in which he describes humanity as lost in the labyrinth perception, so that, to take his case, he is unable to feel even the death of his young son, Waldo, who recently had succumbed to scarlet fever.

This section of “Experience” is not so much about Waldo's passing, the author claims, as “it is a story about every moment of our lives,” for “the instant we reflect [on anything] we are unsure about where we find ourselves.” “What is revealed,” Greenham concludes, is thus the terrifying fact “that we have to find ourselves at all, as if we are always lost and in need of discovery.” For Emerson, the only palliative was language, for he had learned that “we only ever find ourselves and the world at the same time, through metaphor,” even as, ironically, metaphor can “deaden us to ourselves, render us ghost-like such that we lose our contact” with the very essence of the experience we seek to capture (177–78, original emphasis). Thus other people, even “sons and lovers,” seem unreal to Emerson “not because he is cold or indifferent,” however, but because as an idealist he realizes that “the objective world is subjectively constructed.” Not even so great a grief as the death of one's child can remove this barrier, and only death can “bring us sharply back to the real in the sense of that word which Emerson the idealist cannot touch.” Emerson's “great desire,” Greenham concludes, thus “is to make life and death one and the same; to live in the absolute union with the real that he sees his own death alone as providing access to” (183–84).

Reading this made me understand even better the striking passage with which Robert D. Richardson begins his magnificent Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1997), when he describes how Emerson went out to his family's burial vault several years after the death of his much beloved first wife Ellen and literally opened her casket, presumably to see death in its utter physicality as well as finality. This was as close to the “real” as he could come, without being dead himself. Although I was similarly enlightened about other thorny passages in Emerson's oeuvre, Greenham's skill as a close reader struck me most forcefully in these pages on “Experience.”

The discussion of Emerson and European Romanticism, however, did not surprise me as much, for scholars such as Richardson, Evelyn Barish, Julie Ellison, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Leon Chai, David Robinson, and others have provided bits and pieces of the story. I also did not appreciate the many typos and other infelicities that should have been caught in copyediting or galleys: a dropped word at 32, two missing commas at 34 and another at 64, an extraneous colon at 45, a grammatical error (“The writer cannot choose their words … if they want to express themselves”) at 158, my middle initial in error and “Berkeley” misspelled at 208 are some that I took time to jot down. But I thoroughly appreciate Greenham's insight into the complexities of Emerson's prose and the complex cerebration that led to it. For those who love Emerson and continue to squeeze wisdom from his pages, Greenham's book offers worthy assistance.