48 pages • 1 hour read
Ralph Waldo EmersonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Paired Texts
Song of Myself and I Sing the Body Electric
These two poems are from a collection titled Leaves of Grass, which a little-known poet named Walt Whitman self-published and sent to Emerson in 1855. Impressed, Emerson wrote back to Whitman, praising his “free brave thought” in a letter that jumpstarted the young poet’s literary career.
Other Student Resources
This video, produced by theschooloflife.com, provides a brief overview of Emerson’s life, philosophy, and his role as the “Father of American Literature” and transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism and the Hudson River School of Art
Heimler’s History presents a short video that traces the growth of American literature from romanticism to transcendentalism along with parallel developments in American landscape painting.
A brief tutorial on Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” from the University of Washington. Plato created this allegory to illustrate his theory of “Forms,” with which Emerson was familiar and which he drew upon to explain how nature is only a shadow of universal truth or spirit.
'Nature-Deficit Disorder' is Really a Thing
This June 2020 New York Times article offers anecdotal evidence from parents to corroborate Richard Louv’s claims in Last Child in the Woods (2005) that modern-day children are suffering psychologically and physiologically from a lack of nature in their lives.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Literature
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Beauty
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Books & Literature
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Essays & Speeches
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Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
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Required Reading Lists
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School Book List Titles
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Science & Nature
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Transcendentalism
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