Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Stephen E. Whicher

Overview

First published in 1953, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely recognized to be the most illuminating of commentaries on Emerson’s thought.

“EMERSON enjoyed, as he wished, an original relation to the universe, one which, like all living relationships, developed and altered with time. Throughout his life he followed the advice of the poet who speaks at the end of Nature: ‘Build therefore your own world.’ His different insights are so many rays of organization thrown out by the exploring soul, in the words of Bacon he cited so often, to conform the shows of things to the desires of the mind.

“As his mind was complex and many-sided, so was the world it built. His greatest gift was his ability to endure the push and pull of contrary directions in his thought without a premature reaching out after conclusions that would do violence to his whole nature. Typically, he came to terms with conflicts as they developed among his truths by dramatizing them, by giving their opposition full play on the stage of his work. Consequently, his writings, and particularly his journals, record a genuine drama of ideas, a still little-known story that adds a new dimension of interest to his thought. This book is intended to ‘produce’ that drama. It traces Emerson’s surprisingly eventful voyage in the world of the mind.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787204324
Publisher:	Valmy Publishing
Publication date:	04/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	265
File size:	656 KB

About the Author

Stephen Emerson Whicher (June 16, 1915 -November 13, 1961) was a Professor of English at Cornell University.

He attended Amherst High School and Exeter Academy and was awarded his Bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Amherst College (1936), after earning some dozen prizes for scholarship, public speaking, and work in English and classics. He received a Master’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University (1937) and the Ph.D. in English at Harvard University (1942). While a graduate student at Harvard, he won two prizes, including the Bowdoin prize, for chapters from his thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

During the war, 1943-1946, he served in the U.S. Navy as Ensign and Lieutenant (j.g.) and was stationed in the Pacific as a night fighter director. He earned combat stars at Iwo Jima and Tokyo in 1945.

Before joining Cornell in 1957, he had been a teaching fellow at Harvard (1938-1942), an instructor at the University of Rochester (1942-1943) and at Harvard (1946), and a member of the English Department at Swarthmore (Assistant Professor, 1947-1952; Associate Professor, 1952-1957). He had also taught summers at Pennsylvania State University (1948) and New York University (1954-1955).

A specialist in American literature, he was also interested in modern drama, and had read widely in Latin, Greek, French, German, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish literature. He had held a Rockefeller Post-War Fellowship, 1946-1947; a Ford Fellowship, 1952-1953; and two Fulbright lectureships—in Norway, 1952-1953, and Sweden, 1955-1956. He was on the board of editors of the periodicals Studies in Romanticism and American Literature. In 1961 he was honored by his alma mater with the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

He died in 1961 at the age of 46.