SOURCE: "Emerson's Poems," in Brownson's Quarterly Review, Vol. 4, April, 1847, pp. 262-76.

Brownson, an early Transcendentalist who became an ardent Roman Catholic, edited his own magazine from 1844 to 1875 as a vehicle for his religious beliefs and wrote popular books containing the sensationalized religious tone evident in this excerpt. Here Brownson criticizes Emerson's poetry by describing it as the voice of a depressed and delusional poet under the influence of Satan.

… Mr. Emerson's poems … fail in all the higher requisites of art. They embody a doctrine essentially false, a morality essentially unsound, and at best a beauty which is partial, individual. To be able to regard them as embodying the beautiful, in any worthy sense of the term, one must cease to be what he is, must divest himself of his own individuality, and that not to fall back on our common humanity, but to become Mr. Emerson, and to...