From the foreword by Robert Richardson:

"Emerson's life was devoted to showing how one may still attain an original, that is to say, an authentic, relation to the universe, and Geldard's book aims to focus and distill the famously dispersed Emerson and put his central teachings into the modern reader's hand. Geldard understands the main thing, which is that Emerson is as alive, as pertinent, as urgent now as he was in his lifetime. We have only to reach out for the gifts which Emerson, like a new god on a new day, offers us."

The vision that Emerson dared speak of was central to the attitudes of many of his closest friends in America. With love and justice at the core, the self-reliant individual lived in a state of true independence, free from authority and yet obedient to natural law. Unlike the constituency of Plato's Republic where the philosopher-king ruled and the poets were banished, Emerson's American Republic was to be governed by the visionary sensibility