Emerson is perhaps the single most influential figure in American literary history. More than any other author of his day, he was responsible for shaping the literary style and vision of the American Romantic period, the era when the United States first developed a distinctively national literature worthy of comparison to that of the mother country. Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson were all deeply indebted to Emerson and helped to transmit his legacy. As the leading expositor of New England Transcendentalism, Emerson also had a decisive impact upon the course of American philosophy and religion. Any serious discussion of such "American" traits as individualism, optimism, pietism, glorification of nature and wilderness, egalitarianism, utopianism, and literary experimentalism must take account of Emerson 's pronouncements on these subjects. Because he was an eclectic and unsystematic thinker, Emerson has often been criticized as a superficial popularizer. But his historical significance is undeniable, and the vitality of his best work still has a way of making his detractors look pedantic by comparison.

Thanks to Lawrence Buell
This is a passage from his "Ralph Waldo Emerson," a work that appeared on pages 48-60 in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 1: The American Renaissance in New England.