Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson explores the American writer's essays as mythic prose poems, suggesting a new approach to the practical criticism of Emerson's works. Richard O'Keefe uses the archetypal model--a critical tool seldom employed on American Romantics, yet frequently applied in the study of British Romantic poets such as William Blake--to contemporize methods of examining Emersonian texts. Blake and Emerson, both products of a Christian culture, found themselves forced--a generation apart and quite independently--to redefine and reinterpret the traditional body of...