Carlyle and Emerson, Their Long Debate

Taken together the two men epitomize the spiritual crisis of the nineteenth century—namely, how to adjust to the gradual removal of conventional religion from the center of one’s being and what to put in that religion’s place that will serve as well. Since their deaths, the crisis has not been resolved so much as it has been deepened. For Kenneth Harris, Emerson and Carlyle remain as cognate emblems of that crisis and as guides to strategies and self-therapies to survive it.

Harris’s essay received the 1977 Howard Mumford Jones Prize of the Department of English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, as the best dissertation in English or American Literature.