Thoreau vs Whitman vs Emerson

I want to re read all these guys. Any feelings?

I guess I'd rank them in order of listing

Whitman is greater than Thoreau or Emerson. Whitman is damn near ecstatic but he has a tendency to cross the line into bombast that can be irksome, while Thoreau is pithy but priggish, and Emerson is rather a stuffed shirt who could have used a lot more editing. But all of them are miles better than, say, Thomas Carlyle.

emerson is not at all a stuffed shirt

he is naive. that's what's wrong with him. he gives intellectual cover to radical individualism, even narcissism

'self-reliance' has interesting and paradoxical things to say about the nature of originality, i think. i will not share them here, it's a secret.

Thoreau is like Ralph Emerson. Ralph Emerson is what I read.

Reading Ralph Emerson near Waldo pond