ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2012) — Drew Thies, a junior English major from Kansas, always put Ralph Waldo Emerson in the “optimistic category” as far as writers of his era went … until he took “American Poetry before 1900” taught by Eric G. Wilson.
Thies says he will never forget when Wilson, the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English, gave some biographical detail about the poet, including the fact that he opened the tomb of his young wife a year after her dying of tuberculosis to gaze at her corpse.
“For a student who had known only the forward-looking author of ‘Nature’ and ‘Self-Reliance’ as he appeared from those two landmark essays, this was obviously a bit of a shock,” says Thies. “Why would such a profoundly optimistic poet be so captivated by the death of his wife? And to the extent that he would go so far as to open the coffin?”