“The history of the genesis,” Emerson notes, is the “old mythology” that

Emerson's description here of that poetic process whereby each youth seeks to inscribe his own fable of renewal is a fair portrayal of how a lapsed Unitarian minister in 1836 attempted to recuperate his powers by opening a literary discourse with the world. Emerson, Santayana notes, “was like a young god making experiments in creation.” Nature, accordingly, represents Emerson's initial effort at “restoring to the world original and eternal beauty” by redeeming and reconstituting his own soul in an imaginative apocalypse.

Stephen Whicher remarks that Emerson's first book “might have exchanged titles with Poe's Eureka,” That, however, is just about all these two odd treatises might be said to have in common. Poe's “apocalypse“ is the revelation of a cosmos in decline, its stars dead or dying, burning on through light-time in paradoxical celebration of their fate. Coming at the end of Poe's painful career, it prophesies his own expiration by figuring that of the universe. But Emerson had no intention of singing a sad tale of the Conqueror Worm. His worm is mounting “through all the spires of form” on its triumphant way to becoming human.