Emily Dickinson:
"I Dwell in Possibility-- A fairer House than Prose--"
Freedom here is about the nature of thought and how we can choose how to think about it. Every independent thought is a possibility, unlike statements already written down in prose. Like Emerson's concept of the bookworm, freedom lies in choosing to think independently and creatively.
Frederick Douglass:
"I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom...Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read."
Literacy for Douglass would allow him to escape the oppression he faced physically and mentally in slavery. If he could read for himself and not take orders from his slave masters like a puppet, he could escape their reigns. He can develop his own truths and break away from dependent thought. A lot of connections to Emerson's bookworm ideas seen in this passage.
Walt Whitman:
"I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me."
To Whitman, freedom is nudity and nature. Nakedness is the authentic self with no specific roles or identities placed upon someone. To be undisguised in nature is the most real and natural way to live. There, everything can be divine, and there are no forced boundaries in thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."
Emerson sees freedom in independent creation of thought. By developing meaning through your own experiences and consciousness you are free from being reduced to parts and imitating other people's ideas.
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