Emerson published Nature anonymously, and its initial readership was modest, but the essay quickly became a foundational reference point for a circle of like-minded writers and thinkers, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and others associated with the Transcendental Club, who took up and extended its core claims about intuition, nature and spiritual self-reliance across their own subsequent work. Emerson's insistence on individual spiritual authority over inherited doctrine also drew significant criticism from more traditionally minded contemporaries, who read the essay as dangerously close to dispensing with revealed religion altogether in favor of a diffuse nature mysticism.
Nature is now read as a founding document not only of American Transcendentalism specifically but of a wider strand of American religious and literary thought that treats direct experience of the natural world as spiritually authoritative in its own right, an orientation that later scholars have traced forward into subsequent American nature writing, environmental thought and forms of religious naturalism that continue to draw on Emerson's basic claim that nature itself can teach.
The essay was substantially revised by Emerson for a second edition published in 1849, and scholars comparing the two versions have traced shifts in his thinking across the intervening years, treating the differences between editions as evidence of how Emerson's Transcendentalist philosophy continued to develop rather than remaining fixed at the moment of the essay's first anonymous publication.