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Willa Cather, unlike many of her famous contemporaries, aligned herself with the American tradition exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emersion. They shared a common moral center which separated her from the post-Eliot critics. Thea Kronsborg in The Song of the Lark is no less Emersonian than Alexandra in O Pioneers, Antonia in My Antonia, and Claude Wheeler in One of Ours. Thea Kronsborg in this novel is Willa Cather in essentials, though Oliver Fremstad was her external prototype. Willa Cather's strong-minded personality became Thea Kronsborg's and Cather's struggles to find her way as a writer became her character's to do so as a singer. Cather's artistry here worked like leaven upon memory, mind, and emotion to convey the inter-relationship of art and nature and art and truth. And when art, with its roots in nature, becomes truth, a transcendence of mundane existence occurs. The birth and flowering of a great artist breaks the natural cycle of birth and death, and something eternal takes its place in the grandeur of the universe. Thea Kronberg creates this transcendent truth in the novel through Cather her creator. Through their intensive experience of life, the main characters transcend their material existence and partake of eternal verities. They become part of the creative, orderly, evolutionary process of Nature whose vicissitudes interrupt the flow but whose ultimate thrust moves toward what Emerson calls a “higher form.” Through her descriptions of features of the natural landscape and of humans' efforts to imitate its beauty, Cather's works become a part of the creative process which she celebrates. The Song of the Lark is not completely perfect, nor is Nature. Nonetheless, it makes the reader recognize the ineffable spirit which inspires humans to endure.