The American Scholar
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a prolific essayist, public philosopher, poet, and political commentator who became world famous in his lifetime and influenced authors as diverse as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. DuBois, and others.
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The American Scholar - Ralph Waldo Emerson
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
By
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
This edition published by Dreamscape Media LLC, 2017
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dreamscapeAbout Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature
. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar
in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's intellectual Declaration of Independence
.
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays Self-Reliance
, The Over-Soul
, Circles
, The Poet
and Experience
. Together with Nature
, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's nature
was more philosophical than naturalistic: Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul
. Emerson is one of several figures who took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.
He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was the infinitude of the private man.
Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.
Source: Wikipedia
The American Scholar
This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which have been the occasion for addresses from the most distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,
I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength¹ or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;² nor for the advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that