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Abstract Born into a Unitarian family, Ralph Waldo Emerson abandoned a formal religious career due to doctrinal doubts, and stands with Thoreau as a representative of the philosophic-literary school of thought known as transcendentalism. Emerson was drawn in this direction partly through his European trip of 18323, which featured meetings in England with Coleridge, Wordsworth and other representatives of Romanticism. Emersons transcendentalism, most fully represented in his 1836 book Nature, involved an emphasis on the unity of nature, science and spirituality, in which transcendent spiritual elements are revealed to us through the beauties of external nature and attentive sensory life, thus meaning that divinity can be seen as immanent in all things; these ideas have notably influenced green thought, especially in the USA. Through a career of 40 years, Emerson gave about 1,500 public lectures, traveling as far as California and Canada but generally staying in Massachusetts. His audiences were captivated by his speaking style. Many of his phrases have long since passed into common English usage, such as "a minority of one" and "the devil's attorney." His essays had a sermon-like quality, which was linked to his practice as a Unitarian minister. Emerson's aim was to encourage people to cultivate "self-trust," to become what they ought to be, and to be open to the intuitive world of experience.

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Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Biography .................................................................................................................................... 3 Mission ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Influence and Contribution.......................................................................................................... 9 Speeches and Publications ........................................................................................................ 13 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 15

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction Ralph Waldo Emerson was the center of the transcendental movement in America, whose followers believed in the importance of individuality, as well as in a deep connection to nature. Emerson set out most of his ideas and values in the book Nature (1836), which signified at least 10 years of concentrated study in philosophy, literature and religion. His theories, that the human mind is influenced by nature, assisted ignite a totally novel philosophical movement in Britain. He called for the dawn of individualism in America instigated by nature. As a great prose poet, he influenced number of other American poets, including Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. He is also gained the fame for influencing the work of many renowned philosophers in which name of Friedrich Nietzsche is noteworthy to mention.

Biography Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister with Puritan ancestors. After his father's early death, Emerson was reared by his mother and by an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who guided Emerson's spiritual and educational development. Emerson began writing in his youth and kept journals at Harvard University that became the basis of his most

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famous essays and poems. After teaching at a school for young women for two years, he entered Harvard's divinity school. An undisciplined student, Emerson nevertheless completed his studies and became a popular preacher at Boston's Second Church. In 1829 he married Ellen Tucker. Ellen Emerson died in 1831, and the following year Emerson resigned from his position in the church, no longer a believer in its doctrines and yearning for another kind of faith. He toured Europe in 1832 and 1833 and met the English Romantic writers Thomas Carlyle; William Wordsworth; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who turned Emerson's attention to German Idealism and to Plato. Emerson broadened his education to include European masters of rational thought such as Michel de Montaigne; mystics such as Emanuel Swedenborg; and British thinkers and empiricists, notably George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Locke. Emerson returned to Boston and began a lecture tour; his addresses, drawn from his journals, were titled "The Philosophy of History," "Human Culture," "Human Life," and "The Present Age." He eventually refined these talks into the classic essays "Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," and "Friendship." In his writing Emerson typically announced a thought and then gradually expanded its range of reference to other matters; he did not follow the classical form of the essay, with an introduction, body, and conclusion. Emerson remarried in 1835 and made his home in Concord, Massachusetts, where he befriended other writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, and others who became known as transcendentalists. Emerson's essay "Nature" became a key text in Transcendentalism. In it he expressed his conviction that the individual in contact with nature could comprehend the great and universal truths of the universe. He solidified his argument in "The American Scholar," which called on Americans to have faith

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in their own creativity and not to rely so much on the age-old learning of Europe. Emerson's creed helped to further the development of a distinctly American literature. His position grew even more radical in his "Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge" (1838), in which he rejected traditional religion and advocated an intuitive spiritual experience much like that espoused by the Romantics in England. Emerson spread his ideas not only through essays and lectures but also through his magazine, The Dial, which became the home publication for many transcendentalists. Emerson was influential in extending the interests of transcendentalists to include direct engagement with public affairs and politics, endorsing, for example, strong opposition to slavery. By the early 1840s, Emerson had earned both a national and an international reputation. He published his first volume of verse, Poems, in 1847. Like the work of Emily Dickinson, Emerson's poetry is gnomic and metaphysical. His poetry tends toward the abstract in works like "Threnody," "Compensation," and "Each and All." Nevertheless, his deep probing of nature had a profound influence on twentieth-century poets, especially on Robert Frost. In 1840 the Dial began publication. It was the literary organ of the so-called Transcendental Club, which had been meeting informally at Emerson's house and elsewhere since 1836. In the Dial, edited first by Margaret Fuller (184042) and then by Emerson himself (184244), Emerson published a number of poems, including "The Problem" and "Wood-Notes," and also the essays "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," and "The Over-Soul," gathered in Essays (1841). The second volume of Essays, containing "The Poet," appeared in 1844, after the Dial had ceased publication. This work was followed in 1846 by a collection entitled Poems.

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Throughout 1845 Emerson delivered a series of lectures on Plato, Napolon Bonaparte, Emanuel Swedenborg, and others, collected in 1850 as Representative Men. Emerson's engagement with more worldly subjects is evident in Representative Men (1850), a study of heroes throughout history. A friend of Thomas Carlyle's, Emerson traveled in England and published English Traits in 1856. During this period he expressed a growing concern for ethical behavior in books such as The Conduct of Life (1860) and Society and Solitude (1870). Emerson continued to lecture and to publish books in the 1870s; Letters and Social Aims (1876) and Natural History of Intellect (1893) collect his last lectures.

Mission "A dominant figure of his time, Emerson had a mystical feeling of the mission he had given. Many accused him of distorting Christianity, but he explained that for him," being a good pastor meant leaving the Church. "The speech he gave in 1838 at the Faculty of Theology at Harvard was to banish for thirty years. He accused the church of proceeding "as if God were dead" and of highlighting doctrine whereas oppressing the spirit. It was said that his philosophy was contradictory and it is true that he put all his efforts to avoid building a system intellectually logical, since such a system would have been the denial of his romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In an essay entitled "Self-Reliance," he points out that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." And yet it is remarkably consistent in its call for the birth of individualism American inspired by nature. Most of his big ideas - need for a new national vision, use of personal experience, idea of "Soul superior" cosmic doctrine of compensation - are already apparent in his first book, Nature (1836) , which starts as follows:

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We live in an era retrospective that builds the sepulchers of his fathers, writes biographies, histories, criticism. Previous generations saw God face to face, we do not see through their eyes. Why could not we, we, too, an original relation to the universe? Why not has poetry of insight and not of tradition, a religion that is revealed to us and not for the story? Buried in a season of nature which the waves of life around us and we travel [...] why should we wander among the dry bones of past [...]? The sun shines today also. The fields are full of linen and wool. There are new lands, new men, and unusual thoughts. Demand our work, our laws, and our worship . Emerson had a passion for the genius of Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write like him, a book "funny, full of poetry, theology, everyday things, philosophy, anecdotes, slag." Emerson's spiritual vision, his style peppered with aphorisms are properly exciting, one of the Transcendentalists claimed that you felt listening to "go to heaven on a swing."Much of his insights come from his study of Eastern religions, including the Hindu, the Confucianism and Sufism. His poem "Brahma" draws on Hindu sources to point to a cosmic order: If the red slayer thinks he killed Or if the victim believes he murdered Is that they ignore the subtle ways I go to practice and back.

The distance, the forgotten are close to me The light and shadow me one; The vanished gods to me appear;

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The shame and the glory of them are me.

They are mistaken when they think they abandon me; If they go near me, I am the wings; I am the one, who doubts, I doubt the same, I am the hymn sung by the Brahmins.

The mighty gods yearn for my stay September and languish in vain, But you, gentle lover of good! Find me and turn my back to heaven. Published in the first issue of Atlantic Monthly (1857), this poem troubled readers unfamiliar with Brahma. Emerson gave this advice for its readers: "Tell them to read Jehovah instead of Brahma. According to the British critic Matthew Arnold, English-language texts of the most important nineteenth century were the poems of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. Great prose poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, among them Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane and Robert Frost. It is further believed that he inspired the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche and William James."

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Influence and Contribution Although his lectures and essays were generally better than his poetry, the Sage of Concord deserves a place near the center of the American pantheon of poetry for his influence on the poets he nurtured and the independence he fostered. The future inspirational speaker was born into the family of the Unitarian minister of Boston's First Church on May 25, 1803, but his father died when Ralph was seven years old. His mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, continued raising her six remaining children on an annual stipend for seven years from the church (McAleer 45) that she eventually supplemented by taking in boarders, providing her son with a practical example of self-reliance. This would eventually become his most important message to the nation as he preached an American progress based on individual insight and ingenuity from the pulpit of the secular lectern. The buoyant optimism everywhere evident in his public writing argues that he somehow managed to transcend a series of tragedies haunting his private life, including the premature deaths of siblings during his childhood and of his oldest child, and his impoverished youth. Biographers tend to make much of the future poet's seemingly lackluster performance at Harvard in order to contrast it with his subsequent fame. They rarely give full weight to the emotional and physical challenges he had to overcome, as he was younger than many of his classmates and faced the burden of working his way through college in addition to the demands of his course work. Reducing something as complex as a college education to a single number, whether it represents a grade-point average or a student's rank in his graduating class, cannot account for extenuating circumstances such as those Emerson had to face. It must be admitted that the records reveal a mediocre student (he finished 30th out of 59 in the class of 1821) and his immediate path after college was anything but outstanding: He continued teaching school, a

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vocation with which he had some acquaintance even before college and which he had pursued during his academic vacations. At that time it was generally not necessary for a teacher to have attended college, and many schools were privately and not publicly funded. This meant that teachers were frequently poorly paid, but Emerson's brother ran a school for young ladies that provided Ralph with a relatively lucrative position. After four years of teaching after college, Emerson was ready for a change. Either the flesh was too weak (he had trouble with his eyes and other health problems) or the spirit was too strong (he already had some reservations about accepting all the tenets of the church) to permit an immediately successful return to school. He reluctantly withdrew from the Harvard Divinity School and taught another year. By presenting a sermon for the approval of an Association of Congregational Ministers, he received a license to preach in 1826 (McAleer 86). Health concerns (tuberculosis ran in his family) led him to travel to Charleston, South Carolina, and St. Augustine, Florida, for his health. In 1827, he re-enrolled in the divinity school (perhaps reasoning that although experience led him to doubt, additional education might remove that obstacle) and continued preaching. While serving as a visiting preacher in Concord, New Hampshire, he first met his future wife, a beautiful albeit consumptive teenaged heiress named Ellen Tucker. In that age of outstanding orators, the golden-throated minister must have seemed especially attractive, and the couple married on September 30, 1829. Up to that point (and after her death as well), Emerson can seem something of a cold fish, but his letters, poetry and private journal reveal that their love touched him deeply. Unfortunately, she died on February 8, 1831. A contested will held up the final installment of Ralph's inheritance until 1837, when he began averaging an income of $100 a month from his investments (McAleer 108). Such bald financial facts can make him seem an unscrupulous opportunist, but such an interpretation runs counter to

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all that is known of his true character. For months after his wife's death, Emerson daily visited her tomb and finally took the exceptional step of opening her coffin (March 29, 1832; McAleer 109). This allowed him to bring closure to the emotional crisis attendant upon her death. Later in 1832, he resigned the ministry of the Boston parish that had paid $1,800 per year (Richardson 91), a princely sum that suggests he was already on his way to substantial wealth even without his wife's dowry. He left for Europe on December 25, 1832, a distancing of himself from the legal squabbles attending his inheritance that further underscores the true nature of his love for his first wife. The crisis of conscience that led Emerson to resign as the junior pastor of his Boston church was based on his willingness to value personal revelation instead of accepting the primacy of church doctrine. He did not believe, for example, that communion wafers could literally become the real flesh of Christ, and therefore refused to officiate over that sacrament. For more than 200 years, his family had been furnishing New England with Harvard-educated clergy, a fact that helped him attain the prominent Boston post. Unfortunately, he had become an important symbol of faith before he had discovered his true beliefs (Richardson 91). His sojourn abroad took him to the chief cities of western Europe and such leading English writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. He returned to America in 1834 but would return to Europe in 1847 to lecture and in 1872 for his health. He began making a living through the public lectures that he then developed into books. In 1835, he married the seemingly wealthy Lydia Jackson after generously agreeing to assign her inheritance to her impoverished sister. They would have four children, including a second Ellen Tucker Emerson. Like his first wife, Lydian (the name she adopted after he had fashioned it for her) had seen him for the first time as a substitute minister. His lecture fees and investments

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provided the resources necessary to purchase their spacious Concord home and to hire servants to tend it. The couple asked his mother and one of his brothers to live with them, but the brother died before he could move in. Emerson created two of his most important essays in the next two years, "Nature" and "The American Scholar." Surrounding himself with friends and other transcendentalists, he was able to turn Concord into the intellectual center of America from 1840 to the start of the Civil War. He provided a shelter, employment, and encouragement for Henry David Thoreau, to ease the younger man's penury, and edited (with Margaret Fuller) and largely financed The Dial, the journal that publicized the philosophical movement known as transcendentalism. Emerson continued to write essays, lectures, and enough poetry to fill the three volumes published in his lifetime: Poems (1846), May-Day and Other Pieces (1866), and Selected Poems (1876). A generous, highly moral, and principled man, he opposed slavery to the extent that he publicly mourned the execution of the murderous John Brown. In the years following the Civil War, the quality of his literary production gradually tapered off. In his prime, he could mesmerize audiences (he gave approximately 1,500 public lectures in a career spanning nearly half a century) with his powerful voice. Near the end of his life, it faded in strength even as his mental powers began to wane. He died of pneumonia in Concord on April 27, 1882. Emerson's transcendental philosophy led to the production of poems like "Brahma" and "Hamatreya" that helped introduce mainstream America to Asian philosophy. His love of nature can be seen in "The River," his "Hymn Sung at the completion of the Concord Movement, April 19, 1836" celebrated the start of the Revolutionary War near his home in Concord, and "The Poet" is an essay on that important subject that helped Walt Whitman finds an audience. His

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most important books are Nature (1836), Essays (especially the first series, published in 1841), and Representative Men (1850). Emerson's home in Concord from 1835 to 1882 was restored following an 1872 fire and has been preserved, although the furniture from the poet's study is on display at the Concord Museum. The Emerson Society holds annual meetings and publishes the Emerson Society Papers. Harvard University holds the largest collection of Emerson material, and additional manuscripts can be found at the Concord Public Library and at UCLA.

Speeches and Publications Soon following the publication of Nature, Emerson delivered two of his most important early addresses, both delivered at his alma mater, Harvard. In 1837 he presented his call for selfeducation in his "American Scholar" address. In 1838, however, his vision of independent thinking extended to a critique of the ministry in his speech to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. Known as the Divinity School Address, Emerson's speech sparked a controversy even he was unprepared for as conservative Unitarians such as Andrews Norton, in particular, attacked Emerson in the press and accused him of heresy and even atheism. Emerson did not respond to such critics publicly and only expanded his ideas more fully in his 1841 collection of Essays: First Series. The foundation of his philosophy, in his writings as well as his lectures, was not theological doctrine but a belief in personal experience and intuition. Over and over he emphasized the supremacy of the individual human soul, rather than doctrine, tradition, or social custom, in determining truth and the meaning of our existence. The one essay most characteristic of his philosophy and most widely quoted is "Self-Reliance". His great work of biography, Representative Men, was published in 1850 and included essays on Plato (See

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Platonism), Goethe, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Emanuel Swedenborg (See Swedenborgianism), all of whom had influenced Emerson's own development and who he now held up as "representative" of the potential for greatness and genius that resides in all individuals. His speeches on topics such as philosophy of history, human culture, human life and the present day, were based on material in his books (published posthumously from 1909 to 1914), remarks and notes that he began writing while a student at Harvard. His most detailed statement of belief was reserved for his first book, Nature (1836), which published it anonymously but was soon correctly attributed to him. At the time the book caught my attention, but is considered his most original and important, which provides the essence of his poetic transcendentalism, which is a synthesis of Puritan religiosity and romantic idealism. The following year he applied these ideas to the cultural and intellectual issues in his speech, 'The American Scholar, "delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard. A second speech, entitled "Address to the College of Divinity 'delivered in 1838 to graduates of the Divinity College, University of Cambridge, raised considerable controversy for its attack on the defense of religion and religious experience intuitive and independent. In his first book of Essays (1841) collected his most famous lectures, among which self-confidence which became the theoretical basis of democratic individualism. At that time he wrote for The Dial, the journal of New England transcendentalism, which was founded in 1840 and closed in 1844. In 1846 he published his first book of poems. Leave the country again in 1847 to lecture in England, where he was received warmly Carlyle. Several of his speeches, portraits of great men like Napoleon, Plato, and Goethe were published later in Representative Men (1850), a work reminiscent of Heroes (1840) of Carlyle. His foreign trip inspired a brilliant travel book, English Traits (1856). His diaries show his growing interest in national affairs and on his

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return to the United States actively championed the abolitionist cause, delivering many lectures against slavery. The Meaning of Life(1869), which was the first of his books was an immediate success, including the trials 'Power', 'Wealth', 'Destination' and 'Culture'. Later he published a book of poems entitled May Day and Other Poems (1867). Although written shortly thereafter and his intellectual capacity declined, his reputation as a writer spread. Society and Solitude (1870) is also a collection of lectures, and Parnassus (1874) collected his favorite poems. Other works are Letters and social objectives (1876) and Natural History of Intellect (1893). He died in Concord on April 27, 1882

Conclusion Philosopher, lecturer, poet, essayist, and the father of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson was also a passionate abolitionist whose writings condemned both southern slaveholders and those northerners who were not fully committed to freedom for African Americans. Initially unenthusiastic about Abraham Lincoln, Emerson became a supporter during the Civil War and delivered a widely reprinted eulogy upon the death of the president. Although Emerson continued to write and speak for the rest of his life, his work after the Civil War was focused mainly on his philosophy of life rather than on politics. On April 27, 1882, he died of pneumonia.

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Works Cited

Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Clavel, Stanley. Emerson's Transcendental Etudes. Edited by David Justin Hodge. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, ed. by Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson Yale Univ. Press 1995. Keane, Patrick J., Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic "Light of All Our Day" Univ. of Mo. Press 2005. McAleer, John. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Myerson, Joel, ed., a Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Oxford 2000. Packer, Barbara, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays Continuum 1982. Porte, Joel, and Saundra Morris, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson Cambridge 1999. Richardson, Robert D. Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire: A Biography Univ. of Calif. Press 1995. Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Sacks, Kenneth. Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle of SelfReliance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Smith, Harmon. My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship with Emerson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.