ralph waldo emerson essay the poet

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Poems & Poets

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson—a New England preacher, essayist, lecturer, poet, and philosopher—was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 19th century in the United States. Emerson was also the first major American literary and intellectual figure to widely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for classical Asian and Middle Eastern works. He not only gave countless readers their first exposure to non-Western modes of thinking, metaphysical concepts, and sacred mythologies; he also shaped the way subsequent generations of American writers and thinkers approached the vast cultural resources of Asia and the Middle East.   Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. As a boy, his first contact with the non-Western world came by way of the merchandise that bustled across the India Wharf in Boston harbor, a major nexus of the Indo-Chinese trade that flourished in New England after the Revolutionary War. Emerson’s first contact with writings from and about the non-Western world came by way of his father, William Emerson, a Unitarian minister with a genteel interest in learning and letters.

In 1817, at the age of 14, Emerson entered Harvard College. While at Harvard, Emerson had little opportunity to study the diverse literary and religious traditions of Asia or the Middle East. The curriculum focused on Greek and Roman writers, British logicians and philosophers, Euclidean geometry and algebra, and post-Enlightenment defenses of revealed religion. As his journals and library borrowing records attest, however, in his spare time, Emerson paid keen attention to the wider European Romantic interest in the “Orient” or the “East,” which to him meant the ancient lands and sacred traditions east of classical Greece, such as Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, China, and India. An aspiring poet, Emerson also gravitated to selections of poetry that took up Eastern themes and Eastern poetry, including the works of Saadi and  Hafez , which he would embrace in adulthood.

Like other Anglo-American readers of his period, Emerson relied heavily on British colonial agents for his knowledge of India, reading treatises, travelogues, and translations of legal, religious, and poetic texts produced in the wake of Britain’s imperial expansion into India. As a consequence, Emerson’s writing about South Asia (as well as China, Persia, and the Arab world) often traffics in the menagerie of 19th century Euro-American stereotypes and misconceptions. Examples can be found in Emerson’s “Indian Superstition,” a densely allusive poem that he composed for Harvard College’s graduation ceremonies in 1822. In the 156-line poem, Emerson describes how “Superstition,” the personification of religious tyranny in Asia, has enslaved “[D]ishonored India.” With its Romantic primitivism and bombastic imagery, “Indian Superstition” is perhaps closer to caricature than considered literary art. Yet, for all its excess, Emerson’s poem is notable for departing from a common formula of the period according to which a debased India could only be redeemed through Western colonialism. Instead, Emerson urges Indians to resist the shackles of the British Empire as forcefully as they should resist the mental chains of religious superstition. He exhorts ordinary Indians to look upon the example of post-revolution America as an emblem of what a modern democratic nation could achieve. After he graduated from Harvard, Emerson’s enthusiasm for non-Western subjects waned, primarily because he devoted himself to becoming a Unitarian minister. In 1831 Emerson’s wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis, an event that galvanized a series of personal and professional changes in his life. The next year Emerson resigned his pulpit at the Second Church of Boston, publicly citing the fact that he did not believe in the special divinity of Jesus and thus could no longer administer the sacrament of communion. After traveling through Europe, where he met literary luminaries such as William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, Emerson returned to his ancestral home in Concord, Massachusetts. He began a career as a public lecturer, which lasted almost 50 years, and married Lydia Jackson, whom he affectionately referred to as “Mine Asia”—a pun on Asia Minor, the location of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. In 1836 Emerson published  Nature,  the first major statement of his mature philosophy and a groundbreaking book that catalyzed the Transcendentalist movement in New England. Along with Emerson, the New England Transcendentalists were an eclectic group of religious, literary, educational, and social reformers that included Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement grew out of Unitarianism in the greater Boston area; was deeply influenced by British and German Romanticism, especially as interpreted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and revolved around a form of philosophical and spiritual idealism that valued intuition over the senses.

With the publication of his  Essays  in 1841 and  Essays: Second Series  in 1844, Emerson emerged as a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity. In his essays from this period Emerson did not explicitly take up Eastern subjects or ideas; however, scholars agree that there are similarities between Emerson’s “Over-Soul” in his 1841 essay of that name and the Hindu conception of  Brahman . Scholars also agree that there are similarities between Emerson’s belief described in his 1841 essay “Compensation” and the Hindu doctrine of  karma . Moreover, in his published writings during this period, Emerson cited maxims, referred to prominent figures, and otherwise incorporated allusions drawn from Asian and Middle Eastern literatures with surprising regularity. He added these “lustres” to his nonfiction writing for at least two reasons. First, by treating non-Western texts with the same respect afforded cultural authorities in the Western traditions, he could disrupt the parochial expectations of his American and European audiences. Second, by adducing evidence from traditions outside of America and Europe, he could assert the universality of his observations on society, fate, ethics, and philosophy. Emerson’s engagement with Eastern cultural sources is also evident in his poetry from the 1840s. For example, inspired by his reading of Persian verse, Emerson wrote “Saadi” in 1842, a poetic tribute to the aphorist, panegyrist, and lyrical poet of the same name.

When scholars discuss the limitations of Emerson’s writing about the East, they often refer to the essay “Plato; or the Philosopher,” published in  Representative Men  in 1850. In that volume, Emerson argues that the Greek philosopher brought together the two “cardinal facts” at the core of all philosophy: Unity and Variety. According to Emerson, the tendency to “dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity” is primarily an Eastern trait, while the impulse toward variety is a Western one. Emerson praises in Plato what he probably valued in himself—an ability to synthesize the best aspects of unity and variety, immensity and detail, East and West. And yet Emerson’s conceptualization of the East in the “Plato” essay poses problems that are worth noting.

As scholars have observed, when Emerson claims to speak about “Asia,” he seems to have India in mind (that is, the country with the “social institution of caste”). It is a muddling of distinctions that suggests Emerson was unconcerned about the vital differences among the cultures of Asia and the Middle East. Emerson also eschews political or economic comparisons in favor of idealized intellectual ones, supporting the notion that “the East” was more for him an abstract idea than a place inhabited by actual people. Also, even though Emerson purports to offer a balanced view of an East that “[loves] infinity” and a West that [“delights] in boundaries,” his language seems to favor Europe—with its activity, creativity, “discipline,” “arts, inventions, trade, freedom”—over Asia, with its “immovable institutions” and “deaf, unimplorable, immense fate.” Emerson’s vague and polarized thinking in “Plato” closely aligns with the stereotypical typologies about East and West that prevailed in the wider culture, pointing to the limits of Emerson’s intellectual vision when trying to imagine the Eastern Other.

In 1856 Emerson composed a lyric poem originally called “Song of the Soul” and later published in the  Atlantic  in 1857 under the title “ Brahma .” The poem dramatizes an idea that Emerson closely associated with Hinduism; namely, that the material world is essentially an illusory mask of the divine spirit that dwells in all beings. Although it stands to reason that the poem is written from the perspective of Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, or even Brahman, the absolute or universal soul, the speaker in the poem does not name itself. Instead, the speaker enumerates the ways in which it eludes characterization. The opening lines of the four-stanza verse exemplify the riddle-like quality of the poem as a whole: “If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain,/ They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again.”

In many ways, “Brahma” is a distillation of Emerson’s reading of Hindu sacred literatures over the previous two decades, from the  Baghavad Gita  to the  Katha Upanishad . When “Brahma” inspired dozens of mocking parodies in the  Atlantic —its paradoxical style proved to be too much for many antebellum American readers, who objected to its exotic obscurities—Emerson told his daughter that one did not need to adopt a Hindu perspective to understand the poem. One could easily substitute “Jehovah” for “Brahma,” he explained, and not lose the sense of the verse.

In 1858 Emerson published a long essay, “Persian Poetry,” in the  Atlantic . As a way of introducing American readers to what was likely an unfamiliar poetic tradition, Emerson drew parallels between Persian poetry and Homeric epics, English ballads, and the works of William Shakespeare. He also noted that the legends of Persian mythology could sometimes be found in the Hebrew Bible. As part of his exposition, Emerson included his own English translations of the poets Hafez, Saadi,  Khayyam , and Enweri, by way of the German translations of Persian poetry by Baron von Hammer-Purgstall. Emerson had no competence in any Asian or Middle Eastern language, and he never read a non-Western text in its original language. But Emerson had been translating von Hammer’s German texts in his journals since 1846. By the end of his life, Emerson produced at least 64 translations, totaling more than 700 lines of Persian verse, many of which can be found in “Orientalist,” a notebook he began to keep in the 1850s. 

In 1872 Emerson sailed for England and then Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. As he toured the cities of Alexandria and Cairo, Emerson noted observations about the Pyramids, the Nile River, and his woeful ignorance of the Arabic language. But at 70 years old, Emerson’s most significant writings about the East were behind him. Ten years later, on April 27, 1882, Emerson died in Concord, leaving an enduring legacy as the seminal figure of modern American Orientalism. His lifelong excursions into the libraries of classical Asian and Middle Eastern literatures were those of an enthusiast instead of a rigorous scholar, and he often relied on crude Romantic stereotypes and failed to recognize the differences among the cultures and peoples of the East. But Ralph Waldo Emerson expanded the Eastern horizons of generations of American readers and writers, and he persuasively demonstrated how classical Indian, Chinese, and Persian works could be used as a means to bring the inquiring self into a fresh appreciation of its own profound powers.

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• U.S., New England

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• 1. Good-Bye
• 2. The Problem
• 4. The Visit
• 6. The World-Soul
• 7. The Sphinx
• 8. Alphonso of Castile
• 9. Mithridates
• 10. To J.W.
• 11. Destiny
• 13. Earth-Song
• 14. The Rhodora
• 15. The Humble-Bee
• 16. Berrying
• 17. The Snow-Storm
• 18. Woodnotes I
• 19. Woodnotes II
• 20. Monadnoc
• 22. Astraea
• 23. Étienne De La Boéce
• 24. Compensation
• 25. Forbearance
• 26. The Park
• 27. Forerunners
• 28. Sursum Corda
• 29. Ode To Beauty
• 30. Give All To Love
• 31. To Ellen At The South
• 32. To Ellen
• 35. The Violet
• 36. The Amulet
• 37. Thine Eyes Still Shined
• 39. Hermione
• 40. Initial, Daemonic And Celestial Love
• 41. The Apology
• 42. Merlin I
• 43. Merlin II
• 44. Bacchus
• 46. The House
• 48. Holidays
• 49. Xenophanes
• 50. The Day’s Ration
• 52. Musketaquid
• 54. Threnody
• 55. May-Day
• 56. The Adirondacs
• 57. Nemesis
• 59. Freedom
• 61. Boston Hymn
• 62. Voluntaries
• 63. Love And Thought
• 66. Letters
• 68. Merlin’s Song
• 69. The Test
• 70. Solution
• 72. Nature I
• 73. Nature II
• 74. The Romany Girl
• 75. My Garden
• 76. The Chartist’s Complaint
• 77. The Titmouse
• 78. The Harp
• 79. Seashore
• 80. Song Of Nature
• 81. Two Rivers
• 82. Waldeinsamkeit
• 83. Terminus
• 84. The Nun’s Aspiration
• 86. Maiden Speech Of The Aeolian Harp
• 88. The Past
• 89. The Last Farewell
• 90. In Memoriam E.B.E.
• 91. Experience
• 92. Compensation II
• 93. Politics
• 94. Heroism
• 95. Character
• 96. Culture
• 97. Friendship
• 98. Spiritual Laws
• 100. Manners
• 103. Worship
• 104. Prudence
• 105. Nature
• 106. The Informing Spirit
• 107. Circles
• 108. Intellect
• 110. Promise
• 111. Caritas
• 113. Wealth
• 114. Illusions
• 115. Quatrains
• 116. Sonnet Of Michel Angelo Buonarotti
• 117. The Exile
• 118. From Hafiz
• 119. Epitaph
• 120. Friendship II
• 121. From Omar Khayyam
• 122. From Ali Ben Abu Taleb
• 123. From Ibn Jemin
• 124. The Flute
• 125. To The Shah
• 126. To The Shah II
• 127. To The Shah III
• 128. Song Of Seyd Nimetollah Of Kuhistan
• 129. The Poet (Poem)
• 130. Fragments On The Poet And The Poetic Gift
• 131. Nature III
• 132. The Earth
• 133. The Heavens
• 134. Transition
• 135. The Garden
• 138. Nahant
• 139. Sunrise
• 140. Night In June
• 144. The Bohemian Hymn
• 146. Insight
• 148. Monadnoc From Afar
• 149. September
• 150. Eros II
• 151. October
• 152. Peter’s Field
• 154. The Walk
• 155. Cosmos
• 156. The Miracle
• 157. The Waterfall
• 158. Walden
• 159. The Enchanter
• 160. Written In A Volume Of Goethe
• 161. Riches
• 162. Philosopher
• 163. Intellect II
• 164. Limits
• 165. Inscription For A Well In Memory Of The Martyrs Of The War
• 166. The Exile II
• 167. The Bell
• 168. Thought
• 169. Prayer
• 170. To-Day
• 172. The Summons
• 173. The River
• 174. Good Hope
• 175. Lines To Ellen
• 176. Security
• 177. A Mountain Grave
• 178. A Letter
• 179. Hymn II
• 180. Self-Reliance (Poem)
• 181. Written In Naples
• 182. Written At Rome
• 183. Webster
• 184. From The Phi Beta Kappa Poem

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston. After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He was appointed to the Old Second Church in his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Soon after the death of his nineteen-year-old wife of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831.

The following year, Emerson sailed for Europe, visiting Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Carlyle, the Scottish-born English writer, was famous for his explosive attacks on hypocrisy and materialism, his distrust of democracy, and his highly romantic belief in the power of the individual. Emerson’s friendship with Carlyle was both lasting and significant; the insights of the British thinker helped Emerson formulate his own philosophy.

On his return to New England, Emerson became known for challenging traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle as “The Sage of Concord,” Emerson became the chief spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement. Centered in New England during the nineteenth century, Transcendentalism was a reaction against scientific rationalism.

Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience. “Trust thyself,” Emerson’s motto, became the code of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E. Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial .

Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson’s most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson's famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” in which the writer instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God, and to trust his own judgment above all others.

Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address , which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.

Emerson’s philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works of Plotinus, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Jakob Böhme. A believer in the “divine sufficiency of the individual,” Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville , Nathaniel Hawthorne , and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment. In spite of their skepticism, Emerson’s beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.

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Ecstasy of Influence

In January of 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s firstborn child, Waldo, contracted scarlet fever and died within a week. He was five. He had been his father’s exuberant companion, who had, Emerson wrote, “touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact & circumstance in the household.” Henry David Thoreau, who had lodged with the Emersons, “charmed Waldo by the variety of toys whistles boats popguns & all kinds of instruments which he could make & mend.” The death was a shock to the entire village of Concord, Massachusetts. When the nine-year-old Louisa May Alcott came to the Emersons’ door to ask about Waldo, she was greeted, she wrote, by an Emerson “worn with watching and changed by sorrow.” All he said was “Child, he is dead.” Alcott called it her “first glimpse of a great grief.”

But the grief did not feel real, or real enough, to Emerson. “I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve,” he wrote in a letter the following week. The loss of Waldo spurred an essay, “Experience,” that contains one of the most startling passages in American literature:

The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

This seems nearly callous, but that’s the point. Emerson had suffered tragic deaths before, and, partly as a result, had developed a theory of spiritual profit and loss: surely the greatest costs led to the richest benefits? When “a great man,” he wrote in “Compensation,” an earlier essay, is “pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.” But Waldo’s death was so profound that it went uncompensated, even by grief. It taught Emerson “nothing”; it was almost as though his son had never existed. Unluckily, swiftly, even happily, life goes on, only mildly “inconvenienced” by the most devastating loss imaginable.

“Experience” has a knife’s-edge, emergency intensity that is nowhere to be found in Emerson’s poems, collected in “Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry” (Harvard), edited by Albert J. von Frank. Prose was a zone of fruitful conflict for Emerson, who began his public life writing sermons. He entered Harvard Divinity School in 1825, at the age of twenty-one, to prepare for a career in the Unitarian ministry. Soon he was struck by a painful eye disease, likely caused by tuberculosis, and submitted to two cataract operations. According to Robert D. Richardson’s “Emerson: The Mind on Fire,” Emerson’s reading in Hume, and his knowledge of the “brilliantly clever arguments of Cicero,” began to erode his faith. His days were “slipping past him, one by one, in an irrevocable procession,” Richardson writes. He knew that the “proper emotion” wasn’t humility or even skepticism but “wonder.”

Emerson’s essays are like wonder handbooks: they tell you where to find it, how to use it, what to do when it fails you. “Nature,” “The Poet,” “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “Experience”: you can use these essays to become enchanted; many dejected secular people have gone to them regularly to see the world in renewed and refreshed terms of beauty. They outfit you for a walk in the woods or an ordinary morning. They are modular: you can remember bits of one, bits of another, mess up the order, mix and match. Their authority comes not from the Church or the ministry but from the power of their prose. Emerson must have realized that half of the people in church were there to hear language electrified by the preacher; his essays are, as Harold Bloom put it, “interior oratory,” free-range sermons that make their own occasions.

Emerson also wrote a poem about Waldo, “Threnody.” It is often quite beautiful, but it is dressed almost entirely in period costume. The period was the eighteen-forties, and the costume was woodsy, “native,” and politely anti-European. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who returned from Europe to teach modern languages at Harvard, was considered a boldly American poet: he wrote epics about Miles Standish and the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia. To Emerson’s contemporaries, experimentation in poetry meant writing about “the bobolink and the humble-bee” rather than the English nightingale and the skylark, which, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson’s correspondent and early advocate, wrote, Americans “might never have seen or heard anywhere.”

By these standards, “Threnody,” with its tableaux of American village life, is a masterpiece. Instead of nymphs and dryads, here are the rudiments of New England hill, garden, and scrub forest:

On that shaded day, Dark with more clouds than tempests are, When thou didst yield thy innocent breath In birdlike heavings unto death, Night came, and Nature had not thee; I said, ‘We are mates in misery.’ The morrow dawned with needless glow; Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow; Each tramper started; but the feet Of the most beautiful and sweet Of human youth had left the hill And garden,—they were bound and still.

This is one of the first inventories in verse of a distinctly New England winter, its “needless glow” awakening the tinny chirps of native snowbirds. Those unforgettable “birdlike heavings” of the child’s final breaths puncture a frigid silence known to anybody from Emerson’s neck of the woods. The image is borrowed from his journals, roused to this new formal occasion yet maintaining its fringe of untransformed anguish. But the poem quickly stifles its desperation in the prescribed comforts of noble sentiment and regular music.

The listlessness of Emerson’s poetry is surprising, given the veneration he expressed for the art. Some of his best prose is devoted to lobbying for the special advantages of poetry. These works are thrilling because they are written in thrilling sentences. This does not necessarily imply that Emerson’s poetry will be thrilling, though he must have intended his large claims for poetry to be tested on his own work. Like many of his essays, “The Poet” was printed with an original short lyric as its epigraph. The mediocrity of these poem-epigraphs is often emphasized by the essays’ attempts to honor them as superior forms of expression. It makes for a strangely rigged contest between turbocharged prose and the rickshaw verse it ostensibly reveres. Emerson’s “poet”—a “complete man,” a “man without impediment,” a “sayer” and “namer,” like Adam—would not have printed the lacklustre verses appended to “The Poet,” which venerate “Olympian bards” and “divine ideas” with rhymes as bouncy as a Super Ball.

In “Merlin I,” written, like “The Poet,” in the eighteen-forties, Emerson plays the unwinnable game of arguing in metre against metre and in rhyme against rhyme:

Thy trivial harp will never please Or fill my craving ear; Its chords should ring as blows the breeze, Free, peremptory, clear. No jingling serenader’s art, Nor tinkle of piano strings, Can make the wild blood start In its mystic springs.

Emerson kept an Aeolian harp in a window of his house. He intended to build in verse its equivalent, an instrument that nature could play. But the instrument itself was old-fashioned, gaudy, and domestic.

Emerson’s ideas were obviously badly served by the rickety verse structures he built for them. Seeing them strain and buckle under the weight of his mind and ambition led him, in “The Poet,” to call not only for a new kind of poem, which, at least in theory, he could have written, but for a wholly new kind of person, a person he wasn’t and didn’t want to become. His best poems—“Each and All,” “Brahma,” “The Rhodora,” “The Snow-Storm”—are refinements of oratory to the special rhetorical technologies of poetry. But his quicksilver prose was poetry, its sentences like signal flares launched one after another into the ether. What he says about the poet is truer of those astonishing prose performances:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

This passage, like so many in his great essays, describes itself, its own idiosyncratic “architecture.” This is what Emerson meant when he called for a literature of “insight and not of tradition.” Each sentence is an innovation, “a new thing.” Emerson didn’t want to write poems about the New World. He wanted poems to make the world new. It is fascinating, therefore, to see how he arranged for his own swift obsolescence. His poems sometimes feel intentionally slight, as though making way for the accelerating future, still at his back but quickly gaining on him. His prose was poetry by other means, calling for its own mirror image, a poetry whose “argument” trumped its forms.

Emerson was not the poet he had in mind in “The Poet.” In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied an American poetry free of “legendary lays,” “old traditions,” “supernatural beings,” masks, and personifications. Americans led “petty” and “insipid” lives, “crowded with paltry interests”: their lives were “anti-poetic.” The only subject possible for an American poet was humankind; luckily, as Tocqueville wrote, “the poet needs no more.” Emerson, who spent most of his life cultivating the aura of an elder, called for “a brood of Titans” who would “run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love.”

In July of 1855, Emerson got the poet he’d been calling for. He picked up a parcel from the Concord post office which contained the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” sent anonymously from Brooklyn by its author. The book was unsigned, though there was a frontispiece portrait, the name “Walter Whitman” on the copyright page, and, inside, the jubilant line “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos. ” After a little hunting, Emerson found Whitman’s name and the address of his distributor in a newspaper advertisement. He then wrote his famous letter to Whitman, welcoming him to immortality: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”

In response, Whitman published the letter in the book’s next edition, along with twenty new poems and his own open letter to Emerson of several thousand words celebrating “that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that new moral American continent” whose “shores you found”:

I say you have led The States there—have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after you.

Whitman was a fact of American life from that moment forward. It took a little longer for an equally important disciple to surface: Emily Dickinson, who treasured an edition of Emerson’s poems given to her by an admirer, and whose brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, had hosted Emerson many times at their handsome house, the Evergreens, just across the field from her home. Of course, Dickinson’s poems sound nothing like Emerson’s. He provided, for the wild synaptic activity of his protégés, the framework. He was their server. If Emerson’s poems had been just a little better than they were, we might not have American literature as we know it. Our greatest writers, seeing their own visions usurped, might have been content to remain his readers. ♦

10 of the Best Ralph Waldo Emerson Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In his vast Guide to Modern World Literature , Martin Seymour-Smith calls Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman the only true poetic innovators in nineteenth-century American poetry. But in fact, Dickinson’s eccentric use of slant rhyme and Whitman’s development of free verse are both anticipated in the work of an earlier nineteenth-century American poet: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson (1803-82) is best-known for his prose writings: his 1836 pamphlet ‘ Nature ’ became a kind of unofficial manifesto for the Transcendentalist movement in New England. This was, in many ways, America’s development of European Romanticism, in that it argued for the kinship between the natural world and the human imagination.

Emerson’s prose essays often eclipse his poetic achievement. His poetry, which appeared in Poems (1847) and May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), is uneven in quality, but at its best it is lively, arresting, and genuinely innovative. Let’s take a look at ten of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best poems.

1. ‘ Boston Hymn ’.

The word of the Lord by night To the watching Pilgrims came, As they sat by the seaside, And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

One of two very famous public hymns Emerson is principally known for (even by people who don’t usually read his poetry), ‘Boston Hymn’ was composed in 1862 and read publicly in Boston Music Hall on 1 January 1863.

The poem commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation issued by the US President Abraham Lincoln. Emerson lived in Boston, and the city was known for its support for the abolitionist movement; this hymn celebrates the freeing of the slaves which the proclamation brought into being.

2. ‘ The Snow-Storm ’.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

Transcendentalists, like the Romantics whom they followed and learnt so much from, often write about nature in all its power and beauty; and this is one of Emerson’s finest nature poems.

Indeed, the poem might be regarded as an example of the Sublime: that philosophy which views nature as both beautiful and terrifying, and far greater, more long-lasting, and more powerful than mankind. In lines of blank verse – the unrhymed structure perhaps suggesting the wild unpredictability of the snow falling – Emerson vividly captures the ‘frolic architecture of the snow’.

3. ‘ Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing ’.

Though loath to grieve The evil time’s sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest’s cant, Or statesman’s rant.

As the full title of this poem makes clear, it was dedicated to William Henry Channing (1810-84), a minister and reformer for the abolition of slavery. The poem is one of Emerson’s most deeply allusive, and one needs a fairly good knowledge of American history to make sense of its various references; but the lively short lines show Emerson’s distinctive and original approach to form.

4. ‘ The Rhodora ’.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

This 1834 poem is another one of Emerson’s nature poems, describing the flowering shrub, the rhodora, in the woods. Emerson praises this shrub as a ‘rival of the rose’ for its beauty. The last line is Romantic Transcendentalism through and through, uniting the poet’s fate with that of the flower.

5. ‘ Merlin ’.

Pass in, pass in, the angels say, In to the upper doors; Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise.

In this longer poem of 1847, Emerson tried to find a new direction for American poetry, much as he had tried to do in his 1843 essay ‘ The Poet ’. To do this, Emerson rejects the traditional forms and models which earlier American poets had inherited from England and Europe.

The Merlin of Emerson’s poem is a seer, a prophetic figure: exactly the kind of person Emerson thought the poet should be. The image of the ‘stairway of surprise’, quoted above, has often been praised by critics.

6. ‘ Brahma ’.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

This poem, written in 1856, was first published in The Atlantic the following year. The poem is named after Brahman, the universal principle of the Vedas in Hinduism. It’s a dramatic work (of sorts), spoken by Brahma himself, and reveals Emerson’s interest in Eastern scriptures and spiritual thought.

7. ‘ The Bell ’.

I love thy music, mellow bell, I love thine iron chime, To life or death, to heaven or hell, Which calls the sons of Time.

Written in more traditional quatrains using alternate abab rhyme, ‘The Bell’ shows that Emerson was capable of more conventional formal lyrics as well as his freer, looser poems.

8. ‘ Ode to Beauty ’.

Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old; Or what was the service For which I was sold?

Here’s another of Emerson’s odes, this time in praise of ‘Beauty’, whom Emerson personifies and addresses directly. For Emerson, Beauty is ‘Queen of things’ whom he entreats to give herself to him, or else let him die – for a life lived without beauty is not worth living.

9. ‘ Terminus ’.

It is time to be old, To take in sail:— The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: ‘No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root …

The Latin word ‘terminus’ means ‘end’, and this later poem, published when Emerson was in his sixties, shows him reflecting on old age and what Philip Larkin called ‘the only end of age’, death. Terminus, in Emerson’s poem, is personified, as a figure not unlike Old Father Time, reminding us that Terminus was a Roman god of boundaries and endings.

10. ‘ Concord Hymn ’.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Let’s conclude this pick of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best poems with his best-known of all. ‘Concord Hymn’ is a ‘poem of occasion’, written in 1837 in order to be sung at the unveiling of a monument commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord. Emerson was unable to attend the unveiling himself, but Henry David Thoreau was there to sing the hymn along with others in attendance.

One line from this public poem (and a very formally regular poem, by Emerson’s standards) has become universally known: ‘the shot heard around the world.’ Emerson’s poem commemorates those Americans who resisted British rule, starting with the War of Independence in the previous century and moving up to date.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (born May 25, 1803, Boston , Massachusetts , U.S.—died April 27, 1882, Concord , Massachusetts) was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism .

Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian clergyman and friend of the arts. The son inherited the profession of divinity, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from Puritan days. The family of his mother, Ruth Haskins, was strongly Anglican, and among influences on Emerson were such Anglican writers and thinkers as Ralph Cudworth , Robert Leighton , Jeremy Taylor , and Samuel Taylor Coleridge .

On May 12, 1811, Emerson’s father died, leaving the son largely to the intellectual care of Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt, who took her duties seriously. In 1812 Emerson entered the Boston Public Latin School, where his juvenile verses were encouraged and his literary gifts recognized. In 1817 he entered Harvard College (later Harvard University), where he began his journals, which may be the most remarkable record of the “march of Mind” to appear in the United States . He graduated in 1821 and taught school while preparing for part-time study in the Harvard Divinity School.

Though Emerson was licensed to preach in the Unitarian community in 1826, illness slowed the progress of his career, and he was not ordained to the Unitarian ministry at the Second Church, Boston, until 1829. There he began to win fame as a preacher, and his position seemed secure. In 1829 he also married Ellen Louisa Tucker. When she died of tuberculosis in 1831, his grief drove him to question his beliefs and his profession. But in the previous few years Emerson had already begun to question Christian doctrines. His older brother William, who had gone to Germany, had acquainted him with the new biblical criticism and the doubts that had been cast on the historicity of miracles. Emerson’s own sermons, from the first, had been unusually free of traditional doctrine and were instead a personal exploration of the uses of spirit, showing an idealistic tendency and announcing his personal doctrine of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Indeed, his sermons had divested Christianity of all external or historical supports and made its basis one’s private intuition of the universal moral law and its test a life of virtuous accomplishment. Unitarianism had little appeal to him by now, and in 1832 he resigned from the ministry.

When Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain conviction of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation—i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In Paris he saw Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu ’s collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man’s spiritual relation to nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge , William Wordsworth , and Thomas Carlyle . At home once more in 1833, he began to write Nature and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent dwelling place in Concord, Massachusetts, and in the following year he married Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work.

The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other intellectuals . Before the decade was over his personal manifestos— Nature , “The American Scholar,” and the divinity school Address —had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate Transcendentalism by publishing anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled Nature . Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or amendment of the ideas he first affirmed in Nature .

Emerson’s religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the Unitarians’ retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was also deeply unsettled by Newtonian physics’ mechanistic conception of the universe and by the Lockean psychology of sensation that he had learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for free will in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining reality.

Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of 18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to transcend the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking inward into one’s own self, one’s own soul, and from such an enlightened self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to change one’s world according to the dictates of one’s ideals and conscience . Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual’s intimate personal experience of his own portion of the divine “oversoul,” which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to look for it. Emerson enunciates how “reason,” which to him denotes the intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite different from one’s reliance on “understanding”—i.e., the ordinary gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material world. Emerson’s doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches. The individual must then have the courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.

Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other European Romantics , the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg , Hindu philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power and an organic unity whose cumulative effect was highly suggestive and stimulating to his contemporary readers’ imaginations.

In a lecture entitled “The American Scholar” (August 31, 1837), Emerson described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson’s “ Address at Divinity College,” Harvard University, in 1838 was another challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition, especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man’s attempt to encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an intuited sentiment of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by Harvard for many years. Young disciples , however, joined the informal Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his activities.

In 1840 he helped launch The Dial , first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas Transcendentalists were trying to present to America. Though short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered his Essays into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of Essays Emerson consolidated his thoughts on moral individualism and preached the ethics of self-reliance , the duty of self-cultivation , and the need for the expression of self. The second volume of Essays shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater respect for society, and an awareness of the ambiguities and incompleteness of genius.

His Representative Men (1849) contained biographies of Plato , Swedenborg, Montaigne , Shakespeare , Napoleon , and Goethe . In English Traits he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself stemmed. The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson’s most mature work, reveals a developed humanism together with a full awareness of human limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson’s collected Poems (1846) were supplemented by others in May-Day (1867), and the two volumes established his reputation as a major American poet.

By the 1860s Emerson’s reputation in America was secure, for time was wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his teaching without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. Upon his death in 1882 Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had set out to destroy.

Emerson’s voice and rhetoric sustained the faith of thousands in the American lecture circuits between 1834 and the American Civil War . He served as a cultural middleman through whom the aesthetic and philosophical currents of Europe passed to America, and he led his countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the American renaissance (1835–65). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American tributary of European Romanticism , Emerson gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and ethical movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person.

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Self-Reliance

Throughout his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson kept detailed journals of his thoughts and actions, and he returned to them as a source for many of his essays. Self-reliance is all that it sounds like plus considerably more. Learn from one of the greatest writers and poets in American history. His most famous work, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance can truly change your life for the better.

More About Self-Reliance

What is Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous quote?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in American literary history. He was a philosopher, essayist, and poet who lived during the 19th century. His most famous quote is " Self-reliance is the foundation of a prosperous society." This quote is often cited as a cornerstone of Emerson's philosophy, which emphasized individualism, self-sufficiency, and the importance of following one's own path in life. This message continues to inspire and resonate with people around the world, making it one of the most enduring and memorable quotes in American literary history.

What is Emerson's most famous essay?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most famous for his essay " Self-Reliance. " This essay, first published in 1841, outlines Emerson's philosophy of individualism and self-reliance, and it remains one of his most widely read and influential works. In " Self-Reliance ," Emerson argues that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others. He writes that people should cultivate their own inner voice, and that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment. The essay is considered a classic of American literature, and its message continues to be relevant and inspiring to people around the world.

What are Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous poems?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a renowned poet and writer, and several of his poems have become well-known and widely celebrated. Some of his most famous poems include " Concord Hymn ," which he wrote to commemorate the Battle of Concord during the American Revolution, " Each and All ," a meditation on the interconnections between all things, and " Brahma ," a celebration of the unity of all things in the universe. Emerson's poetry is characterized by its use of rich and descriptive language, its philosophical themes, and its focus on individualism and self-reliance . His poems remain popular and widely read today, and they continue to inspire and influence people around the world.

What inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to write?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was inspired to write by a variety of factors, including his experiences as a young man, his philosophical beliefs, and his interest in exploring the relationship between the individual and society. One of the most significant influences on Emerson's writing was his growing sense of disillusionment with traditional religious and cultural institutions. He saw these institutions as stifling and oppressive, and he felt that people were being denied the freedom to think and act for themselves. In response to this, Emerson began to develop a philosophy of individualism and self-reliance , and he sought to share this philosophy through his writing. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, he sought to inspire others to embrace their own inner voice and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs.

What influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by a wide range of factors, including his personal experiences, philosophical ideas, and cultural and historical events. Some of the most significant influences on his work include his exposure to the ideas of Transcendentalism, a philosophical and cultural movement that sought to bridge the gap between the individual and the divine. He was also inspired by his travels in Europe, where he was exposed to the works of leading European philosophers and poets. Additionally, Emerson was deeply influenced by the religious and cultural institutions of his time, and he sought to challenge and reject many of the traditions and beliefs that he saw as stifling and oppressive. These various influences helped shape his unique philosophy of individualism and self-reliance , which he sought to share with others through his writing.

What are 3 significant things about Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a highly influential figure in American literary and cultural history. Here are three significant things about him:

Philosophical Thought: Emerson was a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement, which emphasized the importance of individual experience and the power of the human spirit to understand the world. His writing reflects these beliefs and encourages readers to trust their own instincts and ideas.

Literary Legacy: Emerson was a prolific writer, producing a large body of work that includes essays, poems, and lectures. His writing remains widely read and highly regarded today, and he is considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century.

Cultural Influence: Beyond his literary achievements, Emerson also had a significant impact on American culture. His ideas about individualism and self-reliance have been widely influential, and they continue to shape our understanding of American values and ideals. Additionally, he was a prominent public speaker and a leading figure in the intellectual and cultural life of his time.

What is Ralph Emerson's motto?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's motto, or personal philosophy, can be best summed up by his famous quote, " Self-reliance is the foundation of a prosperous society." This quote reflects Emerson's belief in the importance of individualism and self-reliance, and it encapsulates the central themes that he explored in his writing. In Emerson's view, people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others. He believed that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment, and that it is the foundation of a prosperous and harmonious society. This message continues to inspire and resonate with people around the world, and it remains one of Emerson's most enduring and memorable contributions to American literary and cultural history.

What is Ralph Waldo Emerson most known for?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most widely known for his contributions to American literature and cultural history as a writer, poet, and philosopher. He is considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century, and his essays, poems, and lectures have had a profound impact on American intellectual and cultural life. Emerson is best known for his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance, which he expounded upon in works such as " Self-Reliance " and " Nature ." These works argue that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, and that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment. Through his writing, Emerson sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs. His legacy continues to be celebrated and studied today, and he remains one of the most widely read and influential writers in American literary history.

What type of people did Emerson gather around him?

Throughout his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson was associated with a wide-ranging group of people from various walks of life and intellectual disciplines. Some of the individuals who gathered around him included fellow writers, poets, philosophers, and artists, as well as intellectuals, reformers, and political activists. These individuals were drawn to Emerson's ideas about individualism and self-reliance , and many of them were influenced by his philosophy in their own work.

What is Emerson's theory?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his theory of individualism and self-reliance , which he expounded upon in his essays, poems, and lectures. At its core, this theory holds that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others.

According to Emerson, the inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment, and it should be the guiding force in people's lives. His theory of individualism and self-reliance continues to be widely studied and celebrated today, and it remains one of his most enduring contributions to American literary and cultural history.

What type of poetry is Ralph Waldo Emerson known for?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his contributions to American literature as an essayist and philosopher, but he also wrote several influential works of poetry. He is particularly known for his lyrical and contemplative poems that reflect his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance .

Emerson's poetry is characterized by its focus on nature, spirituality, and the human experience, and it often explores the relationship between the self and the universe. His poems are notable for their vivid and evocative language, their spiritual themes, and their celebration of individual freedom and self-expression.

Some of Emerson's most famous poems include "Each and All," "The Rhodora," "Concord Hymn," and "Brahma." These works continue to be widely read and celebrated today, and they remain an important part of American literary and cultural history. Through his poetry, Emerson sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to find their own path to happiness and fulfillment.

Why was Ralph Waldo Emerson important to Transcendentalism?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a key figure in the Transcendentalist movement, which was a major intellectual and cultural movement that emerged in New England in the early 19th century. Transcendentalism was characterized by a focus on individualism, self-reliance, and the power of the individual spirit, and it sought to challenge traditional religious, social, and political beliefs and institutions.

Emerson was one of the leading voices of the movement, and he was known for his essays, poems, and lectures, which expounded upon his ideas about individualism, self-reliance, and the power of the individual spirit. Through his writing and speaking, he sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs.

Emerson's contributions to Transcendentalism were significant, as he helped to define the movement and to shape its intellectual and cultural influence. He was a major influence on other leading Transcendentalists , such as Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, and his ideas and writings continue to be widely studied and celebrated today.

Overall, Ralph Waldo Emerson's contributions to Transcendentalism were essential in shaping the movement's intellectual and cultural impact, and he remains one of the most important and influential figures in American literary and cultural history.

Popular Collections

Lectures / Biographies

This section includes the lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson and also includes various biographies on his life and those close to Emerson. The Sovereignty of Ethics and Mary Moody Emerson are included.

More Lectures

Early Emerson Poems

This section covers poems written early in Emerson’s career which some are not widely known. Fifty poems are available, including The Rhodora.

Uncollected Prose

This is a collection of writings, addresses, essays, and reviews by Emerson. Included are his famous works, The Last Supper.

The section does not cover the history and life of Emerson and his writings, but rather his work entitled “History.”

More About Histroy

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"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." That quote has been inspirational to me and my business. I've taken risks and fallen, but I always get back up stronger than before. Matt Gallant BiOptimizers

The wisdom that is Emerson has been a strong impact on my career and in my roles as a father and husband. His advice is timeless. "Self Reliance" was the first work of Emerson's that I read and I still read it every year. Ron Halversen

I read Emerson's Self Reliance as a teen for English class. It didn't click for me at the time, but as I got older I found myself remembering bits and pieces. It's been a sort of backbone to my adult life that I've returned to again and again when I needed (self) guidance. Melissa Anderson

I recently attended an important dinner meeting with a potential new client. I reminded myself to be calm, watch my non-verbal cues and maintain eye contact. I learned these important items when reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Conduct of Life". The essay emphasized the importance of "Behavior" and to celebrate "the wonderful expressiveness of the human body". Heather Paige Diet Food Delivery Service

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." To think Emerson uttered these words nearly two centuries ago and yet it is the perfect advice for today's youth." Alyssa Gonzalez TLC Graduate Credits

Emerson's advice, "Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer," is even more important in today's wealth-driven economy. Being a producer ensures your family's security and comfort even after you are gone." Ashley Haigh Carpet Tiles UK

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Every business owner would be wise to heed Emerson's words." Caleb Hunter PuppyWire

There is no human alive could not appreciate the magnitude of living life free from all that we tightly wind ourselves. This freedom comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mark Mason Mark Mason

What I remember most about Emerson is he said not to worry about what has happened in the past, or what may happen in the future, but focus on that which dwells deep within you. Derek Mills Shoptimized

A year has not gone by since I left college that I have not read Emerson’s essay, Self Reliance. I have instilled Emerson’s wisdom on my daughter, family, and friends. Jeff Greenfield

My grandfather told me when I was young that instead of following the path of others, I should go where my heart took me. For me to leave a trail for others to follow. I learned years later it was a quote from Emerson. Todd Chism

People Influenced By Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, a poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. His well-known essays were Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As a key figure in the transcendentalist movement, his work and ideas were deeply interwoven with the broader currents of 19th-century American intellectual and social life. Born in Wolcott, Connecticut, Alcott pursued education and self-improvement with a passion that would define much of his life and career. Alcott’s educational philosophy was progressive and innovative. He advocated for a model of education that emphasized personal growth, moral development, and the cultivation of the imagination rather than rote memorization or strict discipline. This led him to found the Temple School in Boston, where he implemented his ideas. Although the school…

Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) was an American philosopher renowned for his work in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of language and for his contributions to the interpretation of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Thoreau. Cavell’s academic career was primarily associated with Harvard University, where he taught for over three decades and impacted contemporary American philosophy. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Cavell was raised in Sacramento, California. He pursued an undergraduate degree in music at the University of California, Berkeley, before shifting his focus to philosophy, where he found his true calling. Cavell earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, later joining the faculty, influencing generations of students and scholars through his teaching and writing. Cavell’s philosophical…

Ellen Louisa Tucker

Ellen Louisa Tucker (1811–1831) was not a public figure or philosopher in her own right but is remembered primarily for her profound influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist philosopher, essayist, and poet. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, Ellen was known for her beauty, vivacity, and profoundly religious nature. Her life was tragically short, but her impact, particularly on Emerson, was significant and enduring. Ellen and Emerson’s relationship began in 1827, culminating in their marriage in 1829 when Ellen was just 18 years old. Their time together was brief, as Ellen suffered from tuberculosis and died less than two years after their marriage, in February 1831, at the age…

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was also an American journalist. Her given name was Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and a profound influencer of modern intellectual thought. His work is known for its radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, its critique of religion and morality as understood in the traditional sense, and its exploration of the concept of the “will to power.” Nietzsche’s philosophy delves into the complexities of existence, the nature of power, and the potential for individual transcendence by creating one’s own values instead of relying on the values of others. Key works of Nietzsche include “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), a philosophical novel that introduces the idea of the Übermensch, or “Overman,” as…

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian, and teacher during the Victorian era. Known for his sharp critique of democracy, industrialization, and the spiritual malaise of his time, Carlyle became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. His work is characterized by a profound, often pessimistic, reflection on society and a strong advocacy for heroic leadership and individual moral integrity. Carlyle’s significant contributions include his essay “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834), a satirical work that presents a philosophy of clothes as a metaphor for the human condition and societal values. His magnum opus, “The French Revolution: A History” (1837), is a dramatic and detailed account…

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was born

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803.

The American Scholar

'The American Scholar' was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837.

The Harvard Divinity School Address

Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered this speech before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge in July 15, 1838.

The Over Soul

There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures.

Nominalist and Realist

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth.

Ruth Haskins Emerson

The mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 9 Nov 1768 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Lidian Jackson Emerson

She was the second wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's best known and best-loved essayist, lecturer, poet in 19th-century.

The Harvard University Press

Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, Biography, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press published a book on Ralph Waldo Emerson named Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy.

University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press published a journal -Rethinking Self-Reliance: Emerson on Mobbing, War, and Abolition.

Boston Public Latin School

Ralph Waldo Emerson received his early education at home would serve him well in school.

Edward Waldo Emerson

(1844-1930) Was a physician, writer, and lecturer. Lived in Concord, Massachusetts most of his life. Was the youngest son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydian Jackson Emerson (second wife). Educated at Harvard and graduated in 1866. He went to Harvard Medical School and graduated in 1874. His medical practice was in Concord until 1882 when his inheritance was delivered and decided to retire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - American author, poet, philospher, and essayist, This site is dedicated to the memory of my late father, Emerson West, who was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. The man I am today reflects the influence of my father and the life teachings of Emerson.

Research the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read More Essay

Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out

America's best known and best-loved poems. More Poems

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.

1. Chronology of Emerson's Life

2.1 education, 2.2 process, 2.3 morality, 2.4 christianity, 2.6 unity and moods, 3.1 consistency, 3.2 early and late emerson, 3.3 sources and influence, works by emerson, selected writings on emerson, other internet resources, related entries.

2. Major Themes in Emerson's Philosophy

In “The American Scholar,” delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837, Emerson maintains that the scholar is educated by nature, books, and action. Nature is the first in time (since it is always there) and the first in importance of the three. Nature's variety conceals underlying laws that are at the same time laws of the human mind: “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (CW1: 55). Books, the second component of the scholar's education, offer us the influence of the past. Yet much of what passes for education is mere idolization of books — transferring the “sacredness which applies to the act of creation…to the record.” The proper relation to books is not that of the “bookworm” or “bibliomaniac,” but that of the “creative” reader (CW1: 58) who uses books as a stimulus to attain “his own sight of principles.” Used well, books “inspire…the active soul” (CW1: 56). Great books are mere records of such inspiration, and their value derives only, Emerson holds, from their role in inspiring or recording such states of the soul. The “end” Emerson finds in nature is not a vast collection of books, but, as he puts it in “The Poet,” “the production of new individuals,…or the passage of the soul into higher forms” (CW3:14)

The third component of the scholar's education is action. Without it, thought “can never ripen into truth” (CW1: 59). Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness. Life is the scholar's “dictionary” (CW1: 60), the source for what she has to say: “Only so much do I know as I have lived” (CW1:59). The true scholar speaks from experience, not in imitation of others; her words, as Emerson puts it, are “are loaded with life…” (CW1: 59). The scholar's education in original experience and self-expression is appropriate, according to Emerson, not only for a small class of people, but for everyone. Its goal is the creation of a democratic nation. Only when we learn to “walk on our own feet” and to “speak our own minds,” he holds, will a nation “for the first time exist” (CW1: 70).

Emerson returned to the topic of education late in his career in “Education,” an address he gave in various versions at graduation exercises in the 1860's. Self-reliance appears in the essay in his discussion of respect. The “secret of Education,” he states, “lies in respecting the pupil.” It is not for the teacher to choose what the pupil will know and do, but for the pupil to discover “his own secret.” The teacher must therefore “wait and see the new product of Nature” (E: 143), guiding and disciplining when appropriate-not with the aim of encouraging repetition or imitation, but with that of finding the new power that is each child's gift to the world. The aim of education is to “keep” the child's “nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points” (E: 144). This aim is sacrificed in mass education, Emerson warns. Instead of educating “masses,” we must educate “reverently, one by one,” with the attitude that “the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil” (E: 154).

Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe is fundamentally in flux and “permanence is but a word of degrees” (CW 2: 179). Even as he talks of “Being,” Emerson represents it not as a stable “wall” but as a series of “interminable oceans” (CW3: 42). This metaphysical position has epistemological correlates: that there is no final explanation of any fact, and that each law will be incorporated in “some more general law presently to disclose itself” (CW2: 181). Process is the basis for the succession of moods Emerson describes in “Experience,” (CW3: 30), and for the emphasis on the present throughout his philosophy.

Some of Emerson's most striking ideas about morality and truth follow from his process metaphysics: that no virtues are final or eternal, all being “initial,” (CW2: 187); that truth is a matter of glimpses, not steady views. We have a choice, Emerson writes in “Intellect,” “between truth and repose,” but we cannot have both (CW2: 202). Fresh truth, like the thoughts of genius, comes always as a surprise, as what Emerson calls “the newness” (CW3: 40). He therefore looks for a “certain brief experience, which surprise[s] me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time…” (CW1: 213). This is an experience that cannot be repeated by simply returning to a place or to an object such as a painting. A great disappointment of life, Emerson finds, is that one can only “see” certain pictures once, and that the stories and people who fill a day or an hour with pleasure and insight are not able to repeat the performance.

Emerson's basic view of religion also coheres with his emphasis on process, for he holds that one finds God only in the present: “God is, not was” (CW1:89). In contrast, what Emerson calls “historical Christianity” (CW1: 82) proceeds “as if God were dead” (CW1: 84). Even history, which seems obviously about the past, has its true use, Emerson holds, as the servant of the present: “The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” (CW2: 5).

Emerson's views about morality are intertwined with his metaphysics of process, and with his perfectionism, his idea that life has the goal of passing into “higher forms” (CW3:14). The goal remains, but the forms of human life, including the virtues, are all “initial” (CW2: 187). The word “initial” suggests the verb “initiate,” and one interpretation of Emerson's claim that “all virtues are initial” is that virtues initiate historically developing forms of life, such as those of the Roman nobility or the Confucian junxi . Emerson does have a sense of morality as developing historically, but in the context in “Circles” where his statement appears he presses a more radical and skeptical position: that our virtues often must be abandoned rather than developed. “The terror of reform,” he writes, “is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices” (CW2: 187). The qualifying phrase “or what we have always esteemed such” means that Emerson does not embrace an easy relativism, according to which what is taken to be a virtue at any time must actually be a virtue. Yet he does cast a pall of suspicion over all established modes of thinking and acting. The proper standpoint from which to survey the virtues is the ‘new moment‘ — what he elsewhere calls truth rather than repose (CW2:202) — in which what once seemed important may appear “trivial” or “vain” (CW2:189). From this perspective (or more properly the developing set of such perspectives) the virtues do not disappear, but they may be fundamentally altered and rearranged.

Although Emerson is thus in no position to set forth a system of morality, he nevertheless delineates throughout his work a set of virtues and heroes, and a corresponding set of vices and villains. In “Circles” the vices are “forms of old age,” and the hero the “receptive, aspiring” youth (CW2:189). In the “Divinity School Address,” the villain is the “spectral” preacher whose sermons offer no hint that he has ever lived. “Self Reliance” condemns virtues that are really “penances” (CW2: 31), and the philanthropy of abolitionists who display an idealized “love” for those far away, but are full of hatred for those close by (CW2: 30).

Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent,…the upbuilding of a man” (CW1: 65).

If Emerson criticizes much of human life, he nevertheless devotes most of his attention to the virtues. Chief among these is what he calls “self-reliance.” The phrase connotes originality and spontaneity, and is memorably represented in the image of a group of nonchalant boys, “sure of a dinner…who would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one…” The boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a free, “irresponsible” condemnation of those they see as “silly” or “troublesome,” and praise for those they find “interesting” or “eloquent.” (CW2: 29). The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson's characteristic combination of the romantic (in the glorification of children) and the classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the place of lords or nobles).

Although he develops a series of analyses and images of self-reliance, Emerson nevertheless destabilizes his own use of the concept. “To talk of reliance,” he writes, “is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is” (CW 2:40). ‘Self-reliance’ can be taken to mean that there is a self already formed on which we may rely. The “self” on which we are to “rely” is, in contrast, the original self that we are in the process of creating. Such a self, to use a phrase from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, “becomes what it is.”

For Emerson, the best human relationships require the confident and independent nature of the self-reliant. Emerson's ideal society is a confrontation of powerful, independent “gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus.” There will be a proper distance between these gods, who, Emerson advises, “should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together should depart, as into foreign countries” (CW 3:81). Even “lovers,” he advises, “should guard their strangeness” (CW3: 82). Emerson portrays himself as preserving such distance in the cool confession with which he closes “Nominalist and Realist,” the last of the Essays, Second Series :

I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I liked everything by turns and nothing long…. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction (CW 3:145).

The self-reliant person will “publish” her results, but she must first learn to detect that spark of originality or genius that is her particular gift to the world. It is not a gift that is available on demand, however, and a major task of life is to meld genius with its expression. “The man,” Emerson states “is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (CW 3:4). There are young people of genius, Emerson laments in “Experience,” who promise “a new world” but never deliver: they fail to find the focus for their genius “within the actual horizon of human life” (CW 3:31). Although Emerson emphasizes our independence and even distance from one another, then, the payoff for self-reliance is public and social. The scholar finds that the most private and secret of his thoughts turn out to be “the most acceptable, most public, and universally true” (CW1: 63). And the great “representative men” Emerson identifies are marked by their influence on the world. Their names-Plato, Moses, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, even Napoleon-are “ploughed into the history of this world” (CW1: 80).

Although self-reliance is central, it is not the only Emersonian virtue. Emerson also praises a kind of trust, and the practice of a “wise skepticism.” There are times, he holds, when we must let go and trust to the nature of the universe: “As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world” (CW3:16). But the world of flux and conflicting evidence also requires a kind of epistemological and practical flexibility that Emerson calls “wise skepticism” (CW4: 89). His representative skeptic of this sort is Michel de Montaigne, who as portrayed in Representative Men is no unbeliever, but a man with a strong sense of self, rooted in the earth and common life, whose quest is for knowledge. He wants “a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men” (CW4: 91). Yet he knows that life is perilous and uncertain, “a storm of many elements,” the navigation through which requires a flexible ship, “fit to the form of man.” (CW4: 91).

The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School and was employed as a minister for almost three years. Yet he offers a deeply felt and deeply reaching critique of Christianity in the “Divinity School Address,” flowing from a line of argument he establishes in “The American Scholar.” If the one thing in the world of value is the active soul, then religious institutions, no less than educational institutions, must be judged by that standard. Emerson finds that contemporary Christianity deadens rather than activates the spirit. It is an “Eastern monarchy of a Christianity” in which Jesus, originally the “friend of man,” is made the enemy and oppressor of man. A Christianity true to the life and teachings of Jesus should inspire “the religious sentiment” — a joyous seeing that is more likely to be found in “the pastures,” or “a boat in the pond” than in a church. Although Emerson thinks it is a calamity for a nation to suffer the “loss of worship” (CW1: 89) he finds it strange that, given the “famine of our churches” (CW1: 85) anyone should attend them. He therefore calls on the Divinity School graduates to breathe new life into the old forms of their religion, to be friends and exemplars to their parishioners, and to remember “that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles” (CW1: 90).

Power is a theme in Emerson's early writing, but it becomes especially prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as “Experience,” “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” “Napoleon,” and “Power.” Power is related to action in “The American Scholar,” where Emerson holds that a “true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power” (CW1: 59). It is also a subject of “Self-Reliance,” where Emerson writes of each person that “the power which resides in him is new in nature” (CW2: 28). In “Experience” Emerson speaks of a life which “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy” (CW3: 294); and in “Power” he celebrates the “bruisers” (CW6: 34) of the world who express themselves rudely and get their way. The power in which Emerson is interested, however, is more artistic and intellectual than political or military. In a characteristic passage from “Power,” he states:

In history the great moment, is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:-and you have Pericles and Phidias,-not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity” (CW6: 37-8).

Power is all around us, but it cannot always be controlled. It is like “a bird which alights nowhere,” hopping “perpetually from bough to bough” (CW3: 34). Moreover, we often cannot tell at the time when we exercise our power that we are doing so: happily we sometimes find that much is accomplished in “times when we thought ourselves indolent” (CW3: 28).

At some point in many of his essays and addresses, Emerson enunciates, or at least refers to, a great vision of unity. He speaks in “The American Scholar” of an “original unit” or “fountain of power” (CW1: 53), of which each of us is a part. He writes in “The Divinity School Address” that each of us is “an inlet into the deeps of Reason.” And in “Self-Reliance,” the essay that more than any other celebrates individuality, he writes of “the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE” (CW2: 40). “The Oversoul” is Emerson's most sustained discussion of “the ONE,” but he does not, even there, shy away from the seeming conflict between the reality of process and the reality of an ultimate metaphysical unity. How can the vision of succession and the vision of unity be reconciled?

Emerson never comes to a clear or final answer. One solution he both suggests and rejects is an unambiguous idealism, according to which a nontemporal “One” or “Oversoul” is the only reality, and all else is illusion. He suggests this, for example, in the many places where he speaks of waking up out of our dreams or nightmares. But he then portrays that to which we awake not simply as an unchanging “ONE,” but as a process or succession: a “growth” or “movement of the soul” (CW2: 189); or a “new yet unapproachable America” (CW3: 259).

Emerson undercuts his visions of unity (as of everything else) through what Stanley Cavell calls his “epistemology of moods.” According to this epistemology, most fully developed in “Experience” but present in all of Emerson's writing, we never apprehend anything “straight” or in-itself, but only under an aspect or mood. Emerson writes that life is “a train of moods like a string of beads,” through which we see only what lies in each bead's focus (CW3: 30). The beads include our temperaments, our changing moods, and the “Lords of Life” which govern all human experience. The Lords include “Succession,” “Surface,” “Dream,” “Reality,” and “Surprise.” Are the great visions of unity, then, simply aspects under which we view the world?

Emerson's most direct attempt to reconcile succession and unity, or the one and the many, occurs in the last essay in the Essays, Second Series , entitled “Nominalist and Realist.” There he speaks of the universe as an “old Two-face…of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied” (CW3: 144). As in “Experience,” Emerson leaves us with the whirling succession of moods. “I am always insincere,” he skeptically concludes, “as always knowing there are other moods” (CW3: 145). But Emerson enacts as well as describes the succession of moods, and he ends “Nominalist and Realist” with the “feeling that all is yet unsaid,” and with at least the idea of some universal truth (CW3: 363).

3. Some Questions about Emerson

Emerson routinely invites charges of inconsistency. He says the world is fundamentally a process and fundamentally a unity; that it resists the imposition of our will and that it flows with the power of our imagination; that travel is good for us, since it adds to our experience, and that it does us no good, since we wake up in the new place only to find the same “ sad self” we thought we had left behind (CW2: 46).

Emerson's “epistemology of moods” is an attempt to construct a framework for encompassing what might otherwise seem contradictory outlooks, viewpoints, or doctrines. Emerson really means to “accept,” as he puts it, “the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (CW3: 36). He means to be irresponsible to all that holds him back from his self-development. That is why, at the end of “Circles,” he writes that he is “only an experimenter…with no Past at my back” (CW2: 188). In the world of flux that he depicts in that essay, there is nothing stable to be responsible to: “every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten, the coming only is sacred” (CW2: 189).

Despite this claim, there is considerable consistency in Emerson's essays and among his ideas. To take just one example, the idea of the “active soul” — mentioned as the “one thing in the world, of value” in “The American Scholar-is a presupposition of Emerson's attack on “the famine of the churches” (for not feeding or activating the souls of those who attend them); it is an element in his understanding of a poem as “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own …” (CW3: 6); and, of course, it is at the center of Emerson's idea of self-reliance. There are in fact multiple paths of coherence through Emerson's philosophy, guided by ideas discussed previously: process, education, self-reliance, and the present.

It is hard for an attentive reader not to feel that there are important differences between early and late Emerson: for example, between the buoyant Nature (1836) and the weary ending of “Experience” (1844); between the expansive author of “Self-Reliance” (1841) and the burdened writer of “Fate” (1860). Emerson himself seems to advert to such differences when he writes in “Fate”: “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half” (CW6: 8). Is “Fate” the record of a lesson Emerson had not absorbed in his early writing, concerning the multiple ways in which circumstances over which we have no control — plagues, hurricanes, temperament, sexuality, old age — constrain self-reliance or self-development?

“Experience” is a key transitional essay. “Where do we find ourselves?” is the question with which it begins. The answer is not a happy one, for Emerson finds that we occupy a place of dislocation and obscurity, where “sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (CW3: 27). An event hovering over the essay, but not disclosed until its third paragraph, is the death of his five-year old son Waldo. Emerson finds in this episode and his reaction to it an example of an “unhandsome” general character of existence-it is forever slipping away from us, like his little boy.

“Experience” presents many moods. It has its moments of illumination, and its considered judgment that there is an “Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (CW3: 41). It offers wise counsel about “skating over the surfaces of life” and confining our existence to the “mid-world.” But even its upbeat ending takes place in a setting of substantial “defeat.” “Up again, old heart!” a somewhat battered voice states in the last sentence of the essay. Yet the essay ends with an assertion that in its great hope and underlying confidence chimes with some of the more expansive passages in Emerson's writing. The “true romance which the world exists to realize,” he states, “will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (CW3: 49).

Despite important differences in tone and emphasis, Emerson's assessment of our condition remains much the same throughout his writing. There are no more dire indictments of ordinary human life than in the early work, “The American Scholar,” where Emerson states that “Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man” (CW1: 65). Conversely, there is no more idealistic statement in his early work than the statement in “Fate” that “[t]hought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic” (CW6: 15). All in all, the earlier work expresses a sunnier hope for human possibilities, the sense that Emerson and his contemporaries were poised for a great step forward and upward; and the later work, still hopeful and assured, operates under a weight or burden, a stronger sense of the dumb resistance of the world.

Emerson read widely, and gave credit in his essays to the scores of writers from whom he learned. He kept lists of literary, philosophical, and religious thinkers in his journals and worked at categorizing them.

Among the most important writers for the shape of Emerson's philosophy are Plato and the Neoplatonist line extending through Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and the Cambridge Platonists. Equally important are writers in the Kantian and Romantic traditions (which Emerson probably learned most about from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria ). Emerson read avidly in Indian, especially Hindu, philosophy, and in Confucianism. There are also multiple empiricist, or experience-based influences, flowing from Berkeley, Wordsworth and other English Romantics, Newton's physics, and the new sciences of geology and comparative anatomy. Other writers whom Emerson often mentions are Anaxagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Cicero, Goethe, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Mencius, Pythagoras, Schiller, Thoreau, August and Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, Socrates, Madame de Staël and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Emerson's works were well known throughout the United States and Europe in his day. Nietzsche read German translations of Emerson's essays, copied passages from “History” and “Self-Reliance” in his journals, and wrote of the Essays : that he had never “felt so much at home in a book.” Emerson's ideas about “strong, overflowing” heroes, friendship as a battle, education, and relinquishing control in order to gain it, can be traced in Nietzsche's writings. Other Emersonian ideas-about transition, the ideal in the commonplace, and the power of human will permeate the writings of such classical American pragmatists as William James and John Dewey.

Stanley Cavell's engagement with Emerson is the most original and prolonged by any philosopher, and Emerson is a primary source for his writing on “moral perfectionism.” In his earliest essays on Emerson, such as “Thinking of Emerson” and “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” Cavell considers Emerson's place in the Kantian tradition, and he explores the affinity between Emerson's call in “The American Scholar” for a return to “the common and the low” and Wittgenstein's quest for a return to ordinary language. In “Being Odd, Getting Even” and “Aversive Thinking,” Cavell considers Emerson's anticipations of existentialism, and in these and other works he explores Emerson's affinities with Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (CHU) and Cities of Words , Cavell develops what he calls “Emersonian moral perfectionism,” of which he finds an exemplary expression in Emerson's “History”: “So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.” Emersonian perfectionism is oriented towards a wiser or better self that is never final, always initial, always on the way.

Cavell does not have a neat and tidy definition of perfectionism, and his list of perfectionist works ranges from Plato's Republic to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations , but he identifies “two dominating themes of perfectionism” in Emerson's writing: (1) “that the human self … is always becoming, as on a journey, always partially in a further state. This journey is described as education or cultivation”; (2) “that the other to whom I can use the words I discover in which to express myself is the Friend—a figure that may occur as the goal of the journey but also as its instigation and accompaniment” ( Cities of Words , 26-7). The friend can be a person but it may also be a text. In the sentence from “History” cited above, the writing of the “Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist” about “the wise man” functions as a friend and guide, describing to each reader not just any idea, but “his own idea.” This is the text as instigator and companion.

Cavell's engagement with perfectionism springs from a response to his colleague John Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice condemns Nietzsche (and implicitly Emerson) for his statement that “mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings.” “Perfectionism,” Rawls states, “is denied as a political principle.” Cavell replies that Emerson's (and Nietzsche's) focus on the great man has nothing to do with a transfer of economic resources or political power, or with the idea that “there is a separate class of great men …for whose good, and conception of good, the rest of society is to live” (CHU, 49). The great man or woman, Cavell holds, is required for rather than opposed to democracy: “essential to the criticism of democracy from within” (CHU, 3).

(See Chronology for original dates of publication.)

• Allen, Gay Wilson, 1981, Waldo Emerson , New York: Viking Press.
• Arsić, Branka, 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Arsić, Branka, and Carey Wolfe (eds.), 2010. The Other Emerson . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Bishop, Jonathan, 1964, Emerson on the Soul , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Buell, Lawrence, 2003, Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cameron, Sharon, 2007, Impersonality , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Carpenter, Frederick Ives, 1930, Emerson and Asia , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cavell, Stanley, 1981, “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition, San Francisco: North Point Press.
• –––, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1990, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Abbreviated CHU in the text.).
• –––, 2004, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2004, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Conant, James, 1997, “Emerson as Educator,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 181–206.
• –––, 2001, “Nietzsche as Educator,” Nietzsche's Post-Moralism: Essays on Nietzsche's Prelude to Philosophy's Future , Richard Schacht (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–257.
• Ellison, Julie, 1984, Emerson's Romantic Style , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Firkins, Oscar W., 1915, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Goodman, Russell B., 1990a, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 2.
• –––, 1990b, “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51(4): 625–45.
• –––, 1997, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 159–80.
• –––, 2004, “The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self,” Nature in American Philosophy , ed. Jean De Groot, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1–18.
• –––, 2008, “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism,” The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy , ed. Cheryl Misak, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–37.
• Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1885, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Lysaker, John, 2008, Emerson and Self-Culture , Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
• Matthiessen, F. O., 1941, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Packer, B. L., 1982, Emerson's Fall , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 2007, The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Poirier, Richard, 1987, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1992, Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra (eds.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1995, Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sacks, Kenneth, 2003, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Versluis, Arthur, 1993, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Whicher, Stephen, 1953, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Guide to Resources on Emerson (maintained by Jone Johnson Lewis).

Anaxagoras | Augustine, Saint | Bacon, Francis | Cambridge Platonists | -->Cicero --> | -->Dewey, John --> | Heraclitus | -->Iamblichus --> | James, William | Lucretius | Mencius | Nietzsche, Friedrich | Plotinus | Pythagoras | Schiller, Friedrich | Schlegel, Friedrich | Socrates | transcendentalism

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Poet Biographies

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Transcendentalist Poet

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the celebrated 19th-century American essayist and poet, is considered the master of Transcendentalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an iconic 19th-century American Transcendentalist poet, essayist, and philosopher. He would leave his fingerprint on not only literature. Emerson had an impact on how people approached their own lives. He is now remembered as one of the most important transcendental writers and thinkers of his time. Some of his best-known works are Nature and Self-Reliance .

His other writings spoke out prominently on slavery and national identity. Emerson was an incredibly prolific writer, creating various writings such as poems, essays , and lectures. In fact, his career as a public lecturer lasted an incredible 50 years. Emerson’s philosophy would explore issues surrounding free will and fate.

About Ralph Waldo Emerson

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 6 Writing Career and Relationships
• 7 Final Years and Death
• 8 Influences
• Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in May of 1803.
• He was a founding member of The Transcendental Club in the mid-1830s.
• Emerson toured around the British Isles and France, where he held a popular series of lectures.
• He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864.
• Emerson contracted fatal pneumonia in April of 1882.

Interesting Facts

• Emerson was ordained in 1829 and served in Boston’s Second Church.
• He served as “Class Poet” and presented an original poem on Harvard’s Class Day.
• He spent time as the chaplain of the Massachusetts legislature.
• Emerson’s wife, Ellen, died after only two years of marriage when she was 20.
• He gave the eulogy at Henry David Thoreau’s funeral.

Famous Poems

• ‘Boston Hymn’   is an unusual poem that is written from the perspective of God. He takes an authoritative tone while he calls out to the American people. God tells them that they need to consider the paths their lives are on. It was first published in January 1863 in Dwight’s Journal of Music.
• ‘Give All to Love’ is a wide-ranging piece that discusses everything in the world. The speaker discusses the existence and its facets. This includes anyone you have known and everything you have done. Love, he decides, is the great determining factor of life. It is “god” and the “master”.
• ‘Brahma’ is named for the Hindu god of creation, and he is the speaker of the poem . Brahma expresses beliefs associated with Hinduism and Confucianism. He also represents himself as the center of the universe. The poem has direct connections to the basis of transcendentalism .
• ‘Terminus’ is the poet’s meditation on his own death. It was written when Emerson was older and considering his life span. There are connections in the poem to the Roman God of Boundaries, Terminus, and what insights this god might have for the poet.
• ‘The Rhodora” is one of Emerson’s best-loved poems. It also uses the subtitle “On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?” In it, the world is illuminated by a rhododendron. It allows the speaker to see the woods through which he is walking clearly. He knows that the flower is his kind, as are the rest of the forms of life around him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in May of 1803. He was the son of Ruth Haskins Emerson and Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. His ancestors were almost entirely English and had been living in New England since the colonial period. Emerson was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood. Three of his brothers died while they were still children. When Emerson was only seven, his father died of stomach cancer. This meant that he and his siblings were raised by their mother, with help from other female family members.

Emerson’s  formal  schooling began at the Boston Public Latin School in 1812 when he was nine years old. When he was fourteen, he went to Harvard College and quickly became the messenger for the institution’s president. While Emerson was not an exceptional student by any means, he did work hard throughout his schooling to pay his tuition. The young man often had to take on jobs as a teacher and waiter. He also served as “Class Poet” and was responsible for presenting an original poem on Harvard’s Class Day when he was eighteen years old.

He graduated in 1821 and taught school while preparing for part-time study at the Harvard Divinity School. A few years after graduating, Emerson became ill and decided to move to the warmer climate of Charleston, South Carolina. He was not content with the weather there and moved further south to Florida. This was the inception of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry career as he began to approach poetry far more seriously. Around this time, he would first come into contact with slavery.

Literary Career

In 1827, Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in New Hampshire. They were married as soon as she turned eighteen. The couple moved to Boston so that Ellen could help take care of Emerson’s ailing mother, Ruth, who had contracted tuberculosis. Emerson was ordained in 1829 and served as the junior pastor of Boston’s Second Church. He was also the chaplain of the Massachusetts legislature and a member of the Boston school committee.

These years were also marked by personal  tragedy  for the young poet. His young wife died in 1831 at only twenty years old, and his brothers Edward and Charles both died of tuberculosis in the mid-1830s. After the death of his wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, he began to take exception to organized religion. He found his profession antiquated and eventually resigned in 1832.

In the early 1830s, he toured Europe and wrote the account  English Traits , published in 1856. He spent time in Rome, Florence, and Venice, as well as Paris and England. While in England, he met Thomas Carlyle ,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge , and others. He returned to the United States in 1833, shortly before he began his series of over 1,500 lectures. One of these was titled The Uses of Natural History . It elaborated on his travels in France and set out beliefs that would later be published in his  essay , Nature .

1835 saw him become engaged to Lydia Jackson. The two bought a house in Concord, which is now known as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House . He was soon regarded as one of the leading citizens of the town. Around this time, he formed the Transcendental Club, which held meetings in Concord. Nature was published in September of 1835, and a year later, he delivered his address, The American Scholar .

In 1940, he was one of the founding members of The Dial , which was an outlet for transcendentalist writers and thinkers to project their new ideas to America. The Dial was also edited by Margaret Fuller.

Writing Career and Relationships

In 1841, he published the essay Self-Reliance, which has since become one of his most popular. In the late 40s, Emerson toured around the British Isles and France where he continued his popular series of lectures.

The later years of his life were marked by travels out into the Adirondacks in order to become closer to the nature he was writing about. He was among friends, including James Russel Lowell and William James Stillman. They traveled by steamboat, stage catch, and canoe. Their adventures were cataloged for the papers of the day. The trip became known as a landmark of the 19th-century intellectual movement.

Final Years and Death

The publication of  The Conduct of Life,  his seventh collection of essays, saw Emerson take a stand on some of the most controversial issues of the day, including slavery and national identity. After  Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson gave the eulogy. He has often been regarded as Thoreau’s closest friend. He was also present at Nathanial Hawthorne ’s funeral in 1864. The poet and essayist were elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864.

After suffering from health problems since the early 1970s, Emerson contracted pneumonia, which proved fatal in April of 1882. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

As one of the most influential forces in 19th-century American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson has been looked to as a benchmark by many poets since.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was notably influenced by writers such as  William Wordsworth , Plato, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the works of Henry David Thoreau .

Ralph Waldo Emerson became well-associated with individualism and critical thinking and emerged as the leading figure in the Transcendentalist movement. The movement gathered pace in the 1930s.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was responsible for an array of works, from poetry to a number of well-thought-out essays . One of his most famous of these essays was Self-Reliance , which argues for trusting one’s own judgment and intuition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry style was known for its simple approach, which could sometimes be seen as harsh. He would also write his essays with a distinctive nod to themes and images that would reappear again and again. Nature was one of these themes.

One meaningful quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson is: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson began to gain fame in the late 1830s with the publication of his essays Nature and The American Scholar .

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Author : Ralph Waldo Emerson

American essayist and transcendentalist philosopher

• 1.1 Essays and Collections
• 1.4 Published Translator of Poems
• 1.5 Poems in Manuscript
• 1.6 Translator of Poems in Manuscript
• 2 Works about Emerson

Essays and Collections

• Nature (1836 edition)
• Nature, Addresses and Lectures ( transcription project )
• An oration, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837 (1838), or The American Scholar
• Divinity School Address (1838)
• Literary Ethics (1838)
• Essays (1841); revised and reissued as Essays: First Series (1847) ( transcription project )
• Man the Reformer (1841)
• The Conservative (1841)
• The Method of Nature (1841)
• The Transcendentalist (1842)
• Essays: Second Series (1844)
• The Young American (1844)
• War (1849), in Æesthetic Papers
• Representative Men (1850) ( Commons category )
• English Traits (1856)
• The Conduct of Life (1860)
• " Thoreau " ("Biographical Sketch") in Excursions (1863)
• " Saadi " in The Atlantic Monthly , 14 ( 81 ) ( July, 1864 )
• Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1868)
• Society and Solitude (1870)
• " Solitude and Society " in The Atlantic Monthly , 1 ( 2 ) ( December, 1857 )
• Parnassus (1874)
• Letters and Social Aims (1876)
• The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riverside Edition , edited by Edward W. Emerson (1884) IA 1 , IA 2 , IA 3 , IA 4 , IA 5 , IA 6 , IA 7 , IA 8 , IA 9 , IA 10 , IA 11 , IA 12
• " George Nidiver "

The following are published works of poetry. For individual poems, see Index of Titles .

• Poems (1847)
• May-day and other pieces (1867)
• Poems (1893) containing most pieces included in Poems (1847) and May-Day (1867)
• Poems: Household Edition (1904)
• " The Mountain and the Squirrel " (quoted in An Argosy of Fables (1921)) Also published as " Fable ".
• Untitled in Birdcraft on Chickadees published in 1895.
• " Waldeinsamkeit " in The Atlantic Monthly , 2 ( 5 ) ( October, 1858 )

Published Translator of Poems

• The Phoenix by Hafiz
• Body and Soul by Enweri

Poems in Manuscript

• Poem on Eloquence
• Written in Sickness
• Γνωθι Σεαυτον "If thou canst bear"
• Woods A Prose Sonnet

Translator of Poems in Manuscript

• Alas, Alas, that I am betrayed by Michel Angelo Buonorotti
• The power of a beautiful face lifts me to heaven by Michel Angelo Buonorotti
• Sweet, sweet, is sleep,—Ah! sweeter, to be stone by Michel Angelo Buonorotti
• Wo is me woe's me when I think by Michel Angelo Buonorotti

Works about Emerson

• A Fable for Critics (1848) by James Russell Lowell
• A memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Elliot Cabot (1887) IA 1 , IA 2
• Emerson in Concord; a memoir by Edward Waldo Emerson (1889) IA
• Emerson: a lecture given before the London ethical society (1892) by Thomas Fair Husband ( HathiTrust )
• " Ralph Waldo Emerson " in Littell's Living Age , 1 ( 1 )
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," in The American Cyclopædia (1879)
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," by George Parsons Lathrop in Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography , New York: D. Appleton and Co. (1900)
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," by William Peterfield Trent in The New International Encyclopædia , New York: Dodd, Mead and Co. (1905)
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," in A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature , by John William Cousin , London: J. M. Dent & Sons (1910)
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," in Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed., 1911)
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," in The New Student's Reference Work , Chicago: F.E. Compton and Co. (1914)
• " Emerson, Ralph Waldo ," by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn in The Encyclopedia Americana , New York: The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation (1920)
• " Emerson " in Studies of a Biographer vol. 4 (1902) by Leslie Stephen

Some or all works by this author were published before January 1, 1929, and are in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. Translations or editions published later may be copyrighted. Posthumous works may be copyrighted based on how long they have been published in certain countries and areas.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist as well as the foremost representative of the transcendentalist movement of the early to mid-19th century. Known mostly for his essays Self-Reliance , The American Scholar , and Nature , he was also a major poet, although he did not consider himself one.

• 1803 - 1882 Life of transcendentalist essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson .
• 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his essay Nature.
• 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson writes The American Scholar.
• 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his Essays, including Self-Reliance.