Reference.com

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early 19th century.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which is considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence." He once said "Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you."

Considered one of the great orators of the time, Emerson's enthusiasm and respect for his audience enraptured crowds. His support for abolitionism late in life created controversy, and at times he was subject to abuse from crowds while speaking on the topic, however this was not always the case. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."

Biography

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, son of the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister, from a well-known line of ministers. Emerson's father, who called his son "a rather dull scholar", died in 1811, less than two weeks short of Emerson's eighth birthday. The young Emerson was subsequently sent to the Boston Latin School in 1812 at the age of nine. In October 1817, at fourteen, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed the Freshman's President, a position which gave him a room free of charge. He waited tables at Commons, a dining hall at Harvard, reducing the cost of his board to one quarter of the full fee, and he received a scholarship. To complement his meager salary, he tutored and taught during the winter vacation at his Uncle Ripley's school in Waltham, Massachusetts.

After Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821 at the age of eighteen, he assisted his brother in a school for young ladies established in their mother's house, after he had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts; when his brother went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school. Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, then went to Harvard Divinity School, and emerged as a Unitarian minister in 1829. A dispute with church officials over the administration of the Communion service, and misgivings about public prayer led to his resignation in 1832.

Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire and married her when she was 18. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 20 on February 8, 1831. Emerson was heavily affected by her death, visiting her grave daily and once even opening her coffin to see for himself that she was dead. Despite his marriage, there is evidence pointing to Emerson being bisexual. During early years at Harvard, he found himself 'strangely attracted' to a young freshman named Martin Gay about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry. Gay would be only the first of his infatuations and interests, with Nathaniel Hawthorne numbered among them.

Emerson toured Europe in 1832 and later wrote of his travels in English Traits (1856). During this trip, he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. Emerson maintained contact with Carlyle until the latter's death in 1881. He also served as Carlyle's agent in the U.S. His travels abroad brought him to England, France (in 1848), Italy, and the Middle East.

In 1835, Emerson bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in Concord, Massachusetts, now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House, and quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town. He married his second wife Lydia Jackson of Plymouth in Concord in 1835. He called her Lydian and she called him Mr. Emerson. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and Edward Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named for his first wife, at Lydia's suggestion.

Emerson lived a financially conservative lifestyle. He had inherited some wealth after his wife's death, though he brought a lawsuit against the Tucker family in 1836 to get it. He did, however, pay the rent of his neighbor Bronson Alcott.

Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

Literary career

In September 1836, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement, but did not publish its journal, The Dial, until July 1840. Emerson anonymously published his first essay, Nature, in September 1836.

In 1838 Emerson was invited to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School, for the school's graduation address, which came to be known as his Divinity School Address. Emerson discounted Biblical miracles and proclaimed while Jesus was a great man, he was not God. His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. At the time, such statements were rather unheard of. For this, he was denounced as an atheist, and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply, leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another thirty years, but by the mid-1880s his position had become standard Unitarian doctrine.

In January of 1842, Emerson lost his first son, Waldo, to scarlet fever. Emerson wrote of his grief in the poem "Threnody", and the essay "Experience". In the same year, William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather.

In the 1840's Emerson was hospitable to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family, and appears to have heavily influenced Hawthorne during these three years.

Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in New England and the rest of the country outside of the South. During several scheduled appearances he was not able to make, Frederick Douglass took his place. Emerson spoke on a wide variety of subjects. Many of his essays grew out of his lectures.

Emerson associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau and often took walks with them in Concord. Emerson encouraged Thoreau's talent and early career. The land on which Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond belonged to Emerson. While Thoreau was living at Walden, Emerson provided food and hired Thoreau to perform odd jobs. When Thoreau left Walden after two years' time, it was to live at the Emerson house while Emerson was away on a lecture tour. Their close relationship fractured after Emerson gave Thoreau the poor advice to publish his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, without extensive drafts, and directed Thoreau to his own agent who made Thoreau split the price/risk of publishing. The book found few readers, and put Thoreau heavily into debt. Eventually the two would reconcile some of their differences, although Thoreau privately accused Emerson of having drifted from his original philosophy, and Emerson began to view Thoreau as a misanthrope. Emerson's eulogy to Thoreau is largely credited with the latter's negative reputation during the 19th century.

Emerson was noted as being a very abstract and difficult writer who nevertheless drew large crowds for his speeches. The heart of Emerson's writing were his direct observations in his journals, which he started keeping as a teenager at Harvard. The journals were elaborately indexed by Emerson. Emerson went back to his journals, his bank of experiences and ideas, and took out relevant passages, which were joined together in his dense, concentrated lectures. He later revised and polished his lectures for his essays and sermons.

He was considered one of the great orators of the time, a man who could enrapture crowds with his deep voice, his enthusiasm, and his egalitarian respect for his audience. His outspoken, uncompromising support for abolitionism later in life caused protest and jeers from crowds when he spoke on the subject, however this was not always the case. He continued to speak on abolition without concern for his popularity and with increasing radicalism. He attempted, with difficulty, not to join the public arena as a member of any group or movement, and always retained a stringent independence that reflected his individualism. He always insisted that he wanted no followers, but sought to give man back to himself, as a self-reliant individual.

Emerson's journals show that he was concerned with the evil of slavery from his youth forward, and he even dreamed that he might somehow deliver slaves from bondage. As a minister, Emerson frequently used slavery as an example of a human injustice. But it was not until 1837 that Emerson was provoked by the murder of an abolitionist publisher, Elijah P. Lovejoy, in Alton, Illinois, into delivering a moderate antislavery address. At this point Emerson still maintained that reform was best achieved by the moral suasion of individuals rather than by the militant action of groups. Over the next seven years Emerson read more deeply into the horrors of slavery, his fears concerning its expansion grew, and he acquired a deep admiration for the abolitionist movement, which he expressed in a moving speech in Concord on August 1, 1844. He stated, 'we are indebted mainly to this movement, and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics.' Thereafter, he was welcomed by the abolitionists with enthusiasm.

In 1845, Emerson's Journal records that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay "The Over-soul":

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Emerson was strongly influenced by his early reading of the French essayist Montaigne. From those compositions he took the conversational, subjective style and the loss of belief in a personal God. He never read Kant's works, but, instead, relied on Coleridge's interpretation of the German Transcriptal Idealist. This led to Emerson's non-traditional ideas of soul and God.

Emerson's "Collected Essays: First (1841) and Second (1844) Series," including his seminal essays on "History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over-soul," "Circles," "Intellect," and "Art" in the first and "The Poet," "Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Nature," "Politics," and "Nominalist and Realist" in the second, is often considered to be one of the 100 greatest books of all time.

Selected works

Collections

Essays

Poems

Named after Emerson

  • Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Professorship. In May 2006, 168 years after Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address," Harvard Divinity School announced the establishment of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Professorship. The Emerson Chair is expected to be occupied in the fall of 2007 or soon thereafter.
  • Emersonian Fraternity (Phi Tau Nu), a local fraternity at Hope College which started as literary society in 1919 following the works of Emerson. The society developed into a fraternity in 1929 and has Emerson as its patron saint.
  • The Emerson Literary Society at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
  • Camp Emerson, a camp based in the Berkshires
  • Ralph Ellison, the award-winning writer and scholar, was named Ralph Waldo Ellison by his father.
  • The town of Emerson, Manitoba, Canada.
  • Mount Emerson, regarded as part of the "Evolution Range" of the High Sierra Nevada near Bishop, California.
  • Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts.
  • Emerson Hall (1900) at Harvard University
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary and Middle School in Detroit, Michigan.
  • Emerson String Quartet
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School in California.

See also

Further reading

  • Strunk, William; et al. (2006). The Classics of Style. The American Academic Press.

  • Soressi, B. (2004). Ralph Waldo Emerson. Armando.

  • Mariani, G.; et al. (2004). Emerson at 200 Proceedings of the International Bicentennial Conference (Rome, 16-18 October 2003). Aracne.

  • Cavell, S. (2003). Emerson Transcendental Etudes. Stanford UP.

  • Geldard, Richard G. (2001). Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lindisfarne Books.

  • Richardson, Jr., Robert D. (1995). Emerson: The Mind on Fire. University of California Press.

  • Whicher, Stephen E. (1950). Freedom and Fate. An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Univ of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Thurin, Erik (1981). Emerson As Priest of Pan: A Study in the Metaphysics of Sex. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas.

Notes

External links



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 17:42:26 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation