Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson an American essayist, lecturer and poet (1803-1882), the central figure of the transcendentalist movement, whose essays on self-reliance, nature and the conduct of life helped to define an independent American literature and a philosophy of spiritual optimism and individual responsibility.

Life and Ministry

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston on 25 May 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister, and was educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he showed a quiet aptitude for letters rather than any striking brilliance. He trained for the ministry and was ordained in 1829 as pastor of the Second Church of Boston, where he served for a few years and where he married Ellen Tucker, whose early death in 1831 left him with a modest inheritance and a lingering grief that coloured the rest of his life and his thought.

He grew dissatisfied with the doctrines and the ritual of the Unitarian church, and in 1832 he resigned his pastorate, feeling unable to administer the sacrament of communion as it was then understood and unwilling to continue in a profession whose forms had lost their meaning for him. He travelled in Europe, where he met Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle and other writers, and began to form the ideas and friendships that would shape his career as a lecturer and essayist and bring the currents of European romanticism to American shores.

Nature and the Transcendentalist Vision

In 1836 Emerson published Nature, a short book that became the manifesto of American transcendentalism. In it he argued that the natural world is a symbol and an expression of the divine, that the human soul is capable of direct access to truth, and that by turning away from tradition and the opinions of others a person may enter into a living relation with the universe and recover the original vision that custom and learning have obscured and that the busy world is always ready to extinguish. The book had a deep effect upon the young writers of his country, and it convinced them that an authentic literature need not copy the models of Europe but could spring from the soil of America itself.

The book teaches that every natural fact is a spiritual fact, and that the fields and woods afford a perpetual invitation to a higher and more joyful state of mind. Emerson called for a philosophy of insight rather than of mere reasoning, and he claimed that the highest truths are reached not through logic but through a moment of intuition in which the self and the world are felt to be one and the ordinary distinctions of subject and object dissolve in a sense of universal being. This mystical strain, joined to a plain confidence in the powers of the individual, gave his philosophy its distinctive character and its appeal to readers of many temperaments.

Essays and the Doctrine of Self-Reliance

Emerson's first series of Essays, published in 1841, contains the celebrated piece on Self-Reliance, in which he urged his readers to trust their own souls and to refuse to conform to the expectations of society. He held that imitation is suicide, that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of one's own mind, and that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, and he called upon the individual to stand alone against the pressures of custom, opinion and the dead weight of the past. The essay has remained a provocation to those who value independence of mind, and it is still read as the clearest statement of the belief that a person must find the truth within.

A second series appeared in 1844, and further volumes followed throughout his career, including Representative Men and The Conduct of Life. His style is aphoristic and epigrammatic, moving by flashes of insight rather than by step-by-step argument, and it has been criticised for inconsistency at the same time as it has been admired for its force, its freshness and its power to awaken the reader to unexpected possibilities of thought and action. He cared less for logical completeness than for the quickening of the mind.

Lecturer, Poet and Reformer

Emerson earned his living chiefly as a lecturer, touring the United States and delivering addresses on literature, philosophy, biography and reform. He was in constant demand upon the lyceum circuit, and his lectures, often read from a manuscript in a low and measured voice, assembled and refined the ideas that later appeared in his essays. His address The American Scholar, delivered at Harvard in 1837, was called by Oliver Wendell Holmes an intellectual declaration of independence. Through the lyceum he reached a wide popular audience, and he used the platform to spread abroad the ideas of self-trust, of the divinity of nature and of the moral responsibility of the individual.

He was drawn to reform and he lent his authority to the antislavery cause, speaking and writing against the extension of slavery and supporting the young men who took up the struggle, though he came to these convictions slowly and with caution. Yet he distrusted the more extreme programmes of social change, believing that the reform of institutions depends in the end upon the regeneration of individuals and that true improvement begins within the soul rather than in any scheme of legislation. He gave his support to the antislavery cause, yet he held that no reform could be lasting that did not begin with the improvement of the individual soul and with a change in the habits of the people.

Later Years and Legacy

Emerson continued to lecture and write into old age, though a period of mental decline clouded his last years and made composition increasingly difficult for him. His house at Concord was destroyed by fire in 1872, and he travelled abroad while friends and admirers helped to rebuild it, returning to find himself honoured as the leading man of letters of his country. He died at Concord on 27 April 1882 and was buried on Authors' Ridge near his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne. His funeral was a national event, and the tributes paid to him at his death showed how deep an impression his writings had made upon the mind of his country.

He is remembered as the sage of Concord and the leading spirit of transcendentalism, a thinker whose central teaching was the dignity and the power of the individual soul. His confidence in the possibilities of human nature and in the spiritual meaning of the natural world gave to American thought one of its permanent sources of aspiration, and his prose remains a model of clarity, vigour and hope for readers who seek in literature a philosophy of life and a faith in the capacities of the human spirit.

See also

• Transcendentalism
• Self-Reliance
• Nature
• American literature