Ralph Waldo Emerson

(From Hart and Leininger's Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed.)

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803-82), born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister who was a member of an old Puritan family. After his father's death, he was raised by his mother and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a zealous pious woman who expressed her sardonically critical mind in a style her nephew admired and imitated. At Harvard in 1820 he began to keep the voluminous journals that he continued throughout his life, and that formed the basis of most of his essays and poems. After graduation (1821) he took over his brother's Boston school for young ladies, although with some misgivings, and when he moved to Canterbury with his family in 1823 he expressed his relief at returning to the natural beauties of the countryside in the poem "Good-bye."* He taught for two more years, then entered the Divinity School at Harvard, where ill health and doubts on dogma made him a desultory student. Although approved as a candidate for the Unitarian ministry (1826), he had to go to Georgia and Florida for the winter because of a pulmonary disease. He married in 1829, but his wife died in 1831. A year later came the great turning point in his life; he resigned his pastorate of the Second Church of Boston, where he had been an effective and popular preacher, because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord's Supper.

During a tour of Europe (1832-33), he met Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, through whom he became intimately associated with the transcendental thought and its sources in German idealism. Other influences on Emerson's later thinking included his own Unitarian-Yankee background, his admiration for Plato and the neo-Platonists, his study of the sacred books of the East, the skepticism of Montaigne, the new republican tradition, the line of British philosophy that ran through Berkeley, Hume, and Locke, and the mystical metaphysics of Swedenborg. On his return to Boston he did some preaching, but turned more and more to lyceum lecturing, for which he drew materials from his journals. His addresses, presented in such series as "The Philosophy of History," "Human Culture," "Human Life," and "The Present Age," in turn furnished the basis for his later essays, which, without formal unity, are bound together by pithy, stimulating sentences that contain the quintessence of his philosophy. Among these are "Self-Reliance,"* "The Over-Soul,"* "Compensation,"* "Spiritual Laws," "Love," and "Friendship,"

In 1835 Emerson remarried and settled in Concord,* the home of his forefathers, which was thereafter the center of his own activity. Here he was intimate with Thoreau, Alcott, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Brownson, Hawthorne, and others who shared in the movement of Transcendentalism.* His first book, Nature* (1836), is the fundamental document of his philosophy, and expresses also his constant, deeply felt love for the natural scenes in which he passed so much of his time. His Transcendental ideas were next applied to cultural and national problems in his oration The American Scholar* (1837). A year later, in his "Divinity School Address,"* he attacked formal religion and championed intuitive spiritual experience. As a result, it was 30 years before he was again invited to speak at Harvard.

To promulgate his ideas further, in 1840 he joined with other Transcendentalists in publishing The Dial, and, though he did not sympathize with the communal experiments at Brook farm and Fruitlands, he became interested in many contemporary reform movements and extended the sphere of his lecturing. Some of these lectures received their final form in the first series of Essays (1841), whose 12 pieces were "History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," and "Art," With the second series of Essays, which appeared three years later, these works established Emerson's reputation throughout the U.S. and abroad. In 1845 he delivered the series of lectures published as Representative Men* (1850). His first volume of Poems (1847), together with May-Day and Other Pieces included such poems as "Threnody,"* "Compensation,"* "Each and All,"* "The Rhodora,"* "The Sphinx,"* "Days,"* "The Humble-Bee,"* "Voluntaries,"* "Concord Hymn,"* "May-Day,"* and "Brahma,"* His poetry is intellectual, gnomic, and metaphysical.

During 1847-48 he visited England and France, renewed the friendship with Carlyle that had been maintained in their notable correspondence, and made new friends among the most distinguished European thinkers and writers. Selected Letters (1987) consists of correspondence with his wife Lillian. His lectures on England the following season formed the basis of his book English Traits* (1856). A collection of Addresses and Lectures was published in 1849, and The Conduct of Life* (1860) and Society and Solitude* (1870) contain the materials of the lectures in his lyceum circuit, which took him as far west as the Mississippi. He contributed, with Channing and Clarke, to the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller (1852), and in 1855 helped found the Saturday Club. During the 1850s, Emerson's journals exhibit his great interest in antislavery, and he was an active sympathizer with the Northern struggle in the Civil War, but by 1866 realized that his career was nearly at its end. In the poem "Terminus" he declared:

Fancy departs; no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.

Thereafter, although in 1870 he gave a series of lectures at Harvard, published as Natural History of Intellect (1893), and continued to lecture and write, issuing Letters and Social Aims (1876), his mental capacities showed a slow but sure decline. He made journeys to California (1871) and to Europe (1872), but gradually slipped into a serene senility in which his mind finally became a calm blank. His son Edward Waldo Emerson (1844-1930) edited his Complete Works (1903-4), along with the Journals (10 vols, 1909-14), and several collections of correspondence. A complete edition of previously unpublished Letters was edited by R. L. Rusk (6 vols., 1939). Early Lectures appeared in three volumes (1959-64). Publication of a complete edition of the Journals and Notebooks (16 vols.) was begun (1960- ), as was a scholarly edition of Collected Works (1972- ).

Emerson, whose thought is often considered the core of Transcendentalism, stood apart from much of the activity of the movement, and, though he summed up the major development of romanticism in America, his philosophy is rooted in the Puritan background and tempered by the many systems of thought that converged in him. He had no complete philosophical system, but with a style now vibrant, now flinty, preached the great doctrine of a higher individualism, the spiritual nature of reality, the importance of self-reliance, the obedience to instinct, the obligation of optimism and hope, and the existence of a unifying Over-Soul which explains the many diverse phenomena of life.

Transcendentalism

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