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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ralph
Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Full name
Ralph
Waldo Emerson
Born
May 25,
1803
Boston
,
Massachusetts
Died
April 27, 1882 (aged
78)
Concord, Massachusetts
Era
19th century
philosophy
Region
Western Philosophy
School
Transcendentalism
Signature
Ralph
Waldo Emerson
(May 25, 1803
–
April 27, 1882) was an
American lecturer,
philosopher
,
essayist, and
poet
, best remembered for
leading the
Transcendentalist
movement
of the mid-19th
century. He was seen as
a champion of
individualism
and a prescient critic of the countervailing
pressures of society, and he
disseminated his thoughts through dozens of
published essays and
more than 1,500
public lectures across the United States.
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
.
Following this ground-breaking work, he
gave a speech entitled
The American
Scholar
in 1837,
which
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
considered to be America's
Independence
[1]
Considered one of the great lecturers of the time,
Emerson had an enthusiasm
and respect
for his audience that enraptured crowds.
Emerson wrote most of
his
important essays
as lectures first,
then revised them for print. His first
two collections of
essays
–
Essays: First
Series
and
Essays: Second
Series
, published respectively
in 1841 and 1844
–
represent the core of his
thinking, and include such well-known essays
as
Self-Reliance
,
The Over-Soul
,
Circles
,
The
Poet
and
Experience
. Together with
Nature
, these
essays made the decade from the
mid-1830s to the mid-1840s
Emerson'
s
most fertile
period.
Emerson wrote on a number of
subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical
tenets
, but
developing certain ideas such as
individuality
,
freedom
, the ability for man
to realize almost
anything, and the
relationship between the soul and the surrounding
world. Emerson's
more philosophical
than
naturalistic
;
Nature and the Soul.
While
his writing style can be seen as somewhat
impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own
time, Emerson'
s
essays remain one of the
linchpins
of American
thinking, and Emerson's work has
influenced nearly every generation of
thinker, writer and poet since his time. When
asked to sum up
his work, he said his
central
doctrine
was
infinitude
of the private
man.
[2]
Contents
1
Early life, family, and education
2 Early career
3
Literary career and
Transcendentalism
4 Civil War
years
5 Final years and
death
6 Lifestyle and
beliefs
7 Legacy
8 Selected works
9 See also
10
Notes
11
References
12 External
links
Early life, family,
and education
Emerson was born in
Boston
,
Massachusetts
on May 25,
1803,
[3]
son of Ruth Haskins
and the
Rev.
William
Emerson
, a
Unitarian
minister. He was
named after his mother's brother Ralph and the
father's great-grandmother Rebecca
Waldo.
[4]
Ralph Waldo was
the second of five sons who
survived
into adulthood; the others were William, Edward,
Robert Bulkeley, and
Charles.
[5]
Three
other
children
—
Phebe, John Clarke,
and Mary Caroline
–
died in
childhood.
[5]
The
young Ralph Waldo Emerson's father died from
stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than
two weeks before Emerson's eighth
birthday.
[6]
Emerson was
raised by his mother, with the help of
the other women in the family; his aunt
Mary Moody Emerson played an important role. Aunt
Mary
had a profound effect on
Emerson.
[7]
She lived with
the family off and on, and maintained a constant
correspondence with Emerson until her
death in 1863.
[8]
Emerson'
s
formal
schooling began at the
Boston Latin
School
in 1812 when he was
nine.
[9]
In
October 1817, at 14, Emerson went to
Harvard College
and was
appointed freshman messenger
for the
president, requiring Emerson to fetch delinquent
students and send messages to
faculty.
[10]
Midway through his junior year, Emerson began
keeping a list of books he had read and
started a journal in a series
of
notebooks that would be called
[11]
He took outside jobs
to cover his school expenses, including
as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an
occasional
teacher working with his
uncle Samuel in
Waltham, Massachusetts<
/p>
.
[12]
By his
senior year, Emerson
decided to go by
his middle name, Waldo.
[13]
Emerson served as Class Poet; as was custom, he
presented an original poem on Harvard's
Class Day, a month before his official graduation
on
August 29, 1821, when he was
18.
[14]
He did not stand out
as a student and graduated in the exact
middle of his class of 59
people.
[15]
In
1826, faced with poor health, Emerson went to seek
out warmer climates. He first went to
Charleston, South Carolina, but found
the weather was still too
cold.
[16]
He then went
further south,
to St. Augustine,
Florida, where he took long walks on the beach,
and began writing poetry. While in
St.
Augustine, he made the acquaintance of
Prince Achille Murat
. Murat,
the nephew of Napoleon
Bonaparte, was
only two years his senior; the two became
extremely good friends and enjoyed one
another's company. The two engaged in
enlightening discussions on religion, society,
philosophy,
and government, and Emerson
considered Murat an important figure in his
intellectual education.
[17]
While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his
first experience of slavery. At one point, he
attended a
meeting of the Bible Society
while there was a slave auction taking place in
the yard outside. He
wrote,
'Going, gentlemen,
going'!
[18]
Early
career
After Harvard,
Emerson assisted his brother William
[19]
in a school for young
women
[20]
established
in their mother's house, after he had
established his own school in
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
;
when his brother William
[21]
went to
G?
ttingen
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
.
Emerson'
s
brother
Edward,
[22]
two years
younger than he, entered the office of lawyer
Daniel
Webster
,
after graduating Harvard first in his class.
Edward's physical health began to deteriorate
and he soon suffered a mental collapse
as well; he was taken to McLean Asylum in June
1828 at
age 23. Although he recovered
his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834 from
apparently
longstanding
tube
rculosis
.
[23]
Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger
brothers, Charles,
born in 1808, died
in 1836, also of
tuberculosis
,
[24]
making him the third
young person in Emerson's
innermost
circle to die in a period of a few years.
Emerson met his first wife, Ellen
Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire on
Christmas Day,
1827, and married her
when she was 18.
[25]
The
couple moved to Boston, with
Emerson'
s
mother
Ruth moving with them to help take care
of Ellen, who was already sick with
tub
erculosis
.
[26]
Less
than two years later, Ellen died
at the age of 20 on February 8, 1831, after
uttering her last words:
have not
forgot the peace and
joy.
[27]
Emerson was heavily
affected by her death and visited her
grave in Roxbury
daily.
[28]
In a journal
entry dated March 29, 1832, Emerson wrote,
tomb and opened the
coffin.
[29]
Boston's
Second
Church
invited Emerson to serve as its
junior pastor and he was ordained on
January 11,
1829.
[30]
His initial salary
was $$1,200 a year, increasing to $$1,400 in
July,
[31]
but with his
church role he took on other
responsibilities: he was chaplain to the
Massachusetts legislature, and
a member
of the Boston school committee. His church
activities kept him busy, though during this
period, facing the imminent death of
his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs.
After his wife's death, he began to
disagree with the church's methods, writing in his
journal in June
1832:
ministry. The profession is antiquated.
In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of
our
forefathers.
[32]
His disagreements with church officials over the
administration of
the
Communion
service and
misgivings about public prayer eventually led to
his resignation in 1832.
As he wrote,
I should abandon
it.
[33]
Emerson
toured Europe in 1832 and later wrote of his
travels in
English Traits
(1857).
[34]
He left
aboard the brig
Jasper
on Christmas Day,
sailing first to Malta.
[35]
During his European trip, he
spent
several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence
and Venice, among other cities. When in
Rome, he met with
John
Stuart Mill
, who gave him a letter of
recommendation to meet
Thomas
Carlyle
. He went to
Switzerland, and had to be dragged by fellow
passengers to visit
Voltaire
's
home
in Ferney,
[36]
He then went
on
to Paris, a
[37]
where he visited the
Jardin des Plantes
. He was
greatly moved by the organization of
plants according to
Jussieu'
s
system of
classification, and the
way all such
objects were related and connected. As Richardson
says,
insight into the
interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des
Plantes was a moment of almost
visionary intensity that pointed him
away from theology and toward
science.
[38]
Moving north to England, Emerson met
William Wordsworth
,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
,
and
Thomas
Carlyle
. Carlyle in particular was a
strong influence on Emerson; Emerson would later
serve as an unofficial literary agent
in the United States for Carlyle, and in March
1835, he tried to
convince Carlyle to
come to America to
lecture.
[39]
The two would
maintain correspondence until
Carlyle's
death in 1881.
[40]
Emerson returned to the United States
on October 9, 1833, and lived with his mother in
Newton,
Massachusetts, until October,
1834, when he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to
live with his
step-grandfather
Dr.
Ezra Ripley
at what was
later named
The Old
Manse
.
[41]
Seeing
the budding
Lyceum movement, which
provided lectures on all sorts of topics, Emerson
saw a possible career
as a lecturer. On
November 5, 1833, he made the first of what would
eventually be some 1,500
lectures,
discussing The Uses of Natural History in Boston.
This was an expanded account of his
experience in
Paris.
[42]
In this lecture,
he set out some of his important beliefs and the
ideas he
would later develop in his
first published essay Nature:
Nature is
a language and every new fact one learns is a new
word; but it is not a language taken to
pieces and dead in the dictionary, but
the language put together into a most significant
and
universal sense. I wish to learn
this language, not that I may know a new grammar,
but that I may
read the great book that
is written in that
tongue.
[43]
On
January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote a letter to Lydia
Jackson proposing
marriage.
[44]
Her
acceptance reached him by mail on the
28th. In July 1835, he bought a house on the
Cambridge
and Concord
Turnpike
in Concord, Massachusetts
which he named
public as the
Ralph Waldo Emerson
House
.
[45]
Emerson quickly became one of the leading citizens
in the town. He gave a lecture to
commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of
Concord on
September 12,
1835.
[46]
Two days later, he
married Lydia Jackson in her home town of
Plymouth,
Massachusetts,
[47]
and moved to the new home in Concord
together with Emerson's mother on
September 15.
[48]
Emerson quickly changed his wife's name
to Lidian, and would call her
Queenie,
[49]
and sometimes
Asia,
[50]
and she
called him Mr. Emerson.
[51]
Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and
Edward
Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named
for his first wife, at
Lidian'
s
suggestion.
[52]
Emerson was poor when he was at
Harvard,
[53]
and later
supported his family for much of his
life.
[54][55]
He
inherited a fair amount of money after his first
wife's death, though he had to file a
lawsuit against the Tucker family in
1836 to get it.
[55]
He
received $$11,600 in May
1834,
[56]
and a
further $$11,674.49 in July
1837.
[57]
In 1834, he
considered that he had an income of $$1,200 a year
from the initial payment of the
estate,
[54]
equivalent to
what he had earned as a pastor.
Literary career and Transcendentalism
On September 8, 1836, the
day before the publication of
Nature
, Emerson met with
Henry Hedge,
George Putnam and George
Ripley to plan periodic gatherings of other like-
minded
intellectuals.
[58]
This was the beginning of the
Transcendental Club
, which
served as a center for the
movement.
Its first official meeting was held on September
19, 1836.
[59]
On September
1, 1837,
women attended a meeting of
the Transcendental Club for the first time.
Emerson invited Margaret
Fuller,
Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his
home before the meeting to ensure that
they would be present for the evening
get-together.
[60]
Fuller
would prove to be an important figure
in Transcendentalism.
Emerson anonymously published his first
essay,
Nature
, on September
9, 1836. A year later, on
August 31,
1837, Emerson delivered his now-famous
Phi Beta Kappa
address,
The American
Scholar
< br>
[61]
then known as
Cambridge
of
[62]
Friends urged him to
publish the talk, and he did so, at his own
expense, in
an edition of 500 copies,
which sold out in a
month.
[1]
In the speech,
Emerson declared literary
independence
in the United States and urged Americans to create
a writing style all their own and
free
from Europe.
[63]
James Russell Lowell
, who
was a student at Harvard at the time, called it
event without former parallel on our
literary annals
[64]
Another
member of the audience, Reverend
John
Pierce, called it
[65]
In 1837, Emerson befriended
Henry David Thoreau
. Though
they had likely met as early as 1835,
in the fall of 1837, Emerson asked
Thoreau,
a lifelong inspiration for
Thoreau.
[66]
Emerson's own
journal comes to 16 large volumes, in the
definitive Harvard University Press
edition published between 1960 and 1982. Some
scholars
consider the journal to be
Emerson's key literary
work.
[67]
In
March 1837, Emerson gave a series of lectures on
The Philosophy of History at Boston's
Masonic Temple. This was the first time
he managed a lecture series on his own, and was
the
beginning of his serious career as
a lecturer.
[68]
The profits
from this series of lectures were much
larger than when he was paid by an
organization to talk, and Emerson continued to
manage his
own lectures often
throughout his lifetime. He would eventually give
as many as 80 lectures a year,
traveling across the northern part of
the United States. He traveled as far as St.
Louis, Des Moines,
Minneapolis, and
California.
[69]
On July 15,
1838,
[70]
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
discounted Biblical
miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a
great man, he was not God:
historical
Christianity, he said, had turned Jesus into a
would describe Osiris or
Apollo
[71]
His comments
outraged the establishment and the general
Protestant community. For this, he was
denounced as an
atheist
,
[71]
and a poisoner of young
men's