Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–1882), essayist, poet, lecturer.Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston as the third son of William Emerson and Ruth Haskins Emerson, came from a long line of ministers. His father, minister at Boston's First Church, was a luminary of the Federalist cultural establishment. Emerson's youth, after his father's death in 1811, was marked by genteel poverty and frequent moves.

Emerson graduated from Harvard College in 1821, where he displayed an early interest in poetry. After serving a brief teaching apprenticeship, he studied for the ministry at Harvard Divinity School. Approbated to preach in 1826, he was ordained colleague pastor of Boston's Second Church in 1829. This post provided him with sufficient social and financial stability to marry Ellen Tucker, from a New Hampshire merchant family, in September 1829. She died of tuberculosis in February 1831. Through this marriage Emerson eventually received a considerable monetary legacy.

Increasingly chafing under the restrictions of the Unitarian ministry and never blessed with easy sociability, Emerson proved ineffectual in the pastoral duties of his office. In his preaching, where he excelled, he interpreted Christianity symbolically, construing the teachings of scripture and revelation in ethical and humanitarian terms. When he insisted in 1832 that he could no longer in good conscience celebrate the Lord's Supper because it had become a source of division among persons of good conscience, his congregation decided to release him as minister. In an apparently amicable parting, he resigned in October 1832.

For most of 1833, Emerson traveled in Europe to broaden his horizons and consider his future. In November 1834 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, his ancestral home, where he occasionally supplied pulpits while building the foundation for a career as an independent lecturer and essayist. A principal venue for the dissemination of his ideas became the lyceum, an institution for the spread of “useful knowledge” begun by Josiah Holbrook in 1826. The lyceum lecture circuit, of which Emerson was a leading light, eventually spread throughout much of the nation.

Freed from the necessity of defending a particular denominational position, Emerson entered upon a freelance career as spiritual sage, essayist, and public speaker that transformed him into an emblem of wisdom in a culture where attitudes toward the sacred were becoming increasingly individualized and privatized. His first published book, a slim volume entitled Nature (1836), imported into the United States some of the tenets of German transcendental philosophy that would become a significant source of inspiration for a small but visible segment of the New England elite looking for an alternative to evangelical religion or secular entrepreneurialism. At Harvard, a Phi Beta Kappa Society oration later known as “The American Scholar” (1837) and a sermon before the graduating class of the divinity school (1838), earned for Emerson a local reputation as an advocate for American letters and harbinger of a radical new brand of spirituality.

Although Emerson gained an early reputation as an intellectual renegade, his popularity as a regional, then national, lecturer soared between 1840 and 1860. Two volumes, Essays, First Series (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844) provided the public printed texts of his major lectures. Later publications largely based on lectures included Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), The Conduct of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870). Two volumes of poems appeared as well.

Although Emerson at first eschewed organized reform as antithetical to the individual's need to carve out his or her own niche in the world, the 1840s and 1850s impelled him toward reforms of various sorts. Although never an organized program, the movement that became known as transcendentalism coalesced around Emerson and the neighborhood of Concord during the 1840s. No firm core of beliefs marked adherents, but they shared a tendency to see the divine represented symbolically throughout nature, and nature as the emblem of a divinity in which humankind shared. Along with Margaret Fuller, Emerson published and edited The Dial (1840–1844), a literary magazine inspired by transcendental philosophy. Emerson's Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau was profoundly influenced by transcendentalist ideas.

The antislavery cause also drew Emerson's attention during these decades. At first repulsed by the rigidity of abolitionist thinking, Emerson increasingly spoke out against slavery and northern complicity with that institution, especially after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Major addresses in Concord (1844 and 1851) and New York (1854) marked his escalating involvement in this major reform movement of his day.

By the mid‐1860s, the most creative phase of Emerson's career was over. With age he grew forgetful and unable to lecture. He died in Concord in 1882, his reputation as a uniquely American seeker of wisdom already gargantuan.
See also Antebellum Era; Federalist Party; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Romantic Movement; Unitarianism and Universalism.

Bibliography

Ralph Leslie Rusk , The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1949.
Gay Wilson Allen , Waldo Emerson: A Biography, 1981.
John McAleer , Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, 1984.
Mary Kupiec Cayton , Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800–1845, 1989.
Len Gougeon , Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform, 1990.
Robert D. Richardson , Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 1995.

Mary Kupiec Cayton