Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the most thought-provoking American cultural leader of the mid-19th century. In his unorthodox ideas and actions he represented a minority of Americans, but by the end of his life he was considered a sage.

Though Ralph Waldo Emerson's origins were promising, his path to eminence was by no means easy. He was born in Boston on May 25, 1803, of a fairly well-known New England family. His father was a prominent Boston minister. However, young Emerson was only 8 when his father died and left the family to face hard times. The genteel poverty which the Emerson family endured did not prevent it from sending the promising boy to the Boston Latin School, where he received the best basic education of his day. At 14 he enrolled in Harvard College. As a scholarship boy, he studied more and relaxed less than some of his classmates. He won several minor prizes for his writing. When he was 17, he started keeping a journal and continued it for over half a century.

Unitarian Minister

Emerson was slow in finding himself. After graduation from Harvard he taught at the school of his brother William. Gradually he moved toward the ministry. He undertook studies at the Harvard Divinity School, meanwhile continuing his journal and other writing. In 1826 he began his career as a Unitarian minister. Appropriately, Unitarianism was the creed of the questioner; in particular it questioned the divine nature of the Trinity. Emerson received several offers before an unusually attractive one presented itself: the junior pastorship at Boston's noted Second Church, with the promise that it would quickly become the senior pastorship. His reputation spread swiftly. Soon he was chosen chaplain of the Massachusetts Senate, and he was elected to the Boston School Committee.

Emerson's personal life flowered even more than his professional one, for he fell in love, deeply in love, for the only time in his life. He wooed and won a charming New Hampshire girl named Ellen Tucker. Their wedding, in September 1829, marked the start of an idyllic marriage. But it was all too short, for she died a year and a half later, leaving Emerson desolate. Though he tried to find consolation in his religion, he was unsuccessful. As a result, his religious doubts developed. Even the permissive creed of Unitarianism seemed to him to be a shackle. In September 1832 he resigned his pastorate; according to his farewell sermon he could no longer believe in celebrating Holy Communion.

Emerson's decision to leave the ministry was the more difficult because it left him with no other work to do. After months of floundering and even sickness, he scraped together enough money to take a 10-month tour of Europe. He hoped that his travels would give him the perspective he needed. They did, but only to the extent of confirming what he did not want rather than what he wanted.

Professional Lecturer

However, the times were on Emerson's side, for he found on his return to America that a new institution was emerging that held unique promise for him. This was the lyceum, a system of lecturing which started in the late 1820s, established itself in the 1830s, and rose to great popularity during the next 2 decades. The local lecture clubs that sprang up discovered that they had to pay for the best lecturers, Emerson among them. Emerson turned the lyceum into his unofficial pulpit and in the process earned at least a modest stipend. He spoke to his audiences with great, if unorthodox, effectiveness. They saw before them a tall, thin Yankee with slightly aquiline features whose words sometimes baffled but often uplifted them. After a few seasons he organized his own lecture courses as a supplement to his lyceum lectures. For example, during the winter of 1837-1838 he offered the Boston public a group of 10 lectures on "human culture" and earned more than $500. Equally to the point, his lectures grew into essays and books, and these he published from the early 1840s on.

Emerson's Creed

As a transcendentalist, Emerson spoke out against materialism, formal religion, and slavery. He could not have found targets better designed to offend the mass of Americans, most of whom considered making money a major purpose in life and church and churchgoing a mainstay and, until they faced the hard fact of the Civil War, either supported slavery or were willing to let it alone. But Emerson spoke of slavery in the context of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), saying, in one of his rare bursts of profanity, "I will not obey it, by God."

Emerson, however, was not merely against certain things; he both preached and exemplified a positive doctrine. He became America's leading transcendentalist; that is, he believed in a reality and a knowledge that transcended the everyday reality Americans were accustomed to. He believed in the integrity of the individual: "Trust thyself," he urged in one of his famous phrases. He believed in a spiritual universe governed by a mystic Over-soul with which each individual soul should try to harmonize. Touchingly enough, he believed in America. Though he ranked as his country's most searching critic, he helped as much as anyone to establish the "American identity." He not only called out for a genuinely American literature but also helped inaugurate it through his own writings. In addition, he espoused the cause of American music and American art; as a matter of fact, his grand purpose was to assist in the creation of an indigenous American national culture.

Publishing His Ideas

His first two books were brilliant. He had published a pamphlet, Nature, in 1836, which excited his fellow transcendentalists; but now he issued two volumes of essays for a broader public, Essays, First Series, in 1841 and Essays, Second Series, in 1844. Their overarching subjects were man, nature, and God. In such pieces as "Self-reliance," "Spiritual Laws," "Nature," "The Poet," and "The Over-soul," Emerson expounded on the innate nobility of man, the joys of nature and their spiritual significance, and the sort of deity omnipresent in the universe. The tone of the essays was optimistic, but Emerson did not neglect the gritty realities of life. In such essays as "Compensation" and "Experience," he tried to suggest how to deal with human losses and failings.

Whether he wrote prose or verse, Emerson was a poet with a poet's gift of metaphor. Both his lectures and his published works were filled from the first with telling phrases, with wisdom startlingly expressed. His next book, after the second series of essays, was a volume of his poems. They proved to be irregular in form and movingly individual in expression. After that came more than one remarkable volume of prose. In Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1850) Emerson pondered the uses of great men, devoting individual essays to half a dozen figures, including Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe. English Traits (1856) resulted from an extended visit to Great Britain. In this volume Emerson anatomized the English people and their culture. His approach was impressionistic, but the result was the best book by an American on the subject up to that time.

Meanwhile, Emerson had been immersed—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—in things other than literature. He had found a second wife, pale and serene, in Lydia Jackson of Plymouth. He had married her in 1835 and got from her the comfort of love, if not its passion. They had four children, one of whom, Waldo, died when he was a little boy; the others outlived their eminent father. As Emerson's family life expanded, so did his friendships. After leaving his pastorate in Boston, he had moved to nearby Concord, where he stayed the rest of his life. In Concord he met a prickly young Harvard graduate who became his disciple, friend, and occasional adversary: Henry David Thoreau. Emerson added others to his circle, becoming as he did so the nexus of the transcendentalist movement. Among his close friends were Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker.

Emerson's public life also expanded. During the 1850s he was drawn deeply into the struggle against slavery. Though he found some of the abolitionists almost as distasteful as the slaveholders, he knew where his place had to be. The apolitical Emerson became a Republican, voting for Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (Jan. 1, 1863), Emerson counted it a momentous day for the United States; when Lincoln was killed, Emerson considered him a martyr.

Last Years

After the Civil War, Emerson continued to lecture and write. Though he had nothing really new to say anymore, audiences continued to throng his lectures and many readers bought his books. The best of the final books were Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1876). However, he was losing his memory and needed more and more help from others, especially his daughter Ellen. He was nearly 79 when he died on April 27, 1882.

America mourned Emerson's passing, as did much of the rest of the Western world. In the general judgment, he had been both a great writer and a great man. Certainly he had been America's leading essayist for half a century. And he had been not only one of the most wise but one of the most sincere of men. He had shown his countrymen the possibilities of the human spirit, and he had done so without a trace of sanctimony or pomposity. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, exclaimed, "How rare he was; how original in thought; how true in character!" Some of the eulogizing was extravagant, but in general the verdict at the time of Emerson's death has been upheld.

Further Reading

Emerson's Journals were reedited with care by William Gilman and others (7 vols., 1960-1969). Also valuable are The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Ralph L. Rusk (6 vols., 1939). The best biography is still Rusk's The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1949). The best critical study of Emerson's writing is Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (1952), which concentrates on Emerson's principle of "correspondence." Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate (1953), is also valuable; it is called an "inner life" of Emerson and concentrates on the 1830s. The only treatment of Emerson's mind and art as they relate to the transcendentalist movement is Francis O. Matthiessen's superb American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). □

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 zealously 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 (1867), 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.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82) US essayist and poet. He was an exponent of transcendentalism, the principles of which are expressed in his book Nature (1836). His belief in the soul, the unity of God with man and nature, self-reliance and hope is articulated in his Essays (1841, 1844), Poems (1847), The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), and many other influential works.