EMERSON, RALPH WALDO

Clergyman, essayist, poet, and philosopher; b. Boston, Mass., May 25, 1803; d. Concord, Mass., April 27, 1882. He came of a long line of clergymen; his father had left Calvinism for Unitarianism and was minister at Boston's famous First Church. Emerson entered Harvard College (1817) and upon graduation taught school for a time. He entered Harvard Divinity School (1825), and was appointed pastor of the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston in 1829. He married in 1829, but his wife died in 1831. He very quickly found himself at odds with Unitarian doctrine and in 1832 resigned his pastorate. The same year he sailed for Europe. After a year of deeply stimulating experiences (he met, among others, coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, he returned home. He made two more trips abroad, in 1847 and 1872.

In 1836 he published Nature, which, like so many of his writings, has a strong manifesto-like quality. It is a challenging declaration of truths toward which many of his contemporaries were groping, and reveals Emerson probing into human reality and the world of nature in order to liberate men from a mechanistic view of the world. Soon there gathered around him a loosely knit group known as Transcendentalists. (see transcendentalism, literary.) In 1841 he published Essays, First Series and in 1844 Essays, Second Series. Then followed Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), Conduct of Life (1860), May Day (1867), Society and Solitude (1870), and Letters and Social Aims (1875).

Emerson was to a marked degree universal-minded. Thus he felt drawn to both the Orient and the Occident, as well as to the most advanced movements of thought in his own time. He was always at home in the great literatures, and entered with ease worlds that seemed far removed from his own. It was characteristic of him that he could be carried away by Dante's Vita Nuova, which he said "reads like the Book of Genesis." Under great difficulties, this son of the Puritans undertook its translation.

It is significant that Emerson's universality should have blossomed out of a mind so strikingly American. In essays like "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance," Emerson speaks for the frontier and not merely for romanticism; the pioneer spirit was as vital in him as his feeling for his Puritan ancestry and his ties with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. Emerson was moved by this frontier spirit to follow in the footsteps of the Puritan thinker Jonathan edwards. Emerson became passionately attached to the world revealed by the senses, and viewed its perception as integral to spiritual vision itself. Moreover, as with other Americans, the enterprise of carving a new world out of the wilderness left its mark on him, reinforcing to a maximum degree that feeling of the all-embracing unity of life and interconnectedness of things that springs up so spontaneously in man. Again, as were other Americans, he was alert to the dynamism that drives man onward and fills him with a sense of new and strange possibilities that lie ahead.

Man is no alien presence in the world. This is Emerson's resounding message. He therefore applied himself to the business of penetrating to "the aboriginal Self," so that he might lay bare and resuscitate a primal state of consciousness in which one rises to an awareness of higher dimensions within reality as well as of one's own immersion in nature and process.

Given such an outlook, the self-reliance of which Emerson makes so much has little in common with the self-sufficiency of one who remains insensitive to the bond linking him with things and who feels no surge within himself of a world that presses on to new and unforeseeable goals. To Emerson the call to self-reliance was a call to an original confrontation with the universe out of the depths of one's own uniqueness; for, as he saw it, the doorway to life and universality is to be found in selfhood. He was not antisocial. For him it was simply a matter of affirming the truth that society is most healthy when it respects the infinite potentiality of each person, while welcoming diversity and uniqueness.

In his deeper reading of human experience, Emerson could show that personality in its spiritual depths is organically connected with the rocks and the plants and all living creatures, as well as with the divinity that stands behind things. In building his picture of the world, he made use of a doctrine already taught by Jonathan Edwards, which can be traced back to medieval times and beyond, namely that the world is a descending manifestation of spirit. Within such a context Emerson was able to

develop his doctrine of the indispensability of organic language, the language of symbolism, to the normal functioning of mind and spirit. In his view, it is through organic language that the world around us evokes answering echoes in the psyche, hinting at realities that escape the grasp of nonpoetic language. Ever close to experience, Emerson believed that symbolic consciousness plays a dominant role in the process by which man seeks to transcend himself toward larger wholeness of life and meaning.

See Also: emanationism; neoplatonism.

Bibliography: Complete Works, ed. e. w. emerson, 12 v. (Boston 1903–04); Journals, ed. e. w. emerson and w. e. forbes, 10 v. (Boston 1909–14); Letters, ed. r. l. rusk, 6 v. (New York 1939). dante aligheri, La Vita Nuova, tr. r. w. emerson, ed. j.c. mathews (Chapel Hill 1960). r. l. rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York 1949). f. i. carpenter, Emerson Handbook (New York 1953). v. c. hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass. 1951). s. paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, Mass. 1952). s. e. whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia 1953).

[r. c. pollock]