Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by Waldo, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, and died on April 27, 1882. He was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet, and he led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. In his own time and after, he was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, and as a critic of the pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche called him “the most gifted of the Americans,” and Walt Whitman called Emerson his “master.”

Emerson’s early life placed him close to religion, learning, and loss. His father, the Rev. William Emerson, was a Unitarian minister who died of stomach cancer in 1811, shortly before Emerson’s eighth birthday. Emerson was raised by his mother, Ruth Haskins, with help from women in the family, especially his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who had a strong effect on him and kept up a steady correspondence with him until her death in 1863. He entered Boston Latin School at nine and Harvard College at fourteen. At Harvard, he began keeping lists of books he had read and started a journal in notebooks later called “Wide World.”

After Harvard, Emerson taught, studied, and wrote. In the early 1820s, he worked at schools for young women and spent two years in a cabin in the Canterbury section of Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he wrote and studied nature. Poor health led him in 1826 to seek a warmer climate. He went first to Charleston, South Carolina, and then to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach and began writing poetry. There he met Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the two talked about religion, society, philosophy, and government. Emerson later considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual development. In St. Augustine, he also had his first encounter with the slave trade.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of many of his contemporaries. He expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature, where his idea of nature was more philosophical than naturalistic. He wrote that, “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.” In 1837, he gave the speech “The American Scholar”, later called America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence” by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Emerson often wrote his major essays first as lectures and then revised them for print.

His collections Essays: First Series in 1841 and Essays: Second Series in 1844 contain the core of his thought, including “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” “The Poet,” and “Experience.” Along with Nature, these works made the period from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s his most productive. Emerson did not set out fixed philosophical rules. He returned instead to ideas of individuality, freedom, the ability of mankind to achieve almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. He was also a mentor and close friend of Henry David Thoreau. His words still speak clearly because they ask a person to think, choose, and live awake to experience: “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”