Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 82)
Boston, Massachusetts

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American philosopher and poet. He was the son of a Unitarian minister who died when Emerson was eight. He was educated at Harvard, studied theology, was ordained, and became a pastor in Boston, but resigned his charge (shortly after the death of his first wife) because he felt unable to believe in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. In 1832, Emerson set sail for Europe where he visited England and met writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. On his return to America Emerson embarked on a career as lecturer, evolving the new quasi-religious concept of Transcendentalism, which found written expression in his essay Nature (1836): 'Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.' This form of mystic idealism and Wordsworthian reverence for nature ('What is a farm but a mute gospel?') was immensely influential in American life and thought, and Emerson, like his friend Carlyle, was revered as a sage. In 1835 he married and settled in Concord; his 1837 Harvard address, 'The American Scholar', urged America (as Channing had recently done) to assert its intellectual independence: 'We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.' The Dial, founded in 1840, was edited by Emerson from 1842 to 1844, and published many of his gnomic, rough-hewn, but frequently striking poems, including 'The Problem' and 'Woodnotes'. His first volume of essays (1841) contains 'Self-Reliance' ('Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist ... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'); 'Compensation'; and 'The Over-Soul', which proposes a mystic Unity 'within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other'. His second Essays (1844) contains 'The Poet', in which he urges the 'incomparable materials' of America, 'our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians ... America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.' In 1845 Emerson delivered the lectures later published in 1850 as Representative Men; these studies of Plato, Swedenborg, Napoleon, and others owe something to Carlyle's concept of the Hero. In 1847 he revisited England on a lecture tour, staying in London in the home of his publisher, J. Chapman; he was greatly admired in this country and his English Traits (1865), a perceptive study of the English national character, won him more readers. On his return to America he was actively engaged in the anti-slavery campaign, and continued to lecture and write (including poems and prose for The Atlantic Monthly) until, in his last decade, he gradually lost his mental powers and became a quiet blank. Of his many later works, mention should be made of his moving tribute to his friend and follower Thoreau (1862) in which, after a warm appreciation, he mildly deplored Thoreau's want of ambition, a comment which takes on an ironic light in view of Emerson's current neglect as a writer and Thoreau's great and continuing influence. A definitive edition of Emerson's Collected Works, ed. R. E. Spiller and others (Vol. I, 1971) is in progress, as is a complete edition of the Journals and Notebooks (1960).

Works
1817 Journal
1836 Nature
1840 The Dial
1847 "Threnody," "Brahma," "The Problem," "The Rhodora," "The Concord Hymn"
"The Over-Soul," "Compensation," "Self-Reliance"
1850 Representative Men
1856 English Traits
1860 The Conduct of Life
1870 Society and Solitude

Additional Information
Ralph Waldo Emerson http://www.rwe.org/

Sources:

Transcendentalists. Ed. Jone Johson Lewis. 2001. <http://www.transcendentalists.com/1emerson.html>