Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well.
Date- 2013-08-06
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803--1882) was a renowned lecturer and
writer, whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature
influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt
Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at
Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister, continuing
a long line of ministers in his family. He traveled widely and
lectured, and became well known for his publications Essays and
Nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian minister and a chaplain
during the American Revolution, was born in 1803 in Boston. He
attended the Boston Latin School, and in 1817 entered Harvard,
graduating in 1820. Emerson supported himself as a schoolteacher
from 1821-26. In 1826 he was 'approbated to preach,' and in 1829
became pastor of the Scond Church (Unitarian) in Boston. That same
year he married Ellen Louise Tucker, who was to die of tuberculosis
only seventeen months later.
In 1832 Emerson resigned his pastorate and traveled to Eurpe, where
he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He settled in Concord,
Massachusetts, in 1834, where he began a new career as a public
lecturer, and married Lydia Jackson a year later. A group that
gathered around Emerson in Concord came to be known as 'the Concord
school,' and included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller.
Every year Emerson made a lecture tour; and these lectures were the
source of most of his essays. Nature (1836), his first published
work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy, which
views the world of phenomena as a sort of symbol of the inner life
and emphasizes individual freedom and self-reliance. Emerson's
address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard (1837) and another
address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School
(1838) applied his doctrine to the scholar and the clergyman,
provoking sharp controversy. An ardent abolitionist, Emerson
lectured and wrote widely against slavery from the 1840's through
the Civil War.
His principal publications include two volumes of Essays (1841,
1844), Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life
(1860), and Society and Solitude (1870). He died of pneumonia in
1882 and was buried in Concord.
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