Emerson Ralph Waldo - Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Table of Contents

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

(from Nature, page 12)

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. (from The Transcendentalist, page 101)

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all menthat is genius.

(from Self-Reliance, page 113)

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. (from Self-Reliance, page 116)

To be great is to be misunderstood. (from Self-Reliance, page 120)

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

(from Friendship, page 179)

The only reward of virtue, is virtue: the only way to have a friend, is to be one. (from Friendship, page 183)

There is not yet any inventory of a mans faculties, and more than a bible of his opinions. (from Power, page 000)

When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.

(from Earth-song, page 000)

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803, to William and Ruth Emerson. In 1811 Emersons father died, leaving his mother limited resources for raising the family. Three of Emersons siblings died during childhood and two before age thirty; one was mentally handicapped. His elder brother William, who became a lawyer in New York City, was the only other Emerson child to have a lengthy career. The family was so impoverished in Emersons early years that one winter he and his brother Edward had to share a single overcoat. Ruth was aided in child-rearing by her sister-in-law Mary Moody Emerson, who instilled in her young nephew a love of learning; her influence helped Emerson enter the distinguished Boston Latin School at age nine and Harvard University at fourteen.

At Harvard Emerson was at best an average student, chosen class poet only after seven classmates had declined the offer. He studied rhetoric, won the Boylston oratory prize, and formed a club for public speaking. Upon graduation he worked first as a schoolteacher but in 1826 decided to become a minister. While preaching in New Hampshire, he met his great love, Ellen Tucker. They married and settled in Massachusetts, and Emerson secured a prominent position at the Second Church of Boston.

Ellens death from tuberculosis in 1831 permanently altered the course of Emersons life. His religious faith shaken to the core, he left his post as minister and toured Europe, where he saw Paris and the museums of Italy. In England he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; he subsequently began an intellectual correspondence with Carlyle that lasted thirty-eight years. Returning to America in 1833, Emerson achieved financial security through an inheritance from his late wife, and his creative period began. Freed from the obligations of the ministry, he began to lecture publicly on a variety of topics, including natural history, biography, literature, and ethics. Throughout the rest of his career, public lectures provided him with a steady source of income and gradually increased his reputation as one of Americas leading intellectuals. In 1835 he married Lydia Jackson and with her had four children; in 1842 Emerson painfully watched his first born son, Waldo, die when the boy was only five. In the late 1830s he published Nature and gave two important speeches at Harvard: The American Scholar, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the declaration of independence of American intellectual life, and The Divinity School Address, for which Harvard banned him for the next twenty-five years.

In the early 1840s, while serving as editor of the Dial, Emerson published Essays and Essays: Second Series, confirming his reputation as one of the leading spokespersons of the transcendental movement. Although his verse was never as successful as he intended and a lack of organizational sense kept him from compiling a universal philosophic scheme, Emerson produced prodigiously throughout his later years, publishing Representative Men ( 1850), The Conduct of Life ( 1860), Society and Solitude (1870), and two collections of poetry (1846, 1867). He made two more trips to Europe, the second after fire destroyed his longtime home in Concord.

Emerson was a leading thinker, lecturer, and writer during a period when the literary character of the United States was being formed. In his role as spokesman for the American philosophical and ethical movement known as transcendentalism, he gave voice to a belief in the spiritual potential of every man. Ralph Waldo Emerson died quietly on April 27, 1882, and was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.