what is ralph waldo emerson's most famous essay

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Chapter 4 pg 42 - Chapter header of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Published in 1884 by The American Publishing Company

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (born May 25, 1803, Boston , Massachusetts , U.S.—died April 27, 1882, Concord , Massachusetts) was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism .

what is ralph waldo emerson's most famous essay

Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian clergyman and friend of the arts. The son inherited the profession of divinity, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from Puritan days. The family of his mother, Ruth Haskins, was strongly Anglican, and among influences on Emerson were such Anglican writers and thinkers as Ralph Cudworth , Robert Leighton , Jeremy Taylor , and Samuel Taylor Coleridge .

Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry

On May 12, 1811, Emerson’s father died, leaving the son largely to the intellectual care of Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt, who took her duties seriously. In 1812 Emerson entered the Boston Public Latin School, where his juvenile verses were encouraged and his literary gifts recognized. In 1817 he entered Harvard College (later Harvard University), where he began his journals, which may be the most remarkable record of the “march of Mind” to appear in the United States . He graduated in 1821 and taught school while preparing for part-time study in the Harvard Divinity School.

Though Emerson was licensed to preach in the Unitarian community in 1826, illness slowed the progress of his career, and he was not ordained to the Unitarian ministry at the Second Church, Boston, until 1829. There he began to win fame as a preacher, and his position seemed secure. In 1829 he also married Ellen Louisa Tucker. When she died of tuberculosis in 1831, his grief drove him to question his beliefs and his profession. But in the previous few years Emerson had already begun to question Christian doctrines. His older brother William, who had gone to Germany, had acquainted him with the new biblical criticism and the doubts that had been cast on the historicity of miracles. Emerson’s own sermons, from the first, had been unusually free of traditional doctrine and were instead a personal exploration of the uses of spirit, showing an idealistic tendency and announcing his personal doctrine of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Indeed, his sermons had divested Christianity of all external or historical supports and made its basis one’s private intuition of the universal moral law and its test a life of virtuous accomplishment. Unitarianism had little appeal to him by now, and in 1832 he resigned from the ministry.

When Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain conviction of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation—i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In Paris he saw Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu ’s collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man’s spiritual relation to nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge , William Wordsworth , and Thomas Carlyle . At home once more in 1833, he began to write Nature and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent dwelling place in Concord, Massachusetts, and in the following year he married Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work.

The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other intellectuals . Before the decade was over his personal manifestos— Nature , “The American Scholar,” and the divinity school Address —had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate Transcendentalism by publishing anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled Nature . Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or amendment of the ideas he first affirmed in Nature .

Emerson’s religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the Unitarians’ retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was also deeply unsettled by Newtonian physics’ mechanistic conception of the universe and by the Lockean psychology of sensation that he had learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for free will in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining reality.

Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of 18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to transcend the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking inward into one’s own self, one’s own soul, and from such an enlightened self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to change one’s world according to the dictates of one’s ideals and conscience . Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual’s intimate personal experience of his own portion of the divine “oversoul,” which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to look for it. Emerson enunciates how “reason,” which to him denotes the intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite different from one’s reliance on “understanding”—i.e., the ordinary gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material world. Emerson’s doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches. The individual must then have the courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.

Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other European Romantics , the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg , Hindu philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power and an organic unity whose cumulative effect was highly suggestive and stimulating to his contemporary readers’ imaginations.

In a lecture entitled “The American Scholar” (August 31, 1837), Emerson described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson’s “ Address at Divinity College,” Harvard University, in 1838 was another challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition, especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man’s attempt to encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an intuited sentiment of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by Harvard for many years. Young disciples , however, joined the informal Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his activities.

In 1840 he helped launch The Dial , first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas Transcendentalists were trying to present to America. Though short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered his Essays into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of Essays Emerson consolidated his thoughts on moral individualism and preached the ethics of self-reliance , the duty of self-cultivation , and the need for the expression of self. The second volume of Essays shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater respect for society, and an awareness of the ambiguities and incompleteness of genius.

His Representative Men (1849) contained biographies of Plato , Swedenborg, Montaigne , Shakespeare , Napoleon , and Goethe . In English Traits he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself stemmed. The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson’s most mature work, reveals a developed humanism together with a full awareness of human limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson’s collected Poems (1846) were supplemented by others in May-Day (1867), and the two volumes established his reputation as a major American poet.

By the 1860s Emerson’s reputation in America was secure, for time was wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his teaching without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. Upon his death in 1882 Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had set out to destroy.

Emerson’s voice and rhetoric sustained the faith of thousands in the American lecture circuits between 1834 and the American Civil War . He served as a cultural middleman through whom the aesthetic and philosophical currents of Europe passed to America, and he led his countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the American renaissance (1835–65). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American tributary of European Romanticism , Emerson gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and ethical movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston. After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He was appointed to the Old Second Church in his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Soon after the death of his nineteen-year-old wife of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831.

The following year, Emerson sailed for Europe, visiting Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Carlyle, the Scottish-born English writer, was famous for his explosive attacks on hypocrisy and materialism, his distrust of democracy, and his highly romantic belief in the power of the individual. Emerson’s friendship with Carlyle was both lasting and significant; the insights of the British thinker helped Emerson formulate his own philosophy.

On his return to New England, Emerson became known for challenging traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle as “The Sage of Concord,” Emerson became the chief spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement. Centered in New England during the nineteenth century, Transcendentalism was a reaction against scientific rationalism.

Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience. “Trust thyself,” Emerson’s motto, became the code of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E. Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial .

Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson’s most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson's famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” in which the writer instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God, and to trust his own judgment above all others.

Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address , which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.

Emerson’s philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works of Plotinus, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Jakob Böhme. A believer in the “divine sufficiency of the individual,” Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville , Nathaniel Hawthorne , and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment. In spite of their skepticism, Emerson’s beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson—a New England preacher, essayist, lecturer, poet, and philosopher—was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 19th century in the United States. Emerson was also the first major American literary and intellectual figure to widely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for classical Asian and Middle Eastern works. He not only gave countless readers their first exposure to non-Western modes of thinking, metaphysical concepts, and sacred mythologies; he also shaped the way subsequent generations of American writers and thinkers approached the vast cultural resources of Asia and the Middle East. Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. As a boy, his first contact with the non-Western world came by way of the merchandise that bustled across the India Wharf in Boston harbor, a major nexus of the Indo-Chinese trade that flourished in New England after the Revolutionary War. Emerson’s first contact with writings from and about the non-Western world came by way of his father, William Emerson, a Unitarian minister with a genteel interest in learning and letters.

In 1817, at the age of 14, Emerson entered Harvard College. While at Harvard, Emerson had little opportunity to study the diverse literary and religious traditions of Asia or the Middle East. The curriculum focused on Greek and Roman writers, British logicians and philosophers, Euclidean geometry and algebra, and post-Enlightenment defenses of revealed religion. As his journals and library borrowing records attest, however, in his spare time, Emerson paid keen attention to the wider European Romantic interest in the “Orient” or the “East,” which to him meant the ancient lands and sacred traditions east of classical Greece, such as Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, China, and India. An aspiring poet, Emerson also gravitated to selections of poetry that took up Eastern themes and Eastern poetry, including the works of Saadi and Hafez , which he would embrace in adulthood.

Like other Anglo-American readers of his period, Emerson relied heavily on British colonial agents for his knowledge of India, reading treatises, travelogues, and translations of legal, religious, and poetic texts produced in the wake of Britain’s imperial expansion into India. As a consequence, Emerson’s writing about South Asia (as well as China, Persia, and the Arab world) often traffics in the menagerie of 19th century Euro-American stereotypes and misconceptions. Examples can be found in Emerson’s “Indian Superstition,” a densely allusive poem that he composed for Harvard College’s graduation ceremonies in 1822. In the 156-line poem, Emerson describes how “Superstition,” the personification of religious tyranny in Asia, has enslaved “[D]ishonored India.” With its Romantic primitivism and bombastic imagery, “Indian Superstition” is perhaps closer to caricature than considered literary art. Yet, for all its excess, Emerson’s poem is notable for departing from a common formula of the period according to which a debased India could only be redeemed through Western colonialism. Instead, Emerson urges Indians to resist the shackles of the British Empire as forcefully as they should resist the mental chains of religious superstition. He exhorts ordinary Indians to look upon the example of post-revolution America as an emblem of what a modern democratic nation could achieve. After he graduated from Harvard, Emerson’s enthusiasm for non-Western subjects waned, primarily because he devoted himself to becoming a Unitarian minister. In 1831 Emerson’s wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis, an event that galvanized a series of personal and professional changes in his life. The next year Emerson resigned his pulpit at the Second Church of Boston, publicly citing the fact that he did not believe in the special divinity of Jesus and thus could no longer administer the sacrament of communion. After traveling through Europe, where he met literary luminaries such as William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, Emerson returned to his ancestral home in Concord, Massachusetts. He began a career as a public lecturer, which lasted almost 50 years, and married Lydia Jackson, whom he affectionately referred to as “Mine Asia”—a pun on Asia Minor, the location of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. In 1836 Emerson published Nature, the first major statement of his mature philosophy and a groundbreaking book that catalyzed the Transcendentalist movement in New England. Along with Emerson, the New England Transcendentalists were an eclectic group of religious, literary, educational, and social reformers that included Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement grew out of Unitarianism in the greater Boston area; was deeply influenced by British and German Romanticism, especially as interpreted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and revolved around a form of philosophical and spiritual idealism that valued intuition over the senses.

With the publication of his Essays in 1841 and Essays: Second Series in 1844, Emerson emerged as a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity. In his essays from this period Emerson did not explicitly take up Eastern subjects or ideas; however, scholars agree that there are similarities between Emerson’s “Over-Soul” in his 1841 essay of that name and the Hindu conception of Brahman . Scholars also agree that there are similarities between Emerson’s belief described in his 1841 essay “Compensation” and the Hindu doctrine of karma . Moreover, in his published writings during this period, Emerson cited maxims, referred to prominent figures, and otherwise incorporated allusions drawn from Asian and Middle Eastern literatures with surprising regularity. He added these “lustres” to his nonfiction writing for at least two reasons. First, by treating non-Western texts with the same respect afforded cultural authorities in the Western traditions, he could disrupt the parochial expectations of his American and European audiences. Second, by adducing evidence from traditions outside of America and Europe, he could assert the universality of his observations on society, fate, ethics, and philosophy. Emerson’s engagement with Eastern cultural sources is also evident in his poetry from the 1840s. For example, inspired by his reading of Persian verse, Emerson wrote “Saadi” in 1842, a poetic tribute to the aphorist, panegyrist, and lyrical poet of the same name.

When scholars discuss the limitations of Emerson’s writing about the East, they often refer to the essay “Plato; or the Philosopher,” published in Representative Men in 1850. In that volume, Emerson argues that the Greek philosopher brought together the two “cardinal facts” at the core of all philosophy: Unity and Variety. According to Emerson, the tendency to “dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity” is primarily an Eastern trait, while the impulse toward variety is a Western one. Emerson praises in Plato what he probably valued in himself—an ability to synthesize the best aspects of unity and variety, immensity and detail, East and West. And yet Emerson’s conceptualization of the East in the “Plato” essay poses problems that are worth noting.

As scholars have observed, when Emerson claims to speak about “Asia,” he seems to have India in mind (that is, the country with the “social institution of caste”). It is a muddling of distinctions that suggests Emerson was unconcerned about the vital differences among the cultures of Asia and the Middle East. Emerson also eschews political or economic comparisons in favor of idealized intellectual ones, supporting the notion that “the East” was more for him an abstract idea than a place inhabited by actual people. Also, even though Emerson purports to offer a balanced view of an East that “[loves] infinity” and a West that [“delights] in boundaries,” his language seems to favor Europe—with its activity, creativity, “discipline,” “arts, inventions, trade, freedom”—over Asia, with its “immovable institutions” and “deaf, unimplorable, immense fate.” Emerson’s vague and polarized thinking in “Plato” closely aligns with the stereotypical typologies about East and West that prevailed in the wider culture, pointing to the limits of Emerson’s intellectual vision when trying to imagine the Eastern Other.

In 1856 Emerson composed a lyric poem originally called “Song of the Soul” and later published in the Atlantic in 1857 under the title “ Brahma .” The poem dramatizes an idea that Emerson closely associated with Hinduism; namely, that the material world is essentially an illusory mask of the divine spirit that dwells in all beings. Although it stands to reason that the poem is written from the perspective of Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, or even Brahman, the absolute or universal soul, the speaker in the poem does not name itself. Instead, the speaker enumerates the ways in which it eludes characterization. The opening lines of the four-stanza verse exemplify the riddle-like quality of the poem as a whole: “If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain,/ They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again.”

In many ways, “Brahma” is a distillation of Emerson’s reading of Hindu sacred literatures over the previous two decades, from the Baghavad Gita to the Katha Upanishad . When “Brahma” inspired dozens of mocking parodies in the Atlantic —its paradoxical style proved to be too much for many antebellum American readers, who objected to its exotic obscurities—Emerson told his daughter that one did not need to adopt a Hindu perspective to understand the poem. One could easily substitute “Jehovah” for “Brahma,” he explained, and not lose the sense of the verse.

In 1858 Emerson published a long essay, “Persian Poetry,” in the Atlantic . As a way of introducing American readers to what was likely an unfamiliar poetic tradition, Emerson drew parallels between Persian poetry and Homeric epics, English ballads, and the works of William Shakespeare. He also noted that the legends of Persian mythology could sometimes be found in the Hebrew Bible. As part of his exposition, Emerson included his own English translations of the poets Hafez, Saadi, Khayyam , and Enweri, by way of the German translations of Persian poetry by Baron von Hammer-Purgstall. Emerson had no competence in any Asian or Middle Eastern language, and he never read a non-Western text in its original language. But Emerson had been translating von Hammer’s German texts in his journals since 1846. By the end of his life, Emerson produced at least 64 translations, totaling more than 700 lines of Persian verse, many of which can be found in “Orientalist,” a notebook he began to keep in the 1850s.

In 1872 Emerson sailed for England and then Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. As he toured the cities of Alexandria and Cairo, Emerson noted observations about the Pyramids, the Nile River, and his woeful ignorance of the Arabic language. But at 70 years old, Emerson’s most significant writings about the East were behind him. Ten years later, on April 27, 1882, Emerson died in Concord, leaving an enduring legacy as the seminal figure of modern American Orientalism. His lifelong excursions into the libraries of classical Asian and Middle Eastern literatures were those of an enthusiast instead of a rigorous scholar, and he often relied on crude Romantic stereotypes and failed to recognize the differences among the cultures and peoples of the East. But Ralph Waldo Emerson expanded the Eastern horizons of generations of American readers and writers, and he persuasively demonstrated how classical Indian, Chinese, and Persian works could be used as a means to bring the inquiring self into a fresh appreciation of its own profound powers.

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The American Scholar: Emerson’s Superb Speech on the Life of the Mind, the Art of Creative Reading, and the Building Blocks of Genius

By maria popova.

Titled “The American Scholar,” the speech was eventually included in the indispensable volume Essays and Lectures ( public library | free download ) — the source of Emerson’s enduring wisdom on the two pillars of friendship , the key to personal growth , what beauty really means , and how to live with maximum aliveness . Nearly two centuries later, his oratory masterwork speaks to some of the most pressing issues of our time and his piercing insight into the cultural responsibility and creative challenges of the scholar applies equally to the writer, the artist, and the journalist of today.

Long before our era’s foundational theories of how creativity works , Emerson argues that the fertile mind is one which connects the seemingly disconnected :

To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.

Echoing Goethe’s insistence upon the importance of building one’s mental library of influences , Emerson considers the singular value of books to the developing mind:

[A] great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past… The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again… It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

But books — like any technology of thought, indeed — aren’t inherently valuable; we confer value upon them by the nature of our use. To deny ourselves the wealth of human genius contained in books, Emerson argues, is to rob ourselves of vital inspiration; but to rely on books as blind dogma is to blunt our own creative genius:

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. […] Instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.

Genius, says Emerson, is best nurtured by a balance of reading books and “reading” life — in fact, even more important than being a scholar by the lamplight of the study is being a scholar in the luminous school of life:

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak.

And yet the pleasure of reading, Emerson reminds us in a remark that applies perfectly to this very speech, is unparalleled in granting us a sense of communion with kindred spirits and likeminds long gone:

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books… There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

But since the fruits of reading are ones we must actively reap, Emerson makes a beautiful case for the art of creative reading:

I would not be hurried … to underrate the Book. … As the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge… I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Tom Wolfe’s magnificent commencement address on the rise of the pseudo-intellectual , Emerson admonishes against mistaking the academic charades of knowledge for knowledge itself:

Colleges … can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.

And yet the true scholar, Emerson argues, is the person able to bridge ideas with actions:

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action… Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. […] I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. […] He who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

In a sentiment that resonates with poet Sylvia Plath’s formative experience as a farm worker and philosopher Simone Weil’s decision to labor incognito at a car factory before entrusting her writings to a farmer , Emerson argues for “the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen” and insists that the true scholar must acquire learning not only by reading but by living fully:

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, — in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. […] Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act… The scholar loses no hour which the man lives.

With this, he turns to the role of the scholar in society — a role he sees much as William Faulkner saw the role of the writer and Joseph Conrad saw that of the artist . Emerson writes:

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

But doing that, he points out, is an act of creative rebellion — one not for the faint of heart or timid of conviction, for those who insist on maintaining appearances will always push back against the tellers of truth. Asserting that the scholar must “defer never to the popular cry” — a piercing and timely incantation in our era of catering to the lowest common denominator of culture, where entire industries are built upon indulging the popular cry — Emerson urges:

In the long period of his preparation, [the true scholar] must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society… For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart.

In a remark particularly assuring amid the outrage culture of our time, Emerson admonishes against getting caught up in the fads of controversy:

The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. […] Free should the scholar be, — free and brave… Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance… The world is his, who can see through its pretension.

“The American Scholar” is a timeless and enormously nourishing read in its entirety, and a spiritually rejuvenating reread, as is just about everything in Emerson’s Essays and Lectures . Complement it with Parker Palmer, a modern-day Emerson, on the six pillars of the wholehearted life and Susan Sontag on storytelling and how to be a moral human being .

— Published August 31, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/31/emerson-the-american-scholar/ —

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Ralph Waldo Emerson The Best 5 Books to Read

R alph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) was a philosopher and essayist perhaps best known for spearheading American Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that emphasizes the power of individualism, self-reliance, and the natural world.

One of the key hallmarks of the Transcendentalist movement, which notably included Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau (see our reading list of Thoreau’s best books here ), is its celebration of the supremacy — even divinity — of nature.

Divinity is not locked in a distant heaven, say transcendentalists; it is accessible right here in the company of the natural world.

We are thus at our best not when we conform to voices outside ourselves, but when we follow the voice within — the glimmering insight, the “immense intelligence” of our natural intuition and instincts.

Society on this view is seen as a corrupting force — it takes us away from our natural wisdom.

As unique individuals, we should not conform to generic belief systems or conventions, Emerson writes, but instead “enjoy an original relation to the universe.”

Emerson offers the beginnings of a path for how we might resist the pressures of society in his famous 1841 essay, Self-Reliance (read my Self-Reliance summary and analysis here ), which features in the collection below.

A famous passage from Emerson’s Self-Reliance that encapsulates the theme of much of his work runs as follows:

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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This reading list consists of the best books by and about Ralph Waldo Emerson.

After reading some of the books on this list, you’ll understand why this brilliant thinker was heralded by the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as “the most gifted of the Americans” (see my reading list of Nietzsche’s best books here ), and remains so celebrated to this day.

Let’s dive in!

1. Nature and Selected Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Nature was Emerson’s first book, and it set out the core principles for much of his (and Transcendentalist) thought.

Published in 1836 following the traumatic death of his first wife, Nature features Emerson at his sermonic best. Having left the Church, Emerson aimed to deliver secular lectures that nevertheless contained an almost religious power of their own. Nature is his first attempt at doing so with the written word — and in this regard it’s an undisputed success.

Emerson meditates on the power and beauty of nature and our profound, unbreakable connection to it. He writes:

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.

The essence of nature is integral to the essence of ourselves, and Emerson implores us to both explore and live in harmony with it.

If you’re interested in Emerson and Transcendentalism, there’s no better book to start with. As well as the book-length Nature essay, Nature and Selected Essays also includes many other of Emerson’s most acclaimed essays, including Self-Reliance, The Poet, and The American Scholar.

2. The Annotated Emerson, by Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Mikics

The Annotated Emerson

While Emerson is regarded as one of America’s greatest writers, his luxurious 19th-century prose can appear a little dense to the modern eye. Hence The Annotated Emerson : a brilliant book — published in 2012 — that contextualizes, illustrates, and discusses Emerson’s most important works.

Presenting some of Emerson’s most significant essays (including Nature, Self-Reliance, and more), the scholar David Mikics provides brilliant commentary throughout, drawing on Emerson’s journal entries and providing biographical details to supplement the work and bring Emerson’s writing to life.

For those seeking a deeper understanding of Emerson’s work, The Annotated Emerson is highly recommended.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for all things Emerson, then look no further than Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures , published in 1983.

This anthology contains all of Emerson’s essays and lectures, as well as a wealth of helpful contextual and biographical detail.

At 1150 pages, this anthology’s a beast — but you won’t need another!

4. Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert D. Richardson

Emerson: The Mind on Fire

BY ROBERT D. RICHARDSON

If you’re looking to learn more about the life Emerson lived and the events that shaped his work, Robert D. Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire is a fantastic biography, excellently researched and engagingly written.

In 100 bite-size chapters, Richardson lovingly weaves the story of Emerson’s intellectual development, his spearheading of the Transcendentalist movement (and often fraught interpersonal relationships with its members), his legacy as one of the greatest figureheads of American literature, and his lasting impact on the American psyche.

If you’re interested in Emerson, this autobiography is an essential addition to your bookshelf.

5. Emerson in His Journals, by Joel Porte

Emerson in His Journals

BY JOEL PORTE

For much of his long and fascinating life, Emerson kept a detailed journal. In 1984, Emerson scholar Joel Porte edited Emerson’s vast collection of journal entries to produce Emerson in His Journals , a book that should delight fans of Emerson and his work.

In these pages, we are granted intimate access into some of the major events in Emerson’s life — like his complex relationship with fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller — from Emerson’s own perspective .

We see a side to Emerson that he would never expose in his published writings, rendering Emerson in His Journals an enthralling addition for hardcore Emerson scholars.

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(From Amos Bronson Alcott, , Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.

1. Chronology of Emerson's Life

2.1 education, 2.2 process, 2.3 morality, 2.4 christianity, 2.6 unity and moods, 3.1 consistency, 3.2 early and late emerson, 3.3 sources and influence, works by emerson, selected writings on emerson, other internet resources, related entries.

1803	Born in Boston to William and Ruth Haskins Emerson.
1811	Father dies, probably of tuberculosis.
1812	Enters Boston Public Latin School
1817	Begins study at Harvard College: Greek, Latin, History, Rhetoric.
1820	Starts first journal, entitled “The Wide World.”
1821	Graduates from Harvard and begins teaching at his brother William's school for young ladies in Boston.
1825	Enters Harvard Divinity School.
1829	Marries Ellen Tucker and is ordained minister at Boston's Second Church.
1831	Ellen Tucker Emerson dies, at age 19.
1832	Resigns position as minister and sails for Europe.
1833	Meets Wordsworth, Coleridge, J. S. Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. Returns to Boston in November, where he begins a career as a lecturer.
1834	Receives first half of a substantial inheritance from Ellen's estate (second half comes in 1837).
1835	Marries Lidian Jackson.
1836	Publishes first book, .
1838	Delivers the “Divinity School Address.” Protests relocation of the Cherokees in letter to President Van Buren.
1841	published (contains “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” “History”).
1842	Son Waldo dies of scarlet fever at the age of 5.
1844	published (contains “The Poet,” “Experience,” “Nominalist and Realist”).
1847–8	Lectures in England.
1850	Publishes (essays on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Goethe, Napoleon).
1851–60	Speaks against Fugitive Slave Law and in support of anti-slavery candidates in Concord, Boston, New York, Philadelphia.
1856	Publishes .
1860	Publishes (contains “Culture” and “Fate”).
1867	Lectures in nine western states.
1870	Publishes Presents sixteen lectures in Harvard's Philosophy Department.
1872–3	After a period of failing health, travels to Europe, Egypt.
1875	Journal entries cease.
1882	Dies in Concord.

2. Major Themes in Emerson's Philosophy

In “The American Scholar,” delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837, Emerson maintains that the scholar is educated by nature, books, and action. Nature is the first in time (since it is always there) and the first in importance of the three. Nature's variety conceals underlying laws that are at the same time laws of the human mind: “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (CW1: 55). Books, the second component of the scholar's education, offer us the influence of the past. Yet much of what passes for education is mere idolization of books — transferring the “sacredness which applies to the act of creation…to the record.” The proper relation to books is not that of the “bookworm” or “bibliomaniac,” but that of the “creative” reader (CW1: 58) who uses books as a stimulus to attain “his own sight of principles.” Used well, books “inspire…the active soul” (CW1: 56). Great books are mere records of such inspiration, and their value derives only, Emerson holds, from their role in inspiring or recording such states of the soul. The “end” Emerson finds in nature is not a vast collection of books, but, as he puts it in “The Poet,” “the production of new individuals,…or the passage of the soul into higher forms” (CW3:14)

The third component of the scholar's education is action. Without it, thought “can never ripen into truth” (CW1: 59). Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness. Life is the scholar's “dictionary” (CW1: 60), the source for what she has to say: “Only so much do I know as I have lived” (CW1:59). The true scholar speaks from experience, not in imitation of others; her words, as Emerson puts it, are “are loaded with life…” (CW1: 59). The scholar's education in original experience and self-expression is appropriate, according to Emerson, not only for a small class of people, but for everyone. Its goal is the creation of a democratic nation. Only when we learn to “walk on our own feet” and to “speak our own minds,” he holds, will a nation “for the first time exist” (CW1: 70).

Emerson returned to the topic of education late in his career in “Education,” an address he gave in various versions at graduation exercises in the 1860's. Self-reliance appears in the essay in his discussion of respect. The “secret of Education,” he states, “lies in respecting the pupil.” It is not for the teacher to choose what the pupil will know and do, but for the pupil to discover “his own secret.” The teacher must therefore “wait and see the new product of Nature” (E: 143), guiding and disciplining when appropriate-not with the aim of encouraging repetition or imitation, but with that of finding the new power that is each child's gift to the world. The aim of education is to “keep” the child's “nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points” (E: 144). This aim is sacrificed in mass education, Emerson warns. Instead of educating “masses,” we must educate “reverently, one by one,” with the attitude that “the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil” (E: 154).

Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe is fundamentally in flux and “permanence is but a word of degrees” (CW 2: 179). Even as he talks of “Being,” Emerson represents it not as a stable “wall” but as a series of “interminable oceans” (CW3: 42). This metaphysical position has epistemological correlates: that there is no final explanation of any fact, and that each law will be incorporated in “some more general law presently to disclose itself” (CW2: 181). Process is the basis for the succession of moods Emerson describes in “Experience,” (CW3: 30), and for the emphasis on the present throughout his philosophy.

Some of Emerson's most striking ideas about morality and truth follow from his process metaphysics: that no virtues are final or eternal, all being “initial,” (CW2: 187); that truth is a matter of glimpses, not steady views. We have a choice, Emerson writes in “Intellect,” “between truth and repose,” but we cannot have both (CW2: 202). Fresh truth, like the thoughts of genius, comes always as a surprise, as what Emerson calls “the newness” (CW3: 40). He therefore looks for a “certain brief experience, which surprise[s] me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time…” (CW1: 213). This is an experience that cannot be repeated by simply returning to a place or to an object such as a painting. A great disappointment of life, Emerson finds, is that one can only “see” certain pictures once, and that the stories and people who fill a day or an hour with pleasure and insight are not able to repeat the performance.

Emerson's basic view of religion also coheres with his emphasis on process, for he holds that one finds God only in the present: “God is, not was” (CW1:89). In contrast, what Emerson calls “historical Christianity” (CW1: 82) proceeds “as if God were dead” (CW1: 84). Even history, which seems obviously about the past, has its true use, Emerson holds, as the servant of the present: “The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” (CW2: 5).

Emerson's views about morality are intertwined with his metaphysics of process, and with his perfectionism, his idea that life has the goal of passing into “higher forms” (CW3:14). The goal remains, but the forms of human life, including the virtues, are all “initial” (CW2: 187). The word “initial” suggests the verb “initiate,” and one interpretation of Emerson's claim that “all virtues are initial” is that virtues initiate historically developing forms of life, such as those of the Roman nobility or the Confucian junxi . Emerson does have a sense of morality as developing historically, but in the context in “Circles” where his statement appears he presses a more radical and skeptical position: that our virtues often must be abandoned rather than developed. “The terror of reform,” he writes, “is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices” (CW2: 187). The qualifying phrase “or what we have always esteemed such” means that Emerson does not embrace an easy relativism, according to which what is taken to be a virtue at any time must actually be a virtue. Yet he does cast a pall of suspicion over all established modes of thinking and acting. The proper standpoint from which to survey the virtues is the ‘new moment‘ — what he elsewhere calls truth rather than repose (CW2:202) — in which what once seemed important may appear “trivial” or “vain” (CW2:189). From this perspective (or more properly the developing set of such perspectives) the virtues do not disappear, but they may be fundamentally altered and rearranged.

Although Emerson is thus in no position to set forth a system of morality, he nevertheless delineates throughout his work a set of virtues and heroes, and a corresponding set of vices and villains. In “Circles” the vices are “forms of old age,” and the hero the “receptive, aspiring” youth (CW2:189). In the “Divinity School Address,” the villain is the “spectral” preacher whose sermons offer no hint that he has ever lived. “Self Reliance” condemns virtues that are really “penances” (CW2: 31), and the philanthropy of abolitionists who display an idealized “love” for those far away, but are full of hatred for those close by (CW2: 30).

Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent,…the upbuilding of a man” (CW1: 65).

If Emerson criticizes much of human life, he nevertheless devotes most of his attention to the virtues. Chief among these is what he calls “self-reliance.” The phrase connotes originality and spontaneity, and is memorably represented in the image of a group of nonchalant boys, “sure of a dinner…who would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one…” The boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a free, “irresponsible” condemnation of those they see as “silly” or “troublesome,” and praise for those they find “interesting” or “eloquent.” (CW2: 29). The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson's characteristic combination of the romantic (in the glorification of children) and the classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the place of lords or nobles).

Although he develops a series of analyses and images of self-reliance, Emerson nevertheless destabilizes his own use of the concept. “To talk of reliance,” he writes, “is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is” (CW 2:40). ‘Self-reliance’ can be taken to mean that there is a self already formed on which we may rely. The “self” on which we are to “rely” is, in contrast, the original self that we are in the process of creating. Such a self, to use a phrase from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, “becomes what it is.”

For Emerson, the best human relationships require the confident and independent nature of the self-reliant. Emerson's ideal society is a confrontation of powerful, independent “gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus.” There will be a proper distance between these gods, who, Emerson advises, “should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together should depart, as into foreign countries” (CW 3:81). Even “lovers,” he advises, “should guard their strangeness” (CW3: 82). Emerson portrays himself as preserving such distance in the cool confession with which he closes “Nominalist and Realist,” the last of the Essays, Second Series :

I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I liked everything by turns and nothing long…. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction (CW 3:145).

The self-reliant person will “publish” her results, but she must first learn to detect that spark of originality or genius that is her particular gift to the world. It is not a gift that is available on demand, however, and a major task of life is to meld genius with its expression. “The man,” Emerson states “is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (CW 3:4). There are young people of genius, Emerson laments in “Experience,” who promise “a new world” but never deliver: they fail to find the focus for their genius “within the actual horizon of human life” (CW 3:31). Although Emerson emphasizes our independence and even distance from one another, then, the payoff for self-reliance is public and social. The scholar finds that the most private and secret of his thoughts turn out to be “the most acceptable, most public, and universally true” (CW1: 63). And the great “representative men” Emerson identifies are marked by their influence on the world. Their names-Plato, Moses, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, even Napoleon-are “ploughed into the history of this world” (CW1: 80).

Although self-reliance is central, it is not the only Emersonian virtue. Emerson also praises a kind of trust, and the practice of a “wise skepticism.” There are times, he holds, when we must let go and trust to the nature of the universe: “As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world” (CW3:16). But the world of flux and conflicting evidence also requires a kind of epistemological and practical flexibility that Emerson calls “wise skepticism” (CW4: 89). His representative skeptic of this sort is Michel de Montaigne, who as portrayed in Representative Men is no unbeliever, but a man with a strong sense of self, rooted in the earth and common life, whose quest is for knowledge. He wants “a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men” (CW4: 91). Yet he knows that life is perilous and uncertain, “a storm of many elements,” the navigation through which requires a flexible ship, “fit to the form of man.” (CW4: 91).

The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School and was employed as a minister for almost three years. Yet he offers a deeply felt and deeply reaching critique of Christianity in the “Divinity School Address,” flowing from a line of argument he establishes in “The American Scholar.” If the one thing in the world of value is the active soul, then religious institutions, no less than educational institutions, must be judged by that standard. Emerson finds that contemporary Christianity deadens rather than activates the spirit. It is an “Eastern monarchy of a Christianity” in which Jesus, originally the “friend of man,” is made the enemy and oppressor of man. A Christianity true to the life and teachings of Jesus should inspire “the religious sentiment” — a joyous seeing that is more likely to be found in “the pastures,” or “a boat in the pond” than in a church. Although Emerson thinks it is a calamity for a nation to suffer the “loss of worship” (CW1: 89) he finds it strange that, given the “famine of our churches” (CW1: 85) anyone should attend them. He therefore calls on the Divinity School graduates to breathe new life into the old forms of their religion, to be friends and exemplars to their parishioners, and to remember “that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles” (CW1: 90).

Power is a theme in Emerson's early writing, but it becomes especially prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as “Experience,” “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” “Napoleon,” and “Power.” Power is related to action in “The American Scholar,” where Emerson holds that a “true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power” (CW1: 59). It is also a subject of “Self-Reliance,” where Emerson writes of each person that “the power which resides in him is new in nature” (CW2: 28). In “Experience” Emerson speaks of a life which “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy” (CW3: 294); and in “Power” he celebrates the “bruisers” (CW6: 34) of the world who express themselves rudely and get their way. The power in which Emerson is interested, however, is more artistic and intellectual than political or military. In a characteristic passage from “Power,” he states:

In history the great moment, is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:-and you have Pericles and Phidias,-not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity” (CW6: 37-8).

Power is all around us, but it cannot always be controlled. It is like “a bird which alights nowhere,” hopping “perpetually from bough to bough” (CW3: 34). Moreover, we often cannot tell at the time when we exercise our power that we are doing so: happily we sometimes find that much is accomplished in “times when we thought ourselves indolent” (CW3: 28).

At some point in many of his essays and addresses, Emerson enunciates, or at least refers to, a great vision of unity. He speaks in “The American Scholar” of an “original unit” or “fountain of power” (CW1: 53), of which each of us is a part. He writes in “The Divinity School Address” that each of us is “an inlet into the deeps of Reason.” And in “Self-Reliance,” the essay that more than any other celebrates individuality, he writes of “the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE” (CW2: 40). “The Oversoul” is Emerson's most sustained discussion of “the ONE,” but he does not, even there, shy away from the seeming conflict between the reality of process and the reality of an ultimate metaphysical unity. How can the vision of succession and the vision of unity be reconciled?

Emerson never comes to a clear or final answer. One solution he both suggests and rejects is an unambiguous idealism, according to which a nontemporal “One” or “Oversoul” is the only reality, and all else is illusion. He suggests this, for example, in the many places where he speaks of waking up out of our dreams or nightmares. But he then portrays that to which we awake not simply as an unchanging “ONE,” but as a process or succession: a “growth” or “movement of the soul” (CW2: 189); or a “new yet unapproachable America” (CW3: 259).

Emerson undercuts his visions of unity (as of everything else) through what Stanley Cavell calls his “epistemology of moods.” According to this epistemology, most fully developed in “Experience” but present in all of Emerson's writing, we never apprehend anything “straight” or in-itself, but only under an aspect or mood. Emerson writes that life is “a train of moods like a string of beads,” through which we see only what lies in each bead's focus (CW3: 30). The beads include our temperaments, our changing moods, and the “Lords of Life” which govern all human experience. The Lords include “Succession,” “Surface,” “Dream,” “Reality,” and “Surprise.” Are the great visions of unity, then, simply aspects under which we view the world?

Emerson's most direct attempt to reconcile succession and unity, or the one and the many, occurs in the last essay in the Essays, Second Series , entitled “Nominalist and Realist.” There he speaks of the universe as an “old Two-face…of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied” (CW3: 144). As in “Experience,” Emerson leaves us with the whirling succession of moods. “I am always insincere,” he skeptically concludes, “as always knowing there are other moods” (CW3: 145). But Emerson enacts as well as describes the succession of moods, and he ends “Nominalist and Realist” with the “feeling that all is yet unsaid,” and with at least the idea of some universal truth (CW3: 363).

3. Some Questions about Emerson

Emerson routinely invites charges of inconsistency. He says the world is fundamentally a process and fundamentally a unity; that it resists the imposition of our will and that it flows with the power of our imagination; that travel is good for us, since it adds to our experience, and that it does us no good, since we wake up in the new place only to find the same “ sad self” we thought we had left behind (CW2: 46).

Emerson's “epistemology of moods” is an attempt to construct a framework for encompassing what might otherwise seem contradictory outlooks, viewpoints, or doctrines. Emerson really means to “accept,” as he puts it, “the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (CW3: 36). He means to be irresponsible to all that holds him back from his self-development. That is why, at the end of “Circles,” he writes that he is “only an experimenter…with no Past at my back” (CW2: 188). In the world of flux that he depicts in that essay, there is nothing stable to be responsible to: “every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten, the coming only is sacred” (CW2: 189).

Despite this claim, there is considerable consistency in Emerson's essays and among his ideas. To take just one example, the idea of the “active soul” — mentioned as the “one thing in the world, of value” in “The American Scholar-is a presupposition of Emerson's attack on “the famine of the churches” (for not feeding or activating the souls of those who attend them); it is an element in his understanding of a poem as “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own …” (CW3: 6); and, of course, it is at the center of Emerson's idea of self-reliance. There are in fact multiple paths of coherence through Emerson's philosophy, guided by ideas discussed previously: process, education, self-reliance, and the present.

It is hard for an attentive reader not to feel that there are important differences between early and late Emerson: for example, between the buoyant Nature (1836) and the weary ending of “Experience” (1844); between the expansive author of “Self-Reliance” (1841) and the burdened writer of “Fate” (1860). Emerson himself seems to advert to such differences when he writes in “Fate”: “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half” (CW6: 8). Is “Fate” the record of a lesson Emerson had not absorbed in his early writing, concerning the multiple ways in which circumstances over which we have no control — plagues, hurricanes, temperament, sexuality, old age — constrain self-reliance or self-development?

“Experience” is a key transitional essay. “Where do we find ourselves?” is the question with which it begins. The answer is not a happy one, for Emerson finds that we occupy a place of dislocation and obscurity, where “sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (CW3: 27). An event hovering over the essay, but not disclosed until its third paragraph, is the death of his five-year old son Waldo. Emerson finds in this episode and his reaction to it an example of an “unhandsome” general character of existence-it is forever slipping away from us, like his little boy.

“Experience” presents many moods. It has its moments of illumination, and its considered judgment that there is an “Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (CW3: 41). It offers wise counsel about “skating over the surfaces of life” and confining our existence to the “mid-world.” But even its upbeat ending takes place in a setting of substantial “defeat.” “Up again, old heart!” a somewhat battered voice states in the last sentence of the essay. Yet the essay ends with an assertion that in its great hope and underlying confidence chimes with some of the more expansive passages in Emerson's writing. The “true romance which the world exists to realize,” he states, “will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (CW3: 49).

Despite important differences in tone and emphasis, Emerson's assessment of our condition remains much the same throughout his writing. There are no more dire indictments of ordinary human life than in the early work, “The American Scholar,” where Emerson states that “Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man” (CW1: 65). Conversely, there is no more idealistic statement in his early work than the statement in “Fate” that “[t]hought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic” (CW6: 15). All in all, the earlier work expresses a sunnier hope for human possibilities, the sense that Emerson and his contemporaries were poised for a great step forward and upward; and the later work, still hopeful and assured, operates under a weight or burden, a stronger sense of the dumb resistance of the world.

Emerson read widely, and gave credit in his essays to the scores of writers from whom he learned. He kept lists of literary, philosophical, and religious thinkers in his journals and worked at categorizing them.

Among the most important writers for the shape of Emerson's philosophy are Plato and the Neoplatonist line extending through Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and the Cambridge Platonists. Equally important are writers in the Kantian and Romantic traditions (which Emerson probably learned most about from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria ). Emerson read avidly in Indian, especially Hindu, philosophy, and in Confucianism. There are also multiple empiricist, or experience-based influences, flowing from Berkeley, Wordsworth and other English Romantics, Newton's physics, and the new sciences of geology and comparative anatomy. Other writers whom Emerson often mentions are Anaxagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Cicero, Goethe, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Mencius, Pythagoras, Schiller, Thoreau, August and Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, Socrates, Madame de Staël and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Emerson's works were well known throughout the United States and Europe in his day. Nietzsche read German translations of Emerson's essays, copied passages from “History” and “Self-Reliance” in his journals, and wrote of the Essays : that he had never “felt so much at home in a book.” Emerson's ideas about “strong, overflowing” heroes, friendship as a battle, education, and relinquishing control in order to gain it, can be traced in Nietzsche's writings. Other Emersonian ideas-about transition, the ideal in the commonplace, and the power of human will permeate the writings of such classical American pragmatists as William James and John Dewey.

Stanley Cavell's engagement with Emerson is the most original and prolonged by any philosopher, and Emerson is a primary source for his writing on “moral perfectionism.” In his earliest essays on Emerson, such as “Thinking of Emerson” and “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” Cavell considers Emerson's place in the Kantian tradition, and he explores the affinity between Emerson's call in “The American Scholar” for a return to “the common and the low” and Wittgenstein's quest for a return to ordinary language. In “Being Odd, Getting Even” and “Aversive Thinking,” Cavell considers Emerson's anticipations of existentialism, and in these and other works he explores Emerson's affinities with Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (CHU) and Cities of Words , Cavell develops what he calls “Emersonian moral perfectionism,” of which he finds an exemplary expression in Emerson's “History”: “So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.” Emersonian perfectionism is oriented towards a wiser or better self that is never final, always initial, always on the way.

Cavell does not have a neat and tidy definition of perfectionism, and his list of perfectionist works ranges from Plato's Republic to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations , but he identifies “two dominating themes of perfectionism” in Emerson's writing: (1) “that the human self … is always becoming, as on a journey, always partially in a further state. This journey is described as education or cultivation”; (2) “that the other to whom I can use the words I discover in which to express myself is the Friend—a figure that may occur as the goal of the journey but also as its instigation and accompaniment” ( Cities of Words , 26-7). The friend can be a person but it may also be a text. In the sentence from “History” cited above, the writing of the “Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist” about “the wise man” functions as a friend and guide, describing to each reader not just any idea, but “his own idea.” This is the text as instigator and companion.

Cavell's engagement with perfectionism springs from a response to his colleague John Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice condemns Nietzsche (and implicitly Emerson) for his statement that “mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings.” “Perfectionism,” Rawls states, “is denied as a political principle.” Cavell replies that Emerson's (and Nietzsche's) focus on the great man has nothing to do with a transfer of economic resources or political power, or with the idea that “there is a separate class of great men …for whose good, and conception of good, the rest of society is to live” (CHU, 49). The great man or woman, Cavell holds, is required for rather than opposed to democracy: “essential to the criticism of democracy from within” (CHU, 3).

	, ed. Robert Spiller et al, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971-
	“Education,” in , in , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883, pp. 125–59
•	, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 12 volumes, 1903–4
•	, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. 10 vols., Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910–14
•	, ed. William Gillman, et al., Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1960-
•	, 3 vols, Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, eds., Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1961–72
•	, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton . 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964–95
•	(with Thomas Carlyle), , ed. Joseph Slater, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964
•	, eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995
•	, eds. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003
•	, ed. Kenneth Sacks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008

(See Chronology for original dates of publication.)

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–––, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
–––, 1990, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Abbreviated CHU in the text.).
–––, 2004, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
–––, 2004, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803- April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Emerson is known as one of the leaders of the transcendentalist movement, which reached its height in mid-19th century New England. With its emphasis on the dignity of the individual, equality, hard work, and respect for nature, Emerson's work remains influential and pertinent to this day.

Fast Facts: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Known For: Founder and leader of the transcendentalist movement
Born: May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts
Parents: Ruth Haskins and Rev. William Emerson
Died: April 27, 1882 in Concord, Massachusetts
Education: Boston Latin School, Harvard College
Selected Published Works: Nature (1832), "The American Scholar" (1837), "Divinity School Address" (1838), Essays: First Series , including "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul" (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844)
Spouse(s): Ellen Louisa Tucker (m. 1829-her death in 1831), Lidian Jackson (m. 1835-his death in 1882)
Children: Waldo, Ellen, Edith, Edward Waldo
Notable Quote: "Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone: to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."

Early Life and Education (1803-1821)

Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Haskins, daughter of a prosperous Boston distiller, and Reverend William Emerson, pastor of Boston’s First Church and the son of the “patriot minister of the Revolution” William Emerson Sr. Although the family had eight children, only five sons lived to adulthood, and Emerson was the second of these. He was named after his mother’s brother Ralph and his father’s great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo.

Ralph Waldo was just 8 years old when his father died. Emerson’s family was not wealthy; his brothers were taunted for only having one coat to share between the five of them, and the family moved several times to stay with whichever family members and friends could accommodate them. Emerson’s education was cobbled together from various schools in the area; primarily he attended Boston Latin School to learn Latin and Greek, but he also attended a local grammar school to study mathematics and writing, and learned French at a private school. Already by the age of 9 he was writing poetry in his free time. In 1814, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson returned to Boston to help with the children and managing the household, and her Calvinist outlook, early individualism—with its belief that the individual both has power and responsibility—and hardworking nature clearly inspired Emerson throughout his life.

At the age of 14, in 1817, Emerson entered Harvard College, the youngest member of the class of 1821. His tuition was paid partially through the “Penn legacy,” from the First Church of Boston of which his father had been pastor. Emerson also worked as Harvard president John Kirkland’s assistant, and earned extra money by tutoring on the side. He was an unremarkable student, although he won a few prizes for essays and was elected Class Poet. At this time he began writing his journal, which he called “The Wide World,” a habit which was to last for most of his life. He graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59.

Teaching and Ministry (1821-1832)

Upon graduating, Emerson taught for a time at a school for young women in Boston set up by his brother William and which he eventually headed. At this time of transition, he noted in his journal that his childhood dreams “are all fading away and giving place to some very sober and very disgusting views of a quiet mediocrity of talents and condition.” He decided not long thereafter to devote himself to God, in the long tradition of his very religious family, and entered Harvard Divinity School in 1825.

His studies were interrupted by sickness, and Emerson moved south for a time to recover, working on poetry and sermons. In 1827, he returned to Boston and preached at several churches in New England. On a visit to Concord, New Hampshire, he met the 16-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker, whom he loved deeply and married in 1829, despite the fact that she suffered from tuberculosis. That same year he became a Unitarian minister of the Second Church of Boston.

Just two years after their marriage, in 1831, Ellen died at the age of 19. Emerson was deeply distraught by her death, visiting her tomb every morning and even opening her coffin once. He became disenchanted with the church, finding it blindly obedient to tradition, repetitive of the words of men long dead, and dismissive of the individual. After he found he could not under good conscience offer communion, he resigned his pastorate in September of 1832.

Transcendentalism and 'The Sage of Concord' (1832-1837)

Nature (1832)
“The American Scholar” (1837)

The following year, Emerson sailed to Europe, where he met William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill , and Thomas Carlyle, with whom he struck up a lifelong friendship and whose Romantic individualism can be seen as an influence in Emerson’s later work. Back in the U.S., he met Lydia Jackson and married her in 1835, calling her “Lidian.” The couple settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and they began a practical and content marriage. Although the marriage was somewhat marked by Emerson’s frustration with Lidian’s conservatism, and her frustration with his lack of passion and his controversial—and at times almost heretical—views, it was to last for a solid and stable 47 years. The couple had four children: Waldo, Ellen (named after Ralph Waldo’s first wife, at Lidian’s suggestion), Edith, and Edward Waldo. At this time, Emerson was receiving money from Ellen’s estate, and was able to support his family as a writer and lecturer because of it.

From Concord, Emerson preached throughout New England and joined a literary society called the Symposium, or Hedge’s Club, and which later morphed into the Transcendental Club, which discussed the philosophy of Kant, the writings of Goethe and Carlyle, and the reform of Christianity. Emerson's preaching and writing caused him to become known in local literary circles as “The Sage of Concord.” At the same time, Emerson was establishing a reputation as a challenger of traditional thought, disgusted with American politics and in particular Andrew Jackson , as well as frustrated with the refusal of the Church to innovate. He wrote in his journal that he will never “utter any speech, poem, or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work.”

During this time he was working steadily to develop his philosophical ideas and articulate them in writing. In 1836 he published Nature , which expressed his philosophy of transcendentalism and its assertion that nature is suffused by God. Emerson maintained the forward momentum of his career; in 1837, he gave a speech to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society, of which he had been elected an honorary member. Entitled “The American Scholar,” the speech demanded that Americans establish a writing style liberated from European conventions, and was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as “the intellectual Declaration of Independence.” The success of Nature and “The American Scholar” set the foundation for Emerson’s literary and intellectual career.

Transcendentalism Continued: The Dial and Essays (1837-1844)

"Divinity School Address” (1838)
Essays (1841)
Essays: Second Series (1844)

Emerson was invited in 1838 to Harvard Divinity School to deliver the graduation address, which became known as his divisive and influential “Divinity School Address.” In this speech, Emerson asserted that while Jesus was a great figure, he was no more divine than any other individual is. He suggested, in true transcendentalist style, that the faith of the church was dying under its own traditionalism, its belief in miracles, and its obsequious praise of historical figures, losing sight of the divinity of the individual. This claim was outrageous to the general Protestant population at the time, and Emerson was not invited back to Harvard for another 30 years.

However, this controversy did nothing to discourage Emerson and his developing point of view. He and his friend, the writer Margaret Fuller , brought out the first issue of The Dial in 1840 , the magazine of the transcendentalists. Its publication gave platform to writers as notable as Henry David Thoreau , Bronson Alcott, W.E. Channing, and Emerson and Fuller themselves. Next, in March of 1841, Emerson published his book, Essays, which had a hugely popular reception, including from Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle in Scotland (though it was received, sadly, with ambivalence by his beloved aunt Mary Moody). Essays contains some of Emerson’s most influential and lasting works, “Self-Reliance,” as well as “The Over-Soul” and other classics.

Emerson’s son Waldo died in January of 1842, to his parents’ devastation. At the same time, Emerson had to take up editorship of the financially struggling Dial , as Margaret Fuller resigned due to her lack of pay. By 1844 Emerson closed the journal down, due to ongoing financial troubles; despite Emerson’s growing prominence, the journal was simply not being bought by the general public. Emerson, however, experienced unrelenting productivity despite these setbacks, publishing Essays: Second Series in October of 1844, including “Experience,” which draws on his sadness at his son’s death, “The Poet,” and yet another essay called “Nature.” Emerson also began exploring other philosophical traditions at this time, reading an English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and recording notes in his journal.

Emerson had become close friends with Thoreau, whom he had met in 1837. In his eulogy, which Emerson gave after his death in 1862, he called Thoreau his best friend. Indeed, it was Emerson who bought the land at Walden Pond upon which Thoreau conducted his famous experiment.

After Transcendentalism: Poetry, Writings, and Travels (1846-1856)

Poems (1847)
Reprint of Essays: First Series (1847)
Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849)
Representative Men (1849)
Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
English Traits (1856)

By this time the unity among the transcendentalists was fading, as they began to differ in their beliefs regarding how to achieve the reform they so desired. Emerson decided to leave for Europe in 1846-1848, sailing to Britain to give a series of lectures, which were received to great acclaim. Upon his return he published Representative Men , an analysis of six great figures and their roles: Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the skeptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world, and Goethe the writer. He suggested that each man was representative of his time and of the potential of all peoples.

Emerson also co-edited a compilation of the writings of his friend Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850. Although this work, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) , featured Fuller’s writings, they were mostly rewritten and the book was published in a rush, as it was believed interest in her life and work would not last.

When Walt Whitman sent him a draft of his 1855 Leaves of Grass, Emerson sent back a letter praising the work, although he would withdraw his support from Whitman later on. Emerson also published English Traits (1856), in which he discussed his observations of the English during his trip there, a book that was met with mixed reception.

Anti-Enslavement Activism and Civil War (1860-1865)

The Conduct of Life (1860)

At the beginning of the 1860s, Emerson published The Conduct of Life (1860), where he begins to explore the concept of fate, a route notably different from his previous insistence on the complete freedom of the individual.

Emerson was not unaffected by the growing disagreements in national politics in this decade. The 1860s saw him strengthen an already potent and vocal support of North American 19th-century anti-enslavement activism, an idea that clearly fit in well with his emphasis on the dignity of the individual and human equality. Even in 1845 he had already refused to give a lecture in New Bedford because the congregation refused membership to Black people, and by the 1860s, with the Civil War looming, Emerson took up a strong stance. Denouncing Daniel Webster’s unionist position and fiercely opposing the Fugitive Slave Act , Emerson called for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved people. When John Brown led the raid on Harper’s Ferry , Emerson welcomed him at his house; when Brown was hanged for treason, Emerson helped raise money for his family.

Later Years and Death (1867-1882)

May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
Society and Solitude (1870)
Parnassus (editor, 1875)
Letters and Social Aims (1876)

In 1867 Emerson’s health began to decline. Although he did not stop lecturing for another 12 years and would live another 15, he began to suffer from memory problems, unable to recall names or the words for even common objects. Society and Solitude (1870) was the last book that he published on his own; the rest relied on help from his children and friends, including Parnassus, an anthology of poetry from writers as varied as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Caroline Dorr, Henry David Thoreau, and Jones Very, among others. By 1879, Emerson stopped appearing publicly, too embarrassed and frustrated by his memory difficulties.

On April 21, 1882, Emerson was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died six days later in Concord on April 27, 1882 at the age of 78. He was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, close to the graves of his dear friends and many great figures of American literature.

Emerson is one of the greatest figures of American literature; his work has influenced to an incredible degree American culture and the American identity. Seen as radical in his own time, Emerson was often labeled an atheist or a heretic whose dangerous views attempted to remove the figure of God as "father" of the universe and to supplant him with humanity. Even still, Emerson did enjoy literary fame and great respect, and especially in the latter half of his life he was accepted and celebrated in radical and establishment circles alike. He was friends with important figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne (even though he himself was against transcendentalism), Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott (prominent educator and father of Louisa May), Henry James Sr. (father of novelist Henry and philosopher William James), Thomas Carlyle, and Margaret Fuller, among many others.

He also a marked influence on later generations of writers. As noted, the young Walt Whitman received his blessing, and Thoreau was a great friend and mentee of his. While during the 19th century Emerson was seen as canon and the radical power of his views were less appreciated, interest particularly in Emerson's peculiar writing style has revived in academic circles. Moreover, his themes of hard work, the dignity of the individual, and faith arguably form some of the underpinnings of the cultural understanding of the American Dream, and are likely still a huge influence on American culture to this day. Emerson and his vision of equality, human divinity, and justice are celebrated around the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson, Essays and Poems. New York, Library of America, 1996.
Porte, Joel; Morris, Saundra, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), Lecturer and Author | American National Biography. https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1600508. Accessed 12 Oct. 2019.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson

A short biography of ralph waldo emerson, ralph waldo emerson’s writing style, characteristics of emerson’s work, works of ralph waldo emerson.

Best Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is the essay in which he put forward the foundation of Transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. He believed that one can learn to understand reality by studying nature.

It contains one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas. It contains one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Emerson says "Trust thyself." It is about trusting the force within you, working in harmony with your inner self (particularly the laws of nature), doing things naturally instead of mechanically.

Named for the Hindu god of creation, this poem is both religious and not at the same time.

This is his speech given to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge University in which he stated the need for America to declare an intellectual independence from Europe and to develop our nation's own identity.

This essay lays out his ideas on politics, being in favor of democracy and individualism. He was very opposed to the State and even goes so far as to say, "Every actual state is corrupt."

This essay offers a profound look at poetry's role in society. It was a major influence for Walt Whitman to publish his own book of poetry, Leaves of Grass.

An essay about the over-intellectualization of life and why utopian societies will never work. Quite astounding for someone of that era.

A beautiful rendition of both the fury of a nighttime winter storm as well as the creative artistry it brings. A poem which runs from furious conflict to slow appreciation in the period of a few lines.

A speech given to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, it argues that moral intuition is more important than religious doctrine.

Come on, people, this is why he was banned from Harvard and this is why we love him!

A tale of Gods and Goddesses, lines versus circles in nature, and the difference between "understanding" and "reason". This poem, while deep and complex, has everything.

10 of the Best Ralph Waldo Emerson Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In his vast Guide to Modern World Literature , Martin Seymour-Smith calls Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman the only true poetic innovators in nineteenth-century American poetry. But in fact, Dickinson’s eccentric use of slant rhyme and Whitman’s development of free verse are both anticipated in the work of an earlier nineteenth-century American poet: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson (1803-82) is best-known for his prose writings: his 1836 pamphlet ‘ Nature ’ became a kind of unofficial manifesto for the Transcendentalist movement in New England. This was, in many ways, America’s development of European Romanticism, in that it argued for the kinship between the natural world and the human imagination.

Emerson’s prose essays often eclipse his poetic achievement. His poetry, which appeared in Poems (1847) and May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), is uneven in quality, but at its best it is lively, arresting, and genuinely innovative. Let’s take a look at ten of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best poems.

1. ‘ Boston Hymn ’.

The word of the Lord by night To the watching Pilgrims came, As they sat by the seaside, And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

One of two very famous public hymns Emerson is principally known for (even by people who don’t usually read his poetry), ‘Boston Hymn’ was composed in 1862 and read publicly in Boston Music Hall on 1 January 1863.

The poem commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation issued by the US President Abraham Lincoln. Emerson lived in Boston, and the city was known for its support for the abolitionist movement; this hymn celebrates the freeing of the slaves which the proclamation brought into being.

2. ‘ The Snow-Storm ’.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

Transcendentalists, like the Romantics whom they followed and learnt so much from, often write about nature in all its power and beauty; and this is one of Emerson’s finest nature poems.

Indeed, the poem might be regarded as an example of the Sublime: that philosophy which views nature as both beautiful and terrifying, and far greater, more long-lasting, and more powerful than mankind. In lines of blank verse – the unrhymed structure perhaps suggesting the wild unpredictability of the snow falling – Emerson vividly captures the ‘frolic architecture of the snow’.

3. ‘ Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing ’.

Though loath to grieve The evil time’s sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest’s cant, Or statesman’s rant.

As the full title of this poem makes clear, it was dedicated to William Henry Channing (1810-84), a minister and reformer for the abolition of slavery. The poem is one of Emerson’s most deeply allusive, and one needs a fairly good knowledge of American history to make sense of its various references; but the lively short lines show Emerson’s distinctive and original approach to form.

4. ‘ The Rhodora ’.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

This 1834 poem is another one of Emerson’s nature poems, describing the flowering shrub, the rhodora, in the woods. Emerson praises this shrub as a ‘rival of the rose’ for its beauty. The last line is Romantic Transcendentalism through and through, uniting the poet’s fate with that of the flower.

5. ‘ Merlin ’.

Pass in, pass in, the angels say, In to the upper doors; Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise.

In this longer poem of 1847, Emerson tried to find a new direction for American poetry, much as he had tried to do in his 1843 essay ‘ The Poet ’. To do this, Emerson rejects the traditional forms and models which earlier American poets had inherited from England and Europe.

The Merlin of Emerson’s poem is a seer, a prophetic figure: exactly the kind of person Emerson thought the poet should be. The image of the ‘stairway of surprise’, quoted above, has often been praised by critics.

6. ‘ Brahma ’.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

This poem, written in 1856, was first published in The Atlantic the following year. The poem is named after Brahman, the universal principle of the Vedas in Hinduism. It’s a dramatic work (of sorts), spoken by Brahma himself, and reveals Emerson’s interest in Eastern scriptures and spiritual thought.

7. ‘ The Bell ’.

I love thy music, mellow bell, I love thine iron chime, To life or death, to heaven or hell, Which calls the sons of Time.

Written in more traditional quatrains using alternate abab rhyme, ‘The Bell’ shows that Emerson was capable of more conventional formal lyrics as well as his freer, looser poems.

8. ‘ Ode to Beauty ’.

Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old; Or what was the service For which I was sold?

Here’s another of Emerson’s odes, this time in praise of ‘Beauty’, whom Emerson personifies and addresses directly. For Emerson, Beauty is ‘Queen of things’ whom he entreats to give herself to him, or else let him die – for a life lived without beauty is not worth living.

9. ‘ Terminus ’.

It is time to be old, To take in sail:— The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: ‘No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root …

The Latin word ‘terminus’ means ‘end’, and this later poem, published when Emerson was in his sixties, shows him reflecting on old age and what Philip Larkin called ‘the only end of age’, death. Terminus, in Emerson’s poem, is personified, as a figure not unlike Old Father Time, reminding us that Terminus was a Roman god of boundaries and endings.

10. ‘ Concord Hymn ’.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Let’s conclude this pick of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best poems with his best-known of all. ‘Concord Hymn’ is a ‘poem of occasion’, written in 1837 in order to be sung at the unveiling of a monument commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord. Emerson was unable to attend the unveiling himself, but Henry David Thoreau was there to sing the hymn along with others in attendance.

One line from this public poem (and a very formally regular poem, by Emerson’s standards) has become universally known: ‘the shot heard around the world.’ Emerson’s poem commemorates those Americans who resisted British rule, starting with the War of Independence in the previous century and moving up to date.

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10 Famous Poets Who Left an Indelible Mark on Literature

In their unique styles, these influential poets drew from their experiences to craft memorable poems about the human experience and the world around them.

maya angelou wearing a red dress and gesturing with her hands as she reads poetry at a podium

Decades later—and for some, even centuries—their writings continue to spark our imaginations. Get to know these 10 famous poets whose most popular works have left enduring legacies.

Birth and death date unknown

Little is definitively known about this famous Greek poet who lived before the common era. Some even question whether the same person wrote both epics credited to Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey . Some scholars believe he might have left hints about his own life through his descriptions of the blind minstrel character Demodokos in The Odyssey .

Despite these uncertainties, the two epics about the fall of Troy and subsequent events have influenced writers throughout history like J.R.R. Tolkien and James Joyce . The use of vivid similes and metaphors as well as the in media res narrative structure—beginning in the middle of the plot and flashing back to past events—are characteristics of Homer’s writings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Originally ordained in the Unitarian Church, Emerson resigned from the clergy after three years. He took up writing and lecturing instead, becoming a founding figure of the Transcendentalism movement in New England with early works such as 1836’s “Nature.” Other notable Transcendentalists included Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller .

According to the Poetry Foundation , Emerson was the first major American writer to explore Middle Eastern and Asian ideas and mythologies in his writing. This was evident in works such as the poem “Brahma” and essay “Persian Poetry.”

Learn More About Ralph Waldo Emerson

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe, originally from Boston, is best known for his 1845 poem “The Raven,” which explores themes of death and loss akin to his collection of other horror and mystery tales like “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Poe began writing poems during adolescence. Surprisingly, given how famous his works have become, he initially received little profits from his writing and had to support himself by editing magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.

Learn More About Edgar Allan Poe

Related: Why Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Remains a Mystery

Walt Whitman

Before his poetry earned him acclaim, Whitman worked as a journalist and was known for taking radical stances on issues like women’s property rights, immigration, and labor practices. But with the 1855 release of Leaves of Grass , the New York–born poet cemented his own unique writing style: using first person and rejecting rigid meter.

One of the poems in the collection, “I Sing the Body Electric,” went on to inspire a short story by author Ray Bradbury , an episode of the science-fiction TV show The Twilight Zone , and even a 2012 song by Lana Del Rey .

Learn More About Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

The first volume of Dickinson’s poetry wasn’t published until 1890, four years after her death, and a full compilation wasn’t available until 1955. This is partly because she often wrote in seclusion, with some scholars suggesting she might have suffered from agoraphobia.

Dickinson was known for using compressed verse in her writing and a first-person style similar to writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning .

Learn More About Emily Dickinson

William Butler Yeats

Born in Ireland and raised in London, Yeats first had his poetry published in the Dublin University Review in 1885. He included legends, folklore, and ballads of his home country in much of his work. He was especially fascinated with the occult.

In 1890, after he returned to London, Yeats helped form a poetry group called the Rhymers’ Club who met regularly to discuss their craft. Their input apparently helped, as Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Learn More About William Butler Yeats

Robert Frost

Frost—who, following the death of his father, moved from California to Massachusetts with his mother and sister at age 11—became known for his references to New England life and locales in his work. His conversational poems avoided traditional verse forms and usually rhymes, too. Some of his notable pieces include “Fire and Ice,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Road Not Taken.”

Frost received a plethora of honors throughout his career, including a record four Pulitzer Prizes and the then-unofficial title of U.S. poet laureate under President John F. Kennedy .

Learn More About Robert Frost

Pablo Neruda

Neruda received the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, and fellow author Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20 th century in any language.” From Chile, Neruda used his writing abilities to reflect on large-scale atrocities from the Spanish Civil War in Spain in Our Hearts , as well as two of his own relationships in Twenty Love Poems .

However, Neruda’s success wasn’t without controversy, as he also wrote poems praising Communist figureheads like Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro . Investigations into his untimely death are ongoing, with some people alleging he was poisoned.

Learn More About Pablo Neruda

Maya Angelou

A multiformat artist, Angelou received a Tony Award nomination in 1973 for the stage play Look Away and an Emmy nomination for the 1977 TV miniseries Roots . However, she is most famous for her writing, including her 1971 poetry collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie that earned her a Pulitzer nomination.

Angelou was also only the second poet— after Frost —to perform at a presidential inauguration, reciting “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton ’s big day in 1993.

Learn More About Maya Angelou

Related: The Meaning of Maya Angelou’s Poem “Still I Rise”

Sylvia Plath

Plath is considered a key figure of confessional poetry, a personal style of writing that includes descriptions of the author’s own trauma and intense psychological experiences. Her notable collection Ariel , published two years after her tragic death, was influenced by the depression she suffered after the fracturing of her marriage to Ted Hughes.

In 1982, Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for an assortment of her works titled The Collected Poems .

Learn More About Sylvia Plath

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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The Principle of Self-Reliance and the Concept of Spiritual Laws in the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Published in Humanitarian vision 5 June 2024

5 References

Self-reliance: philosophy of ralph emerson in the informational society, pragmatism as the intellectual culture of democracy (the historico-philosophical essay in the contemporary context), the illusion of will, self, and time: william james's reluctant guide to enlightenment, individuality. the emersonian background of the bergson-james controversy, the senses of walden: an expanded edition, related papers.

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Self-Reliance
The essay "Self-Reliance," written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is, by far, his most famous piece of work. Emerson, a Transcendentalist, believed focusing on the purity and goodness of individualism and community with nature was vital for a strong society. Transcendentalists despise the corruption and conformity of human society and institutions.
A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'
This explains the title of his essay: 'Self-Reliance' is about relying on one's own sense of oneself, and having confidence in one's ideas and opinions. In a famous quotation, Emerson asserts: 'In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.'.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as "Self-Reliance," "History," "The Over-Soul," and "Fate.". Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism, by which he gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and ethical movement that stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person. ... (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of Essays ...
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882) In his lifetime, Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most widely known man of letters in America, establishing himself as a prolific poet, essayist, popular lecturer, and an advocate of social reforms who was nevertheless suspicious of reform and reformers. Emerson achieved some reputation with his verse ...
About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson ... His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson's most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance," in which the writer instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God ...
Essays (Emerson)
Essays (Emerson) Wikisource has the text of the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana article Emerson's Essays. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote several books of essays, commonly associated with transcendentalism and romanticism. "Essays" most commonly refers to his first two series of essays: Some of the most notable essays of these two collections are Self ...
Self-Reliance
Self-Reliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson 's essay called for staunch individualism. " Self-Reliance " is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of his recurrent themes: the need for each person to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson—a New England preacher, essayist, lecturer, poet, and philosopher—was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 19th century in the United States. Emerson was also the first major American literary and intellectual figure to widely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for classical Asian and Middle Eastern works.
The American Scholar: Emerson's Superb Speech on the Life of the Mind
On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803-April 27, 1882) delivered one of the most extraordinary speeches of all time — a sweeping meditation on the life of the mind, the purpose of education, the art of creative reading, and the building blocks of of genius. He was only thirty-four. Titled "The American Scholar," the speech was eventually included in the indispensable ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Biography, American Poet, Philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher and essayist during the 19th century. One of his best-known essays is "Self-Reliance." Updated: Aug 9, 2023
1. Nature and Selected Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
As well as the book-length Nature essay, Nature and Selected Essays also includes many other of Emerson's most acclaimed essays, including Self-Reliance, The Poet, and The American Scholar. 2. The Annotated Emerson, by Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Mikics.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as "Self-Reliance," "History," "The Over-Soul," and "Fate.". Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism ...
Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803- April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Emerson is known as one of the leaders of the transcendentalist movement, which reached its height in mid-19th century New England. With its emphasis on the dignity of the individual, equality, hard work, and respect for nature, Emerson's work ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings pushed for these ideals, asserting his belief that humans contain an innate sense of right and wrong independent from religious views. Ultimately, Emerson's writings became a key player in helping America create its own distinct literary movement during the nineteenth century. In his first essay, Nature, which ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Writing Style & Short Biography
The most well-known essay was published in these years. Moreover, his four children were also born in these years. In the 1850s, he advocated the idea of nonconformity and abolition of slavery. In the 1870s, Emerson was well known as "the sage of Concord." He died in 1882 in concord. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Writing Style
Best Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Below are the best literary works by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Top Ten. 1 Nature (essay) This is the essay in which he put forward the foundation of Transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. He believed that one can learn to understand reality by studying nature. 2 Self-Reliance (essay)
Emerson's 'The American Scholar': Full Address & Analysis
Summary of The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The American Scholar" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that was first delivered as a lecture in 1837. In this work, Emerson reflects on the role and responsibilities of the American scholar in society. He argues that the American scholar should strive to be independent, self-reliant ...
10 of the Best Ralph Waldo Emerson Poems Everyone Should Read
7. ' The Bell '. I love thy music, mellow bell, I love thine iron chime, To life or death, to heaven or hell, Which calls the sons of Time. Written in more traditional quatrains using alternate abab rhyme, 'The Bell' shows that Emerson was capable of more conventional formal lyrics as well as his freer, looser poems.
10 of the Most Famous Poets Throughout History
This was evident in works such as the poem "Brahma" and essay "Persian Poetry." Learn More About Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edgar Allan Poe. Getty Images. ... she is most famous for her writing, ...
The Principle of Self-Reliance and the Concept of Spiritual Laws in the
The article analyzes the combination of the concept of spiritual laws and the principle of self-reliance in the philosophy of American transcendentalist R. W. Emerson. This analysis reveals the meaning of such combination and the relationship between freedom of creativity and spiritual laws, culminating in a fusion of individualism and holistic principles in R. W. Emerson's philosophy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Essays: Second Series'
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Essays: Second Series, 1844. This site contains HTML (web-readable) versions of many of Emerson's best-known essays, including a Search function to look for specific words, phrases, or quotations. ... Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out.
How the first National Book Awards reflected 1950s America
Among those I had not heard of, to pick three at random: Ralph L. Rusk, nonfiction winner for "The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1950); Horace Gregory, poetry finalist for his "Selected ...

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The American Scholar: Emerson’s Superb Speech on the Life of the Mind, the Art of Creative Reading, and the Building Blocks of Genius

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Ralph Waldo Emerson The Best 5 Books to Read

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1. Nature and Selected Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. The Annotated Emerson, by Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Mikics

The Annotated Emerson

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures

4. Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert D. Richardson

Emerson: The Mind on Fire

5. Emerson in His Journals, by Joel Porte

Emerson in His Journals

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Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist

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Early Life and Education (1803-1821)

Teaching and Ministry (1821-1832)

Transcendentalism and 'The Sage of Concord' (1832-1837)

Transcendentalism Continued: The Dial and Essays (1837-1844)

After Transcendentalism: Poetry, Writings, and Travels (1846-1856)

Anti-Enslavement Activism and Civil War (1860-1865)

Later Years and Death (1867-1882)

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The Principle of Self-Reliance and the Concept of Spiritual Laws in the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

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