essay about ralph waldo emerson

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Photo from Amos Bronson Alcott 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. emerson on slavery and race, 4.1 consistency, 4.2 early and late emerson, 4.3 sources and influence, works by emerson, selected writings on emerson, other internet resources, related entries, 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 1860s. 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).

Massachusetts ended slavery in 1783, when Chief Justice William Cushing instructed the jury in the case of Quock Walker, a former slave, that “the idea of slavery” was “inconsistent” with the Massachusetts Constitution’ guarantee that “all men are born free and equal” (Gougeon, 71). Emerson first encountered slavery when he went south for his health in the winter of 1827, when he was 23. He recorded the following scene in his journal from his time in Tallahasse, Florida:

A fortnight since I attended a meeting of the Bible Society. The Treasurer of this institution is Marshal of the district & by a somewhat unfortunate arrangement had appointed a special meeting of the Society & a Slave Auction at the same time & place, one being in the Government house & the other in the adjoining yard. One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with “Going gentlemen, Going!” And almost without changing our position we might aid in sending the scriptures into Africa or bid for “four children without the mother who had been kidnapped therefrom” (JMN3: 117).

Emerson never questioned the iniquity of slavery, though it was not a main item on his intellectual agenda until the eighteen forties. He refers to abolition in the “Prospects” chapter of Nature when he speaks of the “gleams of a better light” in the darkness of history and gives as examples “the abolition of the Slave-trade,” “the history of Jesus Christ,” and “the wisdom of children” (CW1:43). He condemns slavery in some of his greatest essays, “Self-Reliance” (1841), so that even if we didn’t have the anti-slavery addresses of the 1840s and 1850s, we would still have evidence both of the existence of slavery and of Emerson’s opposition to it. He praises “the bountiful cause of Abolition,” although he laments that the cause had been taken over by “angry bigots.” Later in the essay he treats abolition as one of the great causes and movements of world history, along with Christianity, the Reformation, and Methodism. In a well-known statement he writes that an “institution is the shadow of one man,” giving as examples “the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition of Clarkson” (CW2: 35). The unfamiliar name in this list is that of Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), a Cambridge-educated clergyman who helped found the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Clarkson travelled on horseback throughout Britain, interviewing sailors who worked on slaving ships, and exhibiting such tools as manacles, thumbscews, branding irons, and other tools of the trade. His History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) would be a major source for Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses.

Slavery also appears in “Politics,” from the Essays, Second Series of 1844, when Emerson surveys the two main American parties. One, standing for free trade, wide suffrage, and the access of the young and poor to wealth and power, has the “best cause” but the least attractive leaders; while the other has the most cultivated and able leaders, but is “merely defensive of property.” This conservative party, moreover, “vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant” (CW3: 124). Emerson stands here for emancipation, not simply for the ending of the slave trade.

1844 was also the year of Emerson’s breakout anti-slavery address, which he gave at the annual celebration of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. In the background was the American war with Mexico, the annexation of Texas, and the likelihood that it would be entering the Union as a slave state. Although Concord was a hotbed of abolitionism compared to Boston, there were many conservatives in the town. No church allowed Emerson to speak on the subject, and when the courthouse was secured for the talk, the sexton refused to ring the church bell to announce it, a task the young Henry David Thoreau took upon himself to perform (Gougeon, 75). In his address, Emerson develops a critique of the language we use to speak about, or to avoid speaking about, black slavery:

Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world.… I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers ( Emerson’s Antislavery Writings , 9).

Emerson’s long address is both clear-eyed about the evils of slavery and hopeful about the possibilities of the Africans. Speaking with the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass beside him on the dais, Emerson states: “The black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.” He praises “such men as” Toussaint [L]Ouverture, leader of the Haitian slave rebellion, and announces: “here is the anti-slave: here is man; and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance.” (Wirzrbicki, 95; Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 31).

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 effectively nationalized slavery, requiring officials and citizens of the free states to assist in returning escaped slaves to their owners. Emerson’s 1851 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” calls both for the abrogation of the law and for disobeying it while it is still current. In 1854, the escaped slave Anthony Burns was shipped back to Virginia by order of the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, an order carried out by U. S. Marines, in accordance with the new law. This example of “Slavery in Massachusetts” (as Henry Thoreau put it in a well-known address) is in the background of Emerson’s 1855 “Lecture on Slavery,” where he calls the recognition of slavery by the original 1787 Constitution a “crime.” Emerson gave these and other antislavery addresses multiple times in various places from the late 1840s till the beginning of the Civil War. On the eve of the war Emerson supported John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was executed in 1859 by the U. S. government after he attacked the U. S. armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In the middle of the War, Emerson raised funds for black regiments of Union soldiers (Wirzbicki, 251–2) and read his “Boston Hymn” to an audience of 3000 celebrating President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. “Pay ransom to the owner,” Emerson wrote, “and fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner. And ever was. Pay him” (CW9: 383).

Emerson’s magisterial essay “Fate,” published in The Conduct of Life (1860) is distinguished not only by its attempt to reconcile freedom and necessity, but by disturbing pronouncements about fate and race, for example:

The population of the world is a conditional population, not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.… The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie (CW6: 8–9).

The references to race here show the influence of a new “scientific” interest in both England and America in the role that race—often conflated with culture or nation—plays in human evolution. In America, this interest was entangled with the institution of slavery, the encounters with Native American tribes, and with the notion of “Anglo-Saxon liberties” that came to prominence during the American Revolution, and developed into the idea that there was an Anglo-Saxon race (see Horsman).

Emerson would not be Emerson, however, if he did not conduct a critique of his terms, and “race” is a case in point. He takes it up in a non-American context, however: in the essay “Race” from English Traits (1856). Emerson’s critique of his title begins in the essay’s first paragraph when he writes that “each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.” Civilization “eats away the old traits,” he continues, and religions construct new forms of character that cut against old racial divisions. More deeply still, he identifies considerations that “threaten to undermine” the concept of race. The “fixity … of races as we see them,” he writes, “is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point” in the long duration of nature (CW 5:24). The patterns we see today aren’t pure anyway:

though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us every where, It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antidiluvian seas.

As in Nature and his great early works, Emerson asserts our intimate relations with the natural world, from the oceans to the animals. Why, one might think, should one of the higher but still initial forms be singled out for separation, abasement, and slavery? Emerson works out his views in “Race” without referring to American slavery, however, in a book about England where he sees a healthy mixture, not a pure race. England’s history, he writes, is not so much “one of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them all.… The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities.… The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still” (CW5: 28). Still, it is striking that Emerson never mentions slavery in either “Fate” or “Race,” both of which were written during his intense period of public opposition to American slavery.

4. 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 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).

• [ CW ] The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Robert Spiller et al, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–
• [ E ] “Education,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches , in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883, pp. 125–59
• The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 12 volumes, 1903–4
• The Annotated Emerson , ed. David Mikics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. 10 vols., Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910–14.
• The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. William Gillman, et al., Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1960–
• The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson , 3 vols, Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–72.
• The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964–95.
• (with Thomas Carlyle), The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle , ed. Joseph Slater, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
• Emerson’s Antislavery Writings , eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
• The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson , eds. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
• Emerson: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) , ed. Kenneth Sacks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• (See Chronology for original dates of publication.)
• Alcott, Amos Bronson, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Estimate of His Character and Genius: In Prose and in Verse , Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1882)
• Allen, Gay Wilson, 1981, Waldo Emerson , New York: Viking Press.
• Arsić, Branka, 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Arsić, Branka, and Carey Wolfe (eds.), 2010. The Other Emerson , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Bishop, Jonathan, 1964, Emerson on the Soul , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Buell, Lawrence, 2003, Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cameron, Sharon, 2007, Impersonality , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Carpenter, Frederick Ives, 1930, Emerson and Asia , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cavell, Stanley, 1981, “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition , San Francisco: North Point Press.
• –––, 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.
• Conant, James, 1997, “Emerson as Educator,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 181–206.
• –––, 2001, “Nietzsche as Educator,” Nietzsche’s Post-Moralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future , Richard Schacht (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–257.
• Constantinesco, Thomas, 2012, Ralph Waldo Emerson: L’Amérique à l’essai , Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm.
• Ellison, Julie, 1984, Emerson’s Romantic Style , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Firkins, Oscar W., 1915, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Follett, Danielle, 2015, “The Tension Between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature , Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (eds.), London: Routledge, 209–221.
• Friedl, Herwig, 2018, Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition , New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Goodman, Russell B., 1990a, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 2.
• –––, 1990b, “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51(4): 625–45.
• –––, 1997, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 159–80.
• –––, 2004, “The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self,” Nature in American Philosophy , Jean De Groot (ed.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1–18.
• –––, 2008, “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism,” The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy , Cheryl Misak (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–37.
• –––, 2015, American Philosophy Before Pragmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 147–99, 234–54.
• –––, 2021, “Transcendentalist Legacies in American Philosophy,” Handbook of American Romanticism, Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, Jan Stievermann (ed.), Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 517–536.
• Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1885, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Horsman, Reginald, 1981, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, and London: Harvard University Press.
• Lysaker, John, 2008, Emerson and Self-Culture , Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
• Matthiessen, F. O., 1941, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Packer, B. L., 1982, Emerson’s Fall , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 2007, The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Poirier, Richard, 1987, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1992, Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
• Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra (eds.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1995, Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sacks, Kenneth, 2003, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Urbas, Joseph, 2016, Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes , Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2021, The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and London: Routledge.
• Versluis, Arthur, 1993, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Whicher, Stephen, 1953, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Wirzbicki, Peter, 2021, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Zavatta, Benedetta, 2019, Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson, trans. Alexander Reynolds , New York: Oxford University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Anaxagoras | Augustine of Hippo | Bacon, Francis | Cambridge Platonists | Cicero | Dewey, John | Heraclitus | Iamblichus | James, William | Lucretius | Mencius | Nietzsche, Friedrich | Plotinus | Pythagoras | Schiller, Friedrich | Schlegel, Friedrich | Socrates | transcendentalism

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A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

What accounts for emerson's endurance as a writer.

As a teenager in 1960, Clyde Edgerton was trying to find a name for the doubts he was feeling about his conventional, small-town life in Bethesda, North Carolina.

Then, a high school assignment offered up a tutor for life. Edgerton’s epiphany came while reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”:

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight  and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history  of theirs? . . . The sun shines today also. . . . Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

In Emerson, Edgerton found someone who let him know that questioning orthodox belief was not only acceptable, but vital. “My mind was set afire as if soaked in gasoline,” Edgerton would recall many years later in an essay. “Emerson had served me up a bowl of intellectual rebellion at just the right time in my young life” The encounter steered Edgerton toward college, which he had planned to skip, and onward to a successful career as the novelist behind such celebrated works as  Raney  and  Walking Across Egypt .

“Here was a writer who wrote about ideas—ideas that heated my blood,” Edgerton writes of Emerson. “He was moral, but not dictatorial and narrow. He was kind. He loved the world, and it seemed as if he had written some sentences for no one but me.”

Edgerton’s testimonial seems all the more vivid because of its rarity. Few people these days talk deeply about Emerson, the quintessential nineteenth-century New Englander, as an agent of passion or personal revolution. Emerson, a founding father of American letters, who famously declared that “every hero becomes a bore at last,” would perhaps not be too surprised to learn that even some of his modern-day admirers occasionally find him boring, too.

Some of Emerson’s most discriminating champions over the years have tended, despite their support, to damn him with faint praise. Typical of this view was the late Clifton Fadiman, who included Emerson’s essays in  The Lifetime Reading Plan , a popular 1960 book meant to highlight works that the great literary critic thought every American should read.

While recommending him as a seminal writer, Fadiman notes Emerson’s “gassiness and repetitiousness” and cautions readers, when dipping into the Sage of Concord, to “beware of overlarge doses. At times he offers fine words in lieu of fine thoughts, and he never understood how to organize or compress large masses of material.”

Emerson’s sweeping pronouncements, which sometimes read like a patchwork of fortune cookie aphorisms, give his prose a mystical sensibility that can sometimes feel unmoored from daily concerns. Henry David Thoreau, an Emerson protégé who excelled at grounding his philosophical musings within detailed observations of Concord, seems much more approachable by comparison.“Thoreau, reaping the reward of greater daring and a firmer grasp on rude fact, casts the longer shadow,” Fadiman flatly declares.

But if Emerson is better known as a maker of proverbs than as a master of sustained prose narratives, his one-liners have proven memorable enough to secure his reputation as a cultural icon. Even those who have never cracked the spine of an Emerson anthology are familiar with many of his sayings. The seventeenth edition of  Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , with its one hundred fifty Emerson entries, affirms that he was a heavy-hitter of witticisms. To read them is to be reminded of his rhetorical greatest hits:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”

“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.”

“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.”

“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Emerson’s “things-are-in-the-saddle” comment, extracted from one of his poems, invites an obvious comparison with a similar Thoreau observation on the limits of materialism: “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.” Notice the subtle difference between their grasp of the same subject: humanity’s habit of owning possessions—and, in turn, being owned by them. Emerson goes to the brisk generalization,“things,” while Thoreau gravitates toward the more concrete image of the railroad. Emerson’s public writing tends to resemble a newspaper editorial, with its ambition aimed at the broad conclusion, while Thoreau’s resonates with the urgency of tangible detail.The distinction here is far from absolute. There are some very nice turns in Emerson’s poems and essays in which he drops his guard as a public commentator to reveal an engaging private face. Here, for example, is a much-quoted interlude from “Nature” in which Emerson offers a personal anecdote:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

In passages like this one, Emerson most closely approximates the ideal represented by Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century Frenchman who essentially created the personal essay and, in doing  so, became one of Emerson’s heroes.  “A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of (Montaigne’s) ‘Essays’ remained to me from my father’s library, when a boy,” Emerson tells readers. “It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and  wonder in which I lived with it.”

What Emerson appreciates about Montaigne is his literary idol’s genius for appearing whole on the page.“The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences,” Emerson writes of Montaigne. “I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Emerson admires these qualities, one gathers, because they seem so elusive in his own essays. In his essay on Montaigne, Emerson clears his throat for eight pages before finally sitting beside the reader to share his intimate reflections on a book that changed his life.The long windup to the topic at hand includes a rather dry discourse on epistemology, a preamble that seems neither vascular nor alive.

But Emerson’s kinship with Montaigne also grew from a shared anxiety about the excesses of orthodoxy. While Montaigne had confronted the consequences of religious absolutism during the French Wars of Religion, Emerson faced his own struggles with organized religion when he felt compelled to give up his ministry over differences in church doctrine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, entering a household in which nine previous generations of men had been well-known ministers. His father, a prominent Unitarian preacher, died when Emerson was eight, throwing the family into financial distress. With help from the church, and income from boarders kept by his mother, the family muddled through, eventually scraping together enough money for Emerson to attend Harvard. After graduating and  trying school teaching, Emerson entered the family business of preaching and was ordained as junior pastor of Boston’s Second Church in 1829. That same year, he married young Ellen Tucker, who died sixteen months later of tuberculosis, the same disease that plagued Emerson and other members of his family. Devastated, Emerson began a period of deeper reflection on his faith, resigning from the ministry in 1832, and embarking on an extended trip to England and mainland Europe.

An inheritance from his wife allowed Emerson to pursue a career as a writer and lecturer. His work led him toward transcendentalism, a loosely defined philosophy that stressed indvidual intuition, as opposed to tradition and institutional authority, as the path to knowledge. With its skeptical view of the establishment and its emphasis on nature as a source of spiritual insight, transcendentalism seemed well suited to a frontier nation where memories of the American Revolution still resonated in a land thick with trees.

In “The American Scholar,” an address he gave at Harvard in 1837, Emerson captivated his listeners when he urged them to do their own thinking instead of using imported ideas from the Old World. Emerson’s point  was not that English and European thinking was uniformly bad; he had, after all, derived many of his own insights from the German intellectuals Johann Goethe and Immanuel Kant, and he was also an avid student of Eastern religion. But Emerson argued that all ideas should be tested by individual experience, and not merely accepted based on the power of precedent. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which  Bacon have given,” said Emerson, “forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.”

Addressing Harvard Divinity School students a year later, Emerson questioned common assumptions of organized religion—a gesture that inspired charges of heresy among his critics, prompting officials to ban him from speaking at Harvard for three decades. Emerson’s willingness to challenge society contrasts with his modern reputation as a boring Brahmin. Emerson scholar Donald McQuade has pointed out how easy it is to forget Emerson’s radical streak. “Faith in human potential, belief in self-reliant individualism, resolute optimism, moral idealism, worshipful return to nature—these are but a few of Emerson’s principles that remain central to the national ideology he helped articulate and popularize,” McQuade writes. “Repeated and adapted so often by scores of admirers and apprentices . . . Emerson’s  terms now seem so familiar that it is hard to credit him with all of his originality. The challenge for today’s readers of Emerson is to recover the freshness of a creative thinker whose original ideas no longer sound unique.”

Emerson’s challenge to the ecclesiastical and intellectual status quo coincided with equally vigorous activism on the political scene. Because Emerson “rose to national prominence in one of the most turbulent and formative periods in the United States,” scholar David M. Robinson has observed, “political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1850s and 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual.”

In 1838, the same year as his Divinity School address, Emerson wrote a letter to President Martin Van Buren, protesting the removal of the Cherokee people to Oklahoma, the forced march that resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears in which thousands died. Emerson was also an active abolitionist and champion of women’s rights. Not always eager to enter political frays, he often found this kind of engagement inevitable for a public figure of his stature. “You can no more keep out of politics,” Emerson said, “than you can keep out of the frost.”

The tensions in Emerson’s public life occasionally paralleled equally formidable struggles at home. After Ellen’s death, Emerson moved to Concord and remarried in 1835, taking Lydia Jackson as his new wife. But his relatively tranquil life with Lydia was complicated by the death of his brothers and the loss of his young son, Waldo, who died at age five in 1842. A big fire at Emerson’s Concord home in1872 seemed to foreshadow a decade of physical and mental decline for Emerson that culminated with his death on April 27, 1882.

The darker aspects of Emerson’s biography challenge the notion that he was a sunny-faced optimist untested by hardship. “Sometimes we have vulgarized his affirmative doctrine,” Fadiman noted of Emerson. “It is but a short series of missteps from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Billy Graham.” But when Emerson urges his readers to have courage, one sometimes senses that he is trying to talk himself through self-doubt. Writer Scott Russell Sanders, a contemporary nature essayist in the best Emersonian tradition, suggests that in a close reading of Emerson, “we can see that the greatest of his essays were those he wrote not to proclaim certainties but to overcome uncertainties.”

If Emerson’s life, despite its periods of public controversy and private pain, seemed placid when compared with the lives of many other writers, it is perhaps because his home thrived on order and  unassuming routine, making its drama less visible. He was, as McQuade puts it, “an intellectual radical who led a rather conventional external life.” Phillip Lopate, a modern-day essayist who counts himself a big Emerson fan, suggests that “Emerson has become  an afterthought in the American literary canon because he lacks that outsider romance of our other mid-nineteenth century giants. We tend to value renegades like Thoreau, doomed alcoholics like Poe, recluses like Dickinson, misunderstood visionaries like Melville, expansive gay bards like Whitman.”

Emerson’s stability made him a natural mentor to writers such as Thoreau—who borrowed Emerson’s land to make his famous home near Walden Pond—and fellow transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Emerson had an uneven relationship with Thoreau, who was not always happy in the role of disciple to his Concord benefactor, but Emerson was grief-stricken when Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862.

Emerson, writes biographer Robert D. Richardson Jr., would always remember Thoreau as his best friend, “even when his memory loss was so far advanced that he could not pull up the name.” Richardson notes that Emerson’s eulogy  for Thoreau was his “last sustained major piece of writing.” Later published in essay form, Emerson’s tribute to the author of  Walden  exhibits a directness and vulnerability seldom found in Emerson’s other public writings:

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and  the reward was great. Under his arm he carried  an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest.

Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau is a reminder that most of his printed essays originated as texts that were meant to be spoken, which may explain why some of his essays do not seem fully realized,reading like scripts for plays that retain their most vital spark only in live performance. Emerson’s chief livelihood was as a speaker, a man who was a regular on the lyceum circuit, which was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the talk-show tour. He was apparently quite good at it—so much so that the poet James Russell Lowell remarked, “We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson . . .” As a speaker, according to McQuade, Emerson cut a dramatic figure:

He was tall, but years of poor health had already worn at his body, sloped his shoulders, and made him appear gaunt—certainly older than a man in his mid-thirties. Emerson had a chiseled look—a long, narrow, weathered face beneath a furrowed brow and thick brown hair, with deeply recessed blue eyes set off by a prominent nose and an angular chin. He had a broad mouth, but one that would remain unaccustomed to laughter. There was always something highly serious, almost lofty, even ethereal, about him. There was also a calm dignity evident immediately in his voice; it had the polished cadences of a first-rate preacher.

If quite a number of Emerson's essays seem longish and redundant, it could be because they retain material that worked better on the stump than on the page. Although he left church ministry early in his career, Emerson retained the rhetorical habits of the pulpit, and the hortatory flavor of his essays can, in lengthy doses, wear thin. But luckily, renewed interest in Emerson’s journals is throwing light on a softer, less formal voice than the one expressed in his essays and poems. Those journals, circulated in excerpt form in various new editions, are winning new converts to Emerson’s prose.

The Library of America published a two-volume selection of Emerson’s journals in 2010, prompting Lopate to take a fresh look at a writer who had previously left him cold. “Truthfully, I never felt that close to Emerson in the past,” Lopate  confessed. “I admired his prose style, but his essays seemed too impersonal for my taste. They sounded oracular, abstract, dizzyingly inspired, like visionary sermons: the thinking and language spectacular, the man somehow missing. It took reading his journals to appreciate the man and the work.” In the journals, Lopate concludes, Emerson seems better able to advance the familiar, discursive style of his old hero, Montaigne.

Like Lopate, Sanders thinks that Emerson’s most appealing presence rests not in his essays, but in his journals. “When I first read a handful of his essays in college, I didn’t much care for Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Sanders writes. “He seemed too high-flown, too cocksure, too earnest. I couldn’t imagine he had ever sweated or doubted. His sentences rang with a magisterial certainty that I could never muster.”

But, in Emerson’s journals, Sanders discovered a different writer. “From beginning to end,” adds Sanders, “I found in Emerson’s journals a writer struggling to describe what lurked at the edges of perception, what loomed in the depths of consciousness. Instead of the Olympian, cocksure figure who spoke through the essays, here was an explorer who left the well-trodden ways, brushed against mysteries, and tried to describe what he had experienced.”

Another good selection of Emerson’s journals is   A Year With Emerson: A Daybook , published by David R. Godine in 2003. In one entry, Emerson, perhaps anticipating the ebbs and flows that his literary reputation would undergo far into the future, asserts that he is actually more comfortable with critical brickbats than bouquets. “I hate to be defended in a newspaper,” he writes. “As long as all that is said is said  against  me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.”

Even so, Emerson probably wouldn’t protest too much at Lopate’s assessment of his legacy: “He wrote  some of the best reflective prose we have; he was a hero of intellectual labor, a loyal friend  and, taking all flaws into account, a good egg.”

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

NEH has funded numerous educational projects related to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Among them are  “Reading Emerson’s Essays,”  a four-week seminar for college teachers, and  “Concord, Massachusetts: Fervent Feminists, Utopian Dreamers, and Social Reform in the Age of Emerson and Thoreau,”  a Landmarks of American History  workshop for community college faculty. In July, there will be a summer institute for college and  university teachers on  “Transcendentalism and Social Action in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller.”

The Library of America, which has published several Emerson volumes, received a $1.2 million grant  from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1979 to begin publishing titles of classic American literature and keep them in print.

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What Ralph Waldo Emerson Knew About Money

W hen Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friends hammered out the principles of Transcendentalism in the mid-1830s, the result was a fairly gossamer way of thinking. The movement included a sizable number of activists and reformers, but as theorists the Transcendentalists insisted that the world was a kind of shimmery projection of consciousness. No wonder the movement had its share of penniless eccentrics—the “queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s phrase, who thronged Emerson’s hometown of Concord, Mass., in search of enlightenment.

But Emerson himself was not naive when it came to money. In part, this was simply because he was one of the few Transcendentalists with actual assets. He had grown up in relative poverty, since the death of his father, when Emerson was seven, had deprived the family of any substantial income. Yet it was another death, that of his first wife Ellen in 1831, that stabilized Emerson’s finances. The offspring of a well-to-do merchant family, Ellen was able to leave her shattered husband an estate worth more than $23,000.

This was an enormous sum at the time, surpassing what Emerson would have earned in a dozen years as pastor of Boston’s Second Church (a job he quit in 1832 out of disillusionment with Christianity). Only part of this bequest consisted of cash; the rest was stocks and bonds, including 19 shares of the Atlantic Bank and 31 shares of the Boston and Roxbury Mill Dam. The dividends from these holdings propped up Emerson’s finances for the rest of his life. In a very real sense, Transcendentalism was underwritten by the nascent American stock market.

Despite this windfall, Emerson was often short of cash. He kept afloat a large household, paid for the care of his learning-disabled brother Bulkeley, and frequently bailed his older brother William out of monetary mishaps. Also, the stock market went through a series of panics during Emerson’s lifetime, causing his income to dry up on a regular basis. As the debt-strapped William put it in a letter of 1840, it was a shame that Emerson’s Atlantic Bank stock “cease[d] to dispense its fertilizing showers.”

This meant that Emerson, who made very little money from his books until the end of his career, was forced to seek other sources of income as a public speaker. “I am no very good economist,” he once lamented, yet he was certainly adept at packaging and promoting Transcendentalism for what was then a mass audience. For almost a half-century he crisscrossed America, lecturing in theaters, churches, hospitals and a variety of ramshackle frontier outposts. Sometimes he served as his own producer, booking the hall and printing the tickets himself. He also knew how to bargain, even when the stakes were low. Dickering early on with a Massachusetts lecture venue, he demanded that they pay not only the set fee but four quarts of oats for his horse.

All of this fit into a long Yankee tradition of thrift and fiscal adroitness. But Emerson’s interest in money extended far beyond the management of his personal finances. For one thing, he read the great economists of the era. He was familiar with Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”—which, he assured a Boston audience, was a “book of wisdom” on par with Paradise Lost. Since Emerson conceived of the universe as a vast, self-correcting mechanism, the laissez-faire arguments expressed in Smith’s book made perfect sense to him. “The basis of political economy is non-interference,” he wrote in a lecture titled “Wealth.” “The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.”

The industrialists of the Gilded Age could hardly have found a better mascot. They ignored Emerson’s intermittent doubts about his nation’s commercial culture, his concern that “the stockholder has stepped into the place of the warlike baron.” Instead they seized on his gospel of self-reliance, which had not only shaped the American character but merged quite comfortably with the social Darwinism of the era.

In “Wealth,” Emerson waxed poetic about money. Its role as a symbolic system, a way of transforming one thing into another, seemed almost magical to him. “Money,” he declared in a famous passage, “which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.” Emerson’s greatest acolyte, Henry David Thoreau, wrestled endlessly with the dilemma of how to live without money. Emerson was interested in how to live with it, which soured his friendship with Thoreau but probably makes him more relatable to a contemporary wage-earner with a mortgage and a maxed-out credit card.

Sometimes Emerson could get tangled up in his own conflicting impulses about money. In the early 1860s, for example, his Boston publisher contacted Emerson about one of his articles that had previously appeared in The Atlantic magazine. There was now a plan to publish the same piece in a book, and so a check had been cut for the Sage of Concord—which he refused. “I don’t believe it honest for me,” he insisted, “to take money twice for the same piece of work.” He had an old-fashioned work ethic, believing that he had been paid for an honest day’s labor and the accounts were thereby balanced.

The publisher pleaded with him to accept the payment. Emerson, softening, wondered whether he should stick to the high road after all. Weren’t his principles simply gumming up the sacred machinery of supply and demand? “We cannot live in obedience to the true poles of our being,” he allowed. “I vary from my highest self, and I have no disposition to play the evangelical peacock here.” To put it another way: he took the check.

James Marcus is the author of the new biography “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

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Self-Reliance

Throughout his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson kept detailed journals of his thoughts and actions, and he returned to them as a source for many of his essays. Self-reliance is all that it sounds like plus considerably more. Learn from one of the greatest writers and poets in American history. His most famous work, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance can truly change your life for the better.

More About Self-Reliance

What is Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous quote?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in American literary history. He was a philosopher, essayist, and poet who lived during the 19th century. His most famous quote is " Self-reliance is the foundation of a prosperous society." This quote is often cited as a cornerstone of Emerson's philosophy, which emphasized individualism, self-sufficiency, and the importance of following one's own path in life. This message continues to inspire and resonate with people around the world, making it one of the most enduring and memorable quotes in American literary history.

What is Emerson's most famous essay?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most famous for his essay " Self-Reliance. " This essay, first published in 1841, outlines Emerson's philosophy of individualism and self-reliance, and it remains one of his most widely read and influential works. In " Self-Reliance ," Emerson argues that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others. He writes that people should cultivate their own inner voice, and that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment. The essay is considered a classic of American literature, and its message continues to be relevant and inspiring to people around the world.

What are Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous poems?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a renowned poet and writer, and several of his poems have become well-known and widely celebrated. Some of his most famous poems include " Concord Hymn ," which he wrote to commemorate the Battle of Concord during the American Revolution, " Each and All ," a meditation on the interconnections between all things, and " Brahma ," a celebration of the unity of all things in the universe. Emerson's poetry is characterized by its use of rich and descriptive language, its philosophical themes, and its focus on individualism and self-reliance . His poems remain popular and widely read today, and they continue to inspire and influence people around the world.

What inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to write?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was inspired to write by a variety of factors, including his experiences as a young man, his philosophical beliefs, and his interest in exploring the relationship between the individual and society. One of the most significant influences on Emerson's writing was his growing sense of disillusionment with traditional religious and cultural institutions. He saw these institutions as stifling and oppressive, and he felt that people were being denied the freedom to think and act for themselves. In response to this, Emerson began to develop a philosophy of individualism and self-reliance , and he sought to share this philosophy through his writing. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, he sought to inspire others to embrace their own inner voice and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs.

What influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by a wide range of factors, including his personal experiences, philosophical ideas, and cultural and historical events. Some of the most significant influences on his work include his exposure to the ideas of Transcendentalism, a philosophical and cultural movement that sought to bridge the gap between the individual and the divine. He was also inspired by his travels in Europe, where he was exposed to the works of leading European philosophers and poets. Additionally, Emerson was deeply influenced by the religious and cultural institutions of his time, and he sought to challenge and reject many of the traditions and beliefs that he saw as stifling and oppressive. These various influences helped shape his unique philosophy of individualism and self-reliance , which he sought to share with others through his writing.

What are 3 significant things about Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a highly influential figure in American literary and cultural history. Here are three significant things about him:

Philosophical Thought: Emerson was a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement, which emphasized the importance of individual experience and the power of the human spirit to understand the world. His writing reflects these beliefs and encourages readers to trust their own instincts and ideas.

Literary Legacy: Emerson was a prolific writer, producing a large body of work that includes essays, poems, and lectures. His writing remains widely read and highly regarded today, and he is considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century.

Cultural Influence: Beyond his literary achievements, Emerson also had a significant impact on American culture. His ideas about individualism and self-reliance have been widely influential, and they continue to shape our understanding of American values and ideals. Additionally, he was a prominent public speaker and a leading figure in the intellectual and cultural life of his time.

What is Ralph Emerson's motto?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's motto, or personal philosophy, can be best summed up by his famous quote, " Self-reliance is the foundation of a prosperous society." This quote reflects Emerson's belief in the importance of individualism and self-reliance, and it encapsulates the central themes that he explored in his writing. In Emerson's view, people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others. He believed that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment, and that it is the foundation of a prosperous and harmonious society. This message continues to inspire and resonate with people around the world, and it remains one of Emerson's most enduring and memorable contributions to American literary and cultural history.

What is Ralph Waldo Emerson most known for?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most widely known for his contributions to American literature and cultural history as a writer, poet, and philosopher. He is considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century, and his essays, poems, and lectures have had a profound impact on American intellectual and cultural life. Emerson is best known for his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance, which he expounded upon in works such as " Self-Reliance " and " Nature ." These works argue that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, and that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment. Through his writing, Emerson sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs. His legacy continues to be celebrated and studied today, and he remains one of the most widely read and influential writers in American literary history.

What type of people did Emerson gather around him?

Throughout his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson was associated with a wide-ranging group of people from various walks of life and intellectual disciplines. Some of the individuals who gathered around him included fellow writers, poets, philosophers, and artists, as well as intellectuals, reformers, and political activists. These individuals were drawn to Emerson's ideas about individualism and self-reliance , and many of them were influenced by his philosophy in their own work.

What is Emerson's theory?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his theory of individualism and self-reliance , which he expounded upon in his essays, poems, and lectures. At its core, this theory holds that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others.

According to Emerson, the inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment, and it should be the guiding force in people's lives. His theory of individualism and self-reliance continues to be widely studied and celebrated today, and it remains one of his most enduring contributions to American literary and cultural history.

What type of poetry is Ralph Waldo Emerson known for?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his contributions to American literature as an essayist and philosopher, but he also wrote several influential works of poetry. He is particularly known for his lyrical and contemplative poems that reflect his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance .

Emerson's poetry is characterized by its focus on nature, spirituality, and the human experience, and it often explores the relationship between the self and the universe. His poems are notable for their vivid and evocative language, their spiritual themes, and their celebration of individual freedom and self-expression.

Some of Emerson's most famous poems include "Each and All," "The Rhodora," "Concord Hymn," and "Brahma." These works continue to be widely read and celebrated today, and they remain an important part of American literary and cultural history. Through his poetry, Emerson sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to find their own path to happiness and fulfillment.

Why was Ralph Waldo Emerson important to Transcendentalism?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a key figure in the Transcendentalist movement, which was a major intellectual and cultural movement that emerged in New England in the early 19th century. Transcendentalism was characterized by a focus on individualism, self-reliance, and the power of the individual spirit, and it sought to challenge traditional religious, social, and political beliefs and institutions.

Emerson was one of the leading voices of the movement, and he was known for his essays, poems, and lectures, which expounded upon his ideas about individualism, self-reliance, and the power of the individual spirit. Through his writing and speaking, he sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs.

Emerson's contributions to Transcendentalism were significant, as he helped to define the movement and to shape its intellectual and cultural influence. He was a major influence on other leading Transcendentalists , such as Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, and his ideas and writings continue to be widely studied and celebrated today.

Overall, Ralph Waldo Emerson's contributions to Transcendentalism were essential in shaping the movement's intellectual and cultural impact, and he remains one of the most important and influential figures in American literary and cultural history.

Popular Collections

Lectures / Biographies

This section includes the lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson and also includes various biographies on his life and those close to Emerson. The Sovereignty of Ethics and Mary Moody Emerson are included.

More Lectures

Early Emerson Poems

This section covers poems written early in Emerson’s career which some are not widely known. Fifty poems are available, including The Rhodora.

Uncollected Prose

This is a collection of writings, addresses, essays, and reviews by Emerson. Included are his famous works, The Last Supper.

The section does not cover the history and life of Emerson and his writings, but rather his work entitled “History.”

More About Histroy

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"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." That quote has been inspirational to me and my business. I've taken risks and fallen, but I always get back up stronger than before. Matt Gallant BiOptimizers

The wisdom that is Emerson has been a strong impact on my career and in my roles as a father and husband. His advice is timeless. "Self Reliance" was the first work of Emerson's that I read and I still read it every year. Ron Halversen

I read Emerson's Self Reliance as a teen for English class. It didn't click for me at the time, but as I got older I found myself remembering bits and pieces. It's been a sort of backbone to my adult life that I've returned to again and again when I needed (self) guidance. Melissa Anderson

I recently attended an important dinner meeting with a potential new client. I reminded myself to be calm, watch my non-verbal cues and maintain eye contact. I learned these important items when reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Conduct of Life". The essay emphasized the importance of "Behavior" and to celebrate "the wonderful expressiveness of the human body". Heather Paige Diet Food Delivery Service

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." To think Emerson uttered these words nearly two centuries ago and yet it is the perfect advice for today's youth." Alyssa Gonzalez TLC Graduate Credits

Emerson's advice, "Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer," is even more important in today's wealth-driven economy. Being a producer ensures your family's security and comfort even after you are gone." Ashley Haigh Carpet Tiles UK

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Every business owner would be wise to heed Emerson's words." Caleb Hunter PuppyWire

There is no human alive could not appreciate the magnitude of living life free from all that we tightly wind ourselves. This freedom comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mark Mason Mark Mason

What I remember most about Emerson is he said not to worry about what has happened in the past, or what may happen in the future, but focus on that which dwells deep within you. Derek Mills Shoptimized

A year has not gone by since I left college that I have not read Emerson’s essay, Self Reliance. I have instilled Emerson’s wisdom on my daughter, family, and friends. Jeff Greenfield

My grandfather told me when I was young that instead of following the path of others, I should go where my heart took me. For me to leave a trail for others to follow. I learned years later it was a quote from Emerson. Todd Chism

People Influenced By Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, a poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. His well-known essays were Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As a key figure in the transcendentalist movement, his work and ideas were deeply interwoven with the broader currents of 19th-century American intellectual and social life. Born in Wolcott, Connecticut, Alcott pursued education and self-improvement with a passion that would define much of his life and career. Alcott’s educational philosophy was progressive and innovative. He advocated for a model of education that emphasized personal growth, moral development, and the cultivation of the imagination rather than rote memorization or strict discipline. This led him to found the Temple School in Boston, where he implemented his ideas. Although the school…

Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) was an American philosopher renowned for his work in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of language and for his contributions to the interpretation of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Thoreau. Cavell’s academic career was primarily associated with Harvard University, where he taught for over three decades and impacted contemporary American philosophy. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Cavell was raised in Sacramento, California. He pursued an undergraduate degree in music at the University of California, Berkeley, before shifting his focus to philosophy, where he found his true calling. Cavell earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, later joining the faculty, influencing generations of students and scholars through his teaching and writing. Cavell’s philosophical…

Ellen Louisa Tucker

Ellen Louisa Tucker (1811–1831) was not a public figure or philosopher in her own right but is remembered primarily for her profound influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist philosopher, essayist, and poet. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, Ellen was known for her beauty, vivacity, and profoundly religious nature. Her life was tragically short, but her impact, particularly on Emerson, was significant and enduring. Ellen and Emerson’s relationship began in 1827, culminating in their marriage in 1829 when Ellen was just 18 years old. Their time together was brief, as Ellen suffered from tuberculosis and died less than two years after their marriage, in February 1831, at the age…

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was also an American journalist. Her given name was Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and a profound influencer of modern intellectual thought. His work is known for its radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, its critique of religion and morality as understood in the traditional sense, and its exploration of the concept of the “will to power.” Nietzsche’s philosophy delves into the complexities of existence, the nature of power, and the potential for individual transcendence by creating one’s own values instead of relying on the values of others. Key works of Nietzsche include “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), a philosophical novel that introduces the idea of the Übermensch, or “Overman,” as…

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian, and teacher during the Victorian era. Known for his sharp critique of democracy, industrialization, and the spiritual malaise of his time, Carlyle became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. His work is characterized by a profound, often pessimistic, reflection on society and a strong advocacy for heroic leadership and individual moral integrity. Carlyle’s significant contributions include his essay “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834), a satirical work that presents a philosophy of clothes as a metaphor for the human condition and societal values. His magnum opus, “The French Revolution: A History” (1837), is a dramatic and detailed account…

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was born

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803.

The American Scholar

'The American Scholar' was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837.

The Harvard Divinity School Address

Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered this speech before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge in July 15, 1838.

The Over Soul

There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures.

Nominalist and Realist

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth.

Ruth Haskins Emerson

The mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 9 Nov 1768 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Lidian Jackson Emerson

She was the second wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's best known and best-loved essayist, lecturer, poet in 19th-century.

The Harvard University Press

Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, Biography, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press published a book on Ralph Waldo Emerson named Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy.

University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press published a journal -Rethinking Self-Reliance: Emerson on Mobbing, War, and Abolition.

Boston Public Latin School

Ralph Waldo Emerson received his early education at home would serve him well in school.

Edward Waldo Emerson

(1844-1930) Was a physician, writer, and lecturer. Lived in Concord, Massachusetts most of his life. Was the youngest son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydian Jackson Emerson (second wife). Educated at Harvard and graduated in 1866. He went to Harvard Medical School and graduated in 1874. His medical practice was in Concord until 1882 when his inheritance was delivered and decided to retire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - American author, poet, philospher, and essayist, This site is dedicated to the memory of my late father, Emerson West, who was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. The man I am today reflects the influence of my father and the life teachings of Emerson.

Research the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read More Essay

Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out

America's best known and best-loved poems. More Poems