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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
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A major American poet, who worked first as an Unitarian priest. In his hometown, Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a literary circle called New England Transcendentalism, a hodgepodge of fashionable thoughts, in which participated among others Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau. During his travels in England he met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence from the 1830s and whose opinions of the importance of great historical figures influenced his own writings. Later Emerson became involved in the antislavery movement and worked for women's rights. For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words. (from 'The Poet,' in Essays: Second Series by R. E. Emerson, Boston: James Munroe and Company, MDCCCXLIV, pp. 8-9) Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Most of his
ancestors were clergymen as his father, who died when Emerson was
eight. Following his father's footsteps, he was educated in Boston and Harvard, graduating in 1821. While at Harvad, Emerson began keeping a journal, which
became a source of his later lectures, essays, and books. In 1826 he
was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. In 1829 Emerson married the seventeen-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker; she died in 1831 from tuberculosis. She had been young and pretty, and in March 1832, Emerson opened her coffin, a year and two months after her burial, just to see her. In his own journal he wrote: "I visited Ellen's tomb and opened the coffin." Emerson's first and only
settlement was at the important Second Unitarian Church of Boston,
where he became sole pastor in 1830. The death of his beloved wife and a crisis
of faith made Emerson to stop and reevaluate his life. He was not interested in the rite of
Communion. Emerson once remarked, that if his teachers had been aware of
his true thoughts, they would not have allowed him to become a
minister. Eventually Emerson's controversial views caused him to abandon
his Boston ministry. However, he never ceased to be both teacher and
preacher,
although without the support of any concrete idea of God, perhaps only
a pantheistic approach to the universe. Conscious that there is no
logic in his religious thought Emerson defined himself as the one
seeing what he can, and simply telling what he sees. God is
omnipresent, "one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation
through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly
seen, its tide is one." In his Divinity School Addess of 1838
Emerson stated that "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of
prophets." The bold lecture made Emerson famous but persona non grata at
Harvard for a long time. Facing his crisis of conscience, Emerson sold his household
furniture in 1832 and traveled to Europe. There in England met
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, with
whom he corresponded for half a century. During his Italian journey Emerson read Goethe's account of his trip, Italian Journey, Like the great German author, he took in Italy's famous tourist attactions. In his journal Emerson wrote: "Goethe says "he shall never again be wholly unhappy, for he has seen Naples." If he has said "happy," there would have been equal reason. You cannot go five yards in any direction without seeing saddest objects & hearing the most piteous wailings. Instead of the gayest of cities, you seem to walk in the wards of a hospital." In 1835 Emerson married Lydia Jackson, who came from an old Plymouth family that went back to John Cotton. He settled with her at the east end of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. This was the place where he then spent the rest of his life. Lydia had a strong, brooding face, she was interested in poetry, and loved cats. Her mother and father had died when she was sixteen. Emerson's oldest son, Waldo, died at the age of five. Emerson went on a lecture tour in Europe in 1848. A letter to a London newspaper requested lowering the admission price so that the poorer people could attend, for "to miss him is to lose an important part of the Nineteenth Century." The English writer Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) did not share the admiration which his countrymen had for Emerson – he called Emerson "a wrinkled baboon, a man first hoisted into notoriety on the shoulders of Carlyle, and who now spits and sputters on a filthier platform of his own finding and fouling." Upon his return to the United States, Emerson lectured on natural history, biology, and history. Emerson drew inspiration from Nature. His first book, Nature, a collection of essays, came out when he was 33. The manifesto of American transcendentalism summoned up his central ideas. Emerson emphasized individualism and rejected traditional authority. He invited to "enjoy an original relation to the universe." All creation is one, he believed – people should try to live a simple life in harmony with nature and with others. "... the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God," he wrote in Nature. Emerson's lectures 'The American Scholar' (1837), and 'Address at Divinity College' (1838) challenged the Harvard intelligentsia and warned about the formalism of the clergy of his time. For many years he was ostracized by Harvad, but his message attracted young disciples, who joined the informal Transcendental Club, organized in 1836 by the Unitarian clergyman F.H. Hedge. "Nature's dice are always loaded." Much of his major poetry and critical writings Emerson published in the 1840s. He disliked Edgar Allan Poe,
who was some half a dozen years his junior. In a literary conversation
he referred to Poe as "the jingle man" and found his moral principles
unacceptable. Opposing Poe's romantic conception of nature
he thought that moral and religious truths hidden in nature can
be reached through intuition and conscience, not by escaping into the
shadows of unreality. Emerson helped Margaret Fuller to launch The Dial (1840-44), an open forum for new ideas on the reformation of society. From his compensated lectures Emerson produced various books and collections of essays. A selection of his earlier lectures and writings appeared in 1841 under the title Essays. It was followed by Essays: Second Series (1844), a collection of lectures annexed to a reprint of Nature (1849), and Representative Men (1850). In these works Emerson encouraged his readers to trust instinct, use their potential talents for authentic self-discovery as the great men have done, and perceive Nature as a source of inspiration. When Emerson was courting Lydia, he said, "I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation." In the 1850s Emerson started to gain success as a lecturer. Moreover, books provided him a source of moderate income. English Traits, a summary of English character and history, appeared in 1856. Other later works include Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), a selection of poems called Parnassus (1874), and Letters and Social Aims,
edited by J.Elliot Cabot (1876). To satisfy an urge to see the West, Emerson took a trip to California, which started on Tuesday, April 11, 1871. After the partial burning of his house in 1872, Emerson's heath started fail. He made his last tour abroad in 1872-1873, and then withdrew more and more from public life. Emerson died on April 27, 1882, in Concord. In the 1880s appeared posthumously Miscellanies (1884), a collection of political speeches, and Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1884). As an essayist Emerson was a master of style. "Emerson is God," declared the literary theorist Harold Bloom once, and testified with this the importance of Emerson to American literature. Many of Emerson's phrases have long since passed into common English parlance: "a minority of one'", "the devil's attorney," '"a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". His essays have a speech like character and a prophetic tone, a sermon like quality, often linked to his practice as an Unitarian minister. Emerson's aim was not merely to charm his readers, but encourage them to cultivate 'self-trust' and to be open to the intuitive world of experience. Philosophy for Emerson was always entwined with the concrete reality of life. In his essay 'Books' Emerson advised to avoid mediocrities: "Be
sure, then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press of the
gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking,
in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into
stately shops" and good travellers stop at the best hotels; for, though
they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the good
company and the best information. In like manner, the scholar knows
that the famed books contain, first and last, the vest thoughts and
facts. Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish Grub Street in the
gem we want. But in the best circles is the best information. If you
should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the
newspapers to the standard authors – But who dare
speak such a thing." Emerson encouraged American scholars to break free of European influences and create a new American culture. He had formulated this idea in his a Phi Beta Kappa address, 'The American Scholar,' which Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) hailed as nothing less than the declaration of of independence of American letters. Emerson believed that the development of culture was a more worthy end of a government than the development of commerce. For further reading: Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph L. Rusk (1949); Freedom and Fate by Stephen E. Whicher (1953); Emerson on the Soul by Jonathan Bishop (1964); Waldo Emerson: A Biography by Gay Wilson Allen (1981); Emerson's Fall by B.L. Packer (1982); Apostle of Culture by David Robinson (1982); Emerson's Demanding Optimism by Reif Gertrude Hughes (1984); Emerson's Romantic Style by Julie Ellison (1984); The American Newness by Irving Howe (1986); Emerson and Scepticism by John Michael (1988); Poetry and Pragmatism by Richard Poirier (1992); Nietzsche and Emerson by George J. Stack (1992); Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson (1995); Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida by Stanley Cavell (1995); Emerson Among the Eccentries by Carlos Baker (1996); Self as World: The New Emerson by Heikki A. Kovalainen (2010); Emerson's Metaphysics: a Song of Laws and Causes by Joseph Urbas (2016); Emerson and the History of Rhetoric by Roger Thompson (2017); The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emmerson by Joseph Urbas (2020); The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Travelogue by Brian C. Wilson (2022); Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Companion by Prentiss Clark (2023) - See also: Walt Whitman Selected works:
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