Ralph Waldo Emerson
1) His Biography and Main Works:
Ralph Waldo Emerson became the director of his brother’s girls’ school in 1821. He authored the poem “Good-Bye” in 1823. He became a Transcendentalist in 1832, which resulted in the articles “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar.” In the late 1870s, Emerson continued to write and talk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803. His parents, William and Ruth (Haskins) Emerson, were both clergymen, as were many of his male predecessors. He attended the Boston Latin School, Harvard University, and the Harvard School of Divinity before graduating in 1821. In 1826, he received his ministerial license, and in 1829, he was ordained into the Unitarian church. In 1829, Emerson married Ellen Tucker. He was heartbroken when she died of TB in 1831. His resignation from the priesthood was prompted by her death, as well as his own recent religious difficulty.
Emerson visited Europe in 1832 and encountered literary heavyweights such as Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. When he returned to the United States in 1833, he started giving lectures on spiritual experiences and ethical conduct. In 1834, he relocated to Concord, Massachusetts, and in 1835, he married Lydia Jackson. Emerson’s early sermons often addressed the personal dimension of spirituality. Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Amos Bronson Alcott were among the authors and intellectuals who resided in Concord at the time, and he found common ground with them.
Emerson delivered lectures in the 1830s, which he later published as essays. His freshly evolved philosophy was expressed in these articles, notably “Nature” (1836). Based on a lecture he delivered in 1837, “The American Scholar” he urged American writers to develop their own style rather than imitate their foreign predecessors. Emerson rose to prominence as the leader of his literary and philosophical movement, the American Transcendentalists. These authors all held the notion that via free choice and intuition, each human may transcend, or go beyond, the physical world of the senses into a higher spiritual experience. God was not distant and unknown in this school of thinking; believers knew God and themselves by gazing into their own hearts and sensing their own connection to nature.
Emerson had a prolific decade in the 1840s. In 1841 and 1844, he created and co-edited the literary journal The Dial, and he wrote two volumes of articles. “Self-Reliance,” “Friendship,” and “Experience,” among the essays, are among his best-known works. In the 1840s, he had four children: two boys and two girls. Later writings by Emerson, such as The Conduct of Life (1860), advocated for more balance between individual nonconformity and community concerns. Throughout the 1860s, he spoke around the nation, advocating for the abolition of slavery. By the 1870s, Emerson had earned the moniker “the sage of Concord.” Despite his deteriorating
health, he continued to write, releasing Society and Solitude in 1870 and Parnassus, a poetry collection, in 1874.
Emerson died in Concord on April 27, 1882. His ideals and views influenced the work of his protégé Henry David Thoreau, his contemporary Walt Whitman, and a slew of other writers. His publications are regarded important works of American literature, religion, and ideas from the nineteenth century.
2) His Religious Background and Commitment to American Ideals:
At the time, Emerson’s religious ideas were often regarded as radical. He felt that everything is divine because everything is related to God. Critics feared Emerson was losing the major God figure; as Henry Ware Jr. put it, Emerson was in danger of removing “the Father of the Universe” and left “just a group of orphans in an orphanage.” Emerson was inspired by German philosophy as well as Biblical criticism to some extent. His ideas, which formed the foundation of Transcendentalism, indicated that God did not have to disclose the truth, but that it might be instinctively sensed straight from nature. Emerson declared, “I am more of a Quaker than anything else,” when questioned about his religious beliefs. The’still, little voice,’ I think, is Christ inside us.
“Consider what you have in the tiniest selected library,” Emerson said of communal libraries. In a thousand years, a group of the brightest and wittiest persons from all civilized nations have placed the fruits of their study and knowledge in the greatest possible order.” At least one individual may have inspired Emerson’s amorous ideas. He was drawn to a young student called Martin Gay, about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry during his first year at Harvard. Throughout his life, he had a variety of love interests, including Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis, among others.
Emerson was widely regarded as one of the most liberal democratic philosophers of his period, believing that slavery should be eliminated via the democratic process. Emerson wrestled with the implications of race while being an ardent abolitionist and well-known for his condemnation of slavery’s legitimacy. His customary liberal leanings did not transfer well when it came to thinking that all races were capable or functioned equally, which was a popular belief at the time. Many detractors feel his ideas on race kept him from becoming an abolitionist and becoming more engaged in the antislavery struggle earlier in his life.
During his early years, Emerson, like many other defenders of slavery, seemed to have believed that African slaves’ faculties were inferior to those of European slave-owners. Emerson was not a proponent of slavery because of his conviction in racial inferiority. “No clever sophistry will ever reconcile the unperverted intellect to the forgiveness of Slavery; nothing except great familiarity, and the prejudice of private interest,” Emerson wrote later that year. Slavery, the treatment of slaves, and self-seeking donors of slaves were all seen by Emerson as grave injustices. Slavery was a moral matter for Emerson, but racial supremacy was a scientific one that he attempted to examine using what he thought to be hereditary features.
Emerson’s views on race shifted later in life as he got more active in the abolitionist movement and started to examine the philosophical implications of race and racial hierarchy more fully. His viewpoint moved to the possible consequences of racial strife. Emerson’s racial ideas were intertwined with his beliefs on nationalism and national supremacy, which were popular at the time in the United States. Emerson supported his racial development thesis with modern race ideas and natural science. He argued that the present political conflict and slavery of other races was an unavoidable racial struggle that would lead to the United States’ eventual unity. Conflicts like this were crucial for the dialectic of change that would finally lead to the country’s growth. Emerson seemed to accept the idea that various European ethnicities would ultimately blend in America in much of his later work. This process of hybridization would result in a superior race, which would benefit the United States’ dominance.
3) His speech: The American Scholar:
The American Scholar was a lecture delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the “Phi Beta Kappa Society” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 31, 1837. He was asked to speak in honor of his book “Nature,” in which he introduced a new way of seeing the world for America’s emerging civilization. The European culture has had a significant effect on American culture. Emerson attempts to discover the true American culture in this lecture and asks his citizens to maintain the core of that culture. According to an American folktale, the universe started with a single guy who was split into multiple individuals in order to fulfil a task efficiently. This is how a civilization was formed, yet it was further separated. Because of the increased split among men, man could no longer collaborate efficiently with one another to achieve great things.
Emerson seeks to restore men’s efficiency by informing his audience about the qualifications and responsibilities of a real scholar. Emerson believes that a good scholar must have a deep understanding of nature since it aids in self-awareness. Nature has a profound influence on our thoughts. It assists individuals in discovering fresh and unique ways to live their lives. Because of age-old views and traditions, man is often unable to alter anything in his life. Emerson wants a great scholar to purge the world of old notions that are destroying society’s vitality.
He believes that the existing educational system, which has resulted in kids depending on notes and remembering information, has to change. Nature, which has a strong impact on the human mind, must be valued in the educational system, and pupils must be allowed to discover and explore new ideas. He encourages people to stop mindlessly following things and instead learn to think for themselves. Without the effect of tradition or history, we should be able to perceive the world plainly. We are all made up of the same components. We should be aware of our interconnectedness and widen our horizons. It is crucial to note that one should not entirely disregard history, but rather learn about concepts and ideals from historical events in order to better our society.
Books, according to Emerson, may be damaging to society since they preserve decaying notions from the past. These ideologies are harmful to human beings, and men are afraid to speak out against them. He believes that books may suffocate a man’s creative thought process, but he also
believes that a book should be seen as a source of knowledge rather than a way of determining one’s thinking. He also discussed the importance of reading books as well as the pleasure that comes with it. He requests that he be free of old, bad notions and become a “Thinking Man”, a person who is open to new ideas.
Emerson then discusses what he considers to be the responsibilities of the American scholar. These responsibilities are democratic and personal. “Defer never to the popular cry,” he says, emphasizing the significance of “self-trust” for an intellectual and the necessity of rejecting what is trendy. He also encourages the intellectual to regard the world as a thing that he can create, rather than shrinking from it or thinking of oneself as a “protected class.” He criticizes the great man theory—the belief that only certain chosen individuals can transform society—and asserts that the job of the individual writer is as active and important as, if not more so, than that of a statesman: “The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history” (Paragraph 35).
Emerson returns to his immediate period in the concluding section of the essay. He finds reason for optimism in what others have bemoaned: society’s growing focus on the individual, as well as increased attention devoted to “the near, the low, and the common” (Paragraph 40). He says that “this time, like all times, is a very good one, if we only know what to do with it” (Paragraph 38), and that “the world is nothing, the man is all” (Paragraph 43). This final comment emphasizes his notion that the universe is in constant change and a mirror of man’s consciousness, rather than being a final, distinct object. As a result, the work of altering the world is entirely in the hands of the next generation; they may either think for themselves or mindlessly accept old norms and regulations.
4) His Influence on Later Thinkers:
Emerson’s work impacted not just his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but also future generations of thinkers and writers in the United States and across the globe. Nietzsche and William James, Emerson’s godson, are two notable intellectuals who acknowledge Emerson’s impact. There is no doubt that Emerson was the most influential writer in nineteenth-century America, yet he is now primarily the subject of academic debate. While Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and William James were all positive Emersonians, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James were denial Emersonians—despite their best efforts, they couldn’t escape the sage’s influence. Emerson’s articles were an”encumbrance” to T. S. Eliot. From 1914 through 1965, Waldo the Sage was overshadowed, but he reappeared in the work of famous American poets such as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane.
Harold Bloom refers to Emerson as “The Prophet of the American Religion” in his book The American Religion, which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely during Emerson’s lifetime, as well as mainline Protestant churches, which Bloom claims have become more gnostic in the
United States than their European counterparts. “The only analogous reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne,” Bloom writes in The Western Canon, comparing Emerson to Michel de Montaigne. Several of Emerson’s poems were featured in Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, however he claimed that none of them are as good as the best of Emerson’s writings, which Bloom categorized as “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “Experience,” and “nearly all of Conduct of Life.” Emerson’s poetry predicted Charles Olson’s views in his conviction that breath determines line lengths, rhythms, and phrases.
