Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister in a famous line of ministers. He gradually drifted from the doctrines of his peers, then formulated and first expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his essay Nature.

When he was three years old, Emerson's father complained that the child could not read well enough. Then in 1811, when Emerson was eight years old, his father died. He attended Boston Latin School. In October 1817, at the age of 14, Emerson went to Harvard University and was appointed President's Freshman, a position which gave him a room free of charge. He waited at Commons, which reduced the cost of his board to one quarter, and he received a scholarship. He added to his slender means by tutoring and by teaching during the winter vacations at his Uncle Ripley's school in Waltham, Massachusetts.

After Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821, he assisted his brother in a school for young ladies established in their mother's house; when his brother went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school. Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, then went to Harvard Divinity School, and emerged as a Unitarian minister in 1829. A dispute with church officials over the administration of the Communion service, and misgivings about public prayer led to his resignation in 1832. A year earlier his young wife and reputed one true love, Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, died in April 1831.

It is not known how many children he had, but he had at least one son and one daughter. It is known that he travelled with her to Europe in his old age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is distantly related to Charles Wesley Emerson, founder and namesake of Emerson College. Both were Unitarian ministers; Charles was a family name in Ralph Waldo Emerson's family. Their great ancestor, Thomas Emerson, immigrant, settled as early as 1640 in Ipswich, Massachusettts, and was the progenitor of a family of ministers and learned men.

In 1832–33, Emerson toured Europe, a trip that he would later write about in English Traits (1856). During this trip, he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. Emerson maintained a correspondence with Carlyle until the latter's death in 1881. He served as Carlyle's agent in the U.S.

His travels to Europe (three travels) were not to England only; he also visited France (in 1848), Italy, and the Middle East.

In 1835, Emerson bought a house on the Cambridge Turnpike, in Concord, Massachusetts. He quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town. He also married his second wife Lydia Jackson there. He called her Lidian and she called him Mr Emerson. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith and Edward Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named for his first wife, at the suggestion of Lidian.

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Literary career

In September 1836, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement, but didn't publish its journal The Dial, until July 1840. Emerson published his first essay, Nature, anonymously in September 1836. While it became the foundation for Transcendentalism, many people at the time assumed it to be a work of Swedenborgianism.

In 1838 he was invited back to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School, for the school's graduation address, which came to be known as his Divinity School Address. His remarks managed to outrage the establishment and shock the whole Protestant community at the time, as he proclaimed that while Jesus was a great man, he was not God. For this, he was denounced as an atheist, and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of his critics, he made no reply, leaving it to others for his defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another 40 years, but by the mid-1880s his position had become standard Unitarian doctrine.

Early in 1842, Emerson lost his first son, Waldo, to scarlet fever. Emerson wrote about his grief in two major works: the poem "Threnody", and the essay "Experience." In the same year, William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather.

Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in New England and the rest of the country outside of the South. During several scheduled appearances that he was not able to make, Frederick Douglass took his place. Emerson spoke on a wide variety of subjects. Many of his essays grew out of his lectures.

Emerson associated closely with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau and often took walks with them in Concord. Emerson encouraged Thoreau's talent and early career. The land on which Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond belonged to Emerson. While Thoreau was living at Walden, Emerson provided food and hired Thoreau to perform odd jobs. When Thoreau left Walden after two years' time, it was to live at the Emerson house while Emerson was away on a lecture tour. Their close relationship fractured after Emerson gave Thoreau the poor advice to publish his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, without extensive drafts, and directed Thoreau to his own agent who made Thoreau split the price/risk of publishing. The book was a flop, and put Thoreau heavily into debt. Eventually the two would reconcile some of their differences, although Thoreau privately accused Emerson of having drifted from his original philosophy, and Emerson began to view Thoreau as a misanthrope. Emerson's eulogy to Thoreau is largely credited with the latter's negative reputation during the 19th century.

Emerson was noted as being a very abstract and difficult writer who nevertheless drew large crowds for his speeches. The heart of Emerson's writing was his direct observations in his journals, which he started keeping as a teenager at Harvard. The journals were elaborately indexed by Emerson. Emerson went back to his journals, his bank of experiences and ideas, and took out relevant passages, which were joined together in his dense, concentrated lectures. He later revised and polished his lectures for his essays and sermons.

He was considered one of the great orators of the time, a man who could enrapture crowds with his deep voice, his enthusiasm, and his egalitarian respect for his audience. His outspoken, uncompromising support for abolitionism later in life caused protest and jeers from crowds when he spoke on the subject. He continued to speak on abolition without concern for his popularity and with increasing radicalism. He attempted, with difficulty, not to join the public arena as a member of any group or movement, and always retained a stringent independence that reflected his individualism. He always insisted that he wanted no followers, but sought to give man back to himself, as a self-reliant individual. Asked to sum up his work late in life, he said it was his doctrine of "the infinitude of the private man" that remained central.

In 1845, Emerson's Journal records that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas.Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay, "The Over Soul":

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

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Montaigne strongly influenced Emerson by his early reading of the French essayist. From those compositions he took the conversational, subjective style and the loss of belief in a personal God. He never read Kant's works, but, instead, relied on Coleridge's interpretation of the German Transcendental Idealist. This led to Emerson's non-traditional ideas of soul and God.

Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

 

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

A great man is always willing to be little.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

All diseases run into one, old age.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

All life is an experiment.

All mankind love a lover.

All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Be an opener of doors.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Children are all foreigners.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

Earth laughs in flowers.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

He builded better than he knew; the conscious stone to beauty grew.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Men are what their mothers made them.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Money often costs too much.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Nature hates calculators.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

New York is a sucked orange.

Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Reality is a sliding door.

Revolutions go not backward.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The first wealth is health.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

The years teach much which the days never knew.

Then beauty is its own excuse for being.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

To be great is to be misunderstood.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

We are wiser than we know.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.

What you do speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late

 

::nods:: His best essays, imho, are The Over Soul, Divinity School Address, and Self Reliance.

 

This is a nice thread. I ordered two of Emerson's books at the library. Looking for what he wrote on Transcendentalism. Any ideas on what is the best book to buy?

 

some people need to bring their children up a little outside of the norm for sure, but to send them away to a kibbutz with all that war? I mean, its a little like twelve monkeys where hes the sick puppy; but we're all sick because of that sort of mentality you find outside movie concerts and in hotel suites with a hooker perhaps or a line of coke. seriously you guys you should read chronicles of z you can find it from chris butcher's website online somewhere but don't trust me on it. look around. i know some graf magz you can't find in cornwall that the peeps round my block would love to look at as well as some proper graf [soz if any council peeps are on this but it could reverse back or forward to caveman times any day if god doesn't work out his ego [punchline] revert back to...] or yeah lifesize on mine walls perhaps...please skip i've got to keep going no matter how hard it takes me!!!

and another thing, it dont tak e pain to make a man, it takes a father.

 

♥ ♣ :sunny: I Absolutely Love Emerson's & Thoreau's Writings! ♥ They Are Both Profoundly Wise & Poetic... & Their Emotions & Beautiful Spiritually Detailed Descriptions Of Mother Earth & Verdant Nature :daisy: & Beloved Divine Animals... While Strolling & Meditating Nature Are Deeply & Wonderfully Mystical! ♥ ALL Of Their Writings Are Filled With Spiritual Wizdoms! :sunny: ♣ ♥