Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is perhaps best remembered today as a nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalist who wrote influential essays such as “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” and “Experience,” and who occupied a prominent public position in the formation of literary and philosophical modes particular to the United States.  He was one of the first American writers to be recognized by British and European literary authorities.  It is helpful to remember that Emerson represents an eastern, upper class, progressive sector of the U.S. in the nineteenth century, and that his writings can be read in the context of early American nation building and defining.

In addition to his essays, Emerson was a poet, minister, and orator.  His work engages the role of the individual in society, and advocates that individual experience and perception be brought to bear on questions of morality, spirituality, or epistemology.  Emerson came to these ideas through his own experience and study: he was educated both at Boston Latin school and by his aunt Mary Moody Emerson after his father died in 1811, and followed nine generations of his family to study at Harvard and Harvard Divinity School in 1825.

After a period of questioning traditional approaches to spirituality he found in the Unitarian Church, Emerson resigned from the ministry six years after he was ordained.  This resignation accompanied personal tragedy: the death of his first wife Ellen Tucker in 1830.  With Tucker’s inheritance, Emerson travelled to Europe, met prominent writers and philosophers, and visited the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The experience of observing the natural objects and classification system displayed at the museum contributed to Emerson’s interest in naturalist orientations to scientific investigation.

Daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson remembers walks with her father as a child when he pointed out specific characteristics, scents, sounds, and categories of flora and fauna, such as the fennel-like “Solidago odera” of a certain type of golden-rod at Flint’s Pond; though the children despised the botanical names, Tucker Emerson recalls, “he never failed to give them” (159).  Tucker Emerson was one of four children born after Emerson’s marriage to Lidian Jackson in 1835; the family lived in Concord, Massachusetts among the community of public intellectuals, writers, and social activists Emerson cultivated that congregated and debated ideas on his grounds.

With his residence in Concord as a base, Emerson wrote and lectured widely, participated in the Transcendental Club, edited the journal The Dial, and spoke against slavery.  His valuation of individual experience, his attention to observing and recording natural processes and plant and animal characteristics, and his sustained critique of established literary, religious, and educational institutions of his period form the basis of his literary orientation. (BH)

Works Consulted:

Bosco, Ronald A. and Joel Myerson, eds. Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2003.

Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994.