Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Essayist, poet, and lecturer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The son of a Unitarian minister, he was eight years old when his father died leaving six young children. At age 14 he entered Harvard, where he ran messages for the president and worked as a waiter. He also began the journal that he kept up for 50 years, the source of many of his poems, essays, and lectures. Unhappy teaching (1821–5), he tried the Divinity School in Cambridge, MA, and in 1826 began to guest preach in Unitarian pulpits, but his liberal ideas led him to break with the Unitarians (1832). He went to Europe where he sought out many of the major literary-intellectual figures, in particular Thomas Carlyle, his lifelong correspondent, and began to develop his own philosophy, a compound of German idealism, Neo-Platonism, Asian mysticism, and Swedenborgianism.

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Ocultar artículoBack in America (1833) he took up guest preaching again, but he gradually abandoned that for public lectures. His first wife having died (1831), he remarried (1835) and settled in Concord, MA where he spent mornings writing and afternoons walking in the woods and fields. He enjoyed his four children, and among his circle of friends was Henry David Thoreau. His famous Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard (1837), ‘The American Scholar’, was a humanist manifesto, stressing Americans’ distinctive traits, and in place of traditional Christianity he subscribed to a philosophy known as Transcendentalism, stressing the ties of humans to nature. Hardly an activist, he did support the abolitionists and the Civil War.

Although he published many volumes of essays and poetry, including Nature (1836), Representative Man (1850), and The Conduct of Life (1860), his main source of income as well as of his popular reputation came from the lectures that he gave throughout America and in England. He made a final trip to Europe and Egypt (1872–3), and continued to lecture and publish, but his mind clouded over during his final decade. Never accepted solely as a poet, philosopher, or creative writer, he has survived as one of America’s most unique voices and influences.

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