RALPH WALDO EMERSON

(1803-1882)

Better than anyone before him, Emerson expressed the advantages of a young land—its freedom from the old, corrupt, and moribund thought and customs of Europe; its access to higher laws directly through nature rather than indirectly through books and the teachings of the past; its energy; and its opportunity to reform the world.

Emerson was one of those rare writers who appealed both to intellectuals and to the general public. He helped open the door between the commonplace and "uncivilized" world of nineteenth-century America and the realm of philosophical and religious truth, in this way, he influenced contemporaries such as Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, each of whom claimed a slightly different aspect of the crude and rich American experience for subject matter. His influence has continued into the twentieth century and can be seen, among other places, in Robert Frost's simple nature lyrics and in Wallace Stevens’ philosophical poems.

Emerson's influence on the popular mind— spread through the thousands of lectures he gave throughout the United States during a long career—was equally strong. He had something of a reputation for being difficult to understand and, partly as a result of this, was considered "good for you" in a cultural sense. In fact, though, Emerson's lectures were usually quite understandable.

Emerson's work is often "plain" in the sense that he offers a perfectly understandable surface, though there is much substance beneath it. His essays sometimes appear to be collections of memorable sentences rather than organized expositions of thought.

But in some ways, this style was appropriate to a lecture. If one sentence was unclear, the listener need only wait for the next one, which might contain thought enough to consider for the entire evening.

No one had to delve deeply into Emerson's philosophy to respond to such confident optimism. Whether or not Emerson intended it, that sentence served equally well as a motto for businessmen and as an encouragement to a young man to go off and live alone in the woods. Oddly, despite his great influence, it is difficult even to classify what kind of writer Emerson was. Essayist is too limited; philosopher is too broad. The best term, perhaps, is poet, not in the sense of versifier, but in the sense Melville intended when he wrote that Benjamin Franklin was "everything but a poet."

This poet was born in Boston in 1803 to a family that was cultured, but poor. When he was only eight years old, his father, a Unitarian minister, died of tuberculosis. His mother was left with four growing boys to care for. A fifth son was mentally retarded and raised by relatives. Mrs. Emerson opened a boardinghouse and depended on the generosity of the Church. The father's place in the lives of the Emerson children was taken by their aunt.

Despite Aunt Mary's example of self-reliance in the family, every step of Emerson's own life had been laid out for him from an early age. He was to go to Harvard and become a minister like his father and the seven generations of Emerson’s before him. Emerson uncomfortably obeyed. His life consisted of a series of attempts to establish his own identity against this background of expectation.

When he was fourteen, Emerson entered Harvard, He was an indifferent student, especially weak at science and mathematics, but he read widely in philosophy and theology. The most significant events of his college career occurred during his junior year. He dropped the name Ralph, a gesture toward establishing his identity, and he began keeping a journal. Eventually reaching monumental proportions (the published version consists of fourteen volumes), that journal would be the source of Emerson's lectures and essays for the rest of his life.

Emerson's academic record at Harvard was so weak that upon graduation he failed to get a teaching post in the prestigious Boston Public Latin School. Instead, he took a teaching job at a school run by his uncle, and he prepared himself, with many doubts, for the Unitarian ministry. In 1826, he was licensed to preach. Three years later, at the age of twenty six, he accepted a post at Boston's Second Church, which had been Cotton Mather's church a century before. That year, he married Ellen Tucker, a beautiful but fragile seventeen-year-old already in the early stages of tuberculosis. Sixteen months later Ellen died.

In June of 1832, he shocked his congregation by resigning the ministry and setting off for an extended tour of Europe. Long influenced by European thinkers, Emerson had read the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and admired the writings of British historian Thomas Carlyle, who was in Scotland thundering out calls for individual greatness and denouncing the evils of modern society. Emerson had also read the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From Kant he would adopt the term transcendentalism; from Coleridge he would take up the crucial distinction between logical thought and intuition, a poetic form of thought that enables us to see the correspondences between the physical world and spiritual reality. In Europe Emerson met and conversed with Coleridge and Wordsworth, and he visited Carlyle at his remote farmhouse.

When he returned to America in 1834, Emerson settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and soon married Lydia Jackson. He began to supplement his meager income by giving lectures. In fact, lie found in the lectern "a second pulpit" as he wrote Carlyle. After a short time, the major works by which we have come to know Emerson's thought began to appear.

The announced subject of Emerson's first series of lectures was the philosophy of history. Emerson's view was distinctively American, in that he denied the importance of the past. "The ancients are dead," he said in one of these early lectures, "but for us the earth is new today and heaven is raining influences. Let us unfetter ourselves of our historical associations and find a pure standard in the idea of man."

The last phrase points to Emerson's focus on the nature of our humanity—a subject that really interested him more in these lectures than any philosophy of history. Individual men and women were part of this "idea of man" in the same way that individual souls were part of a larger entity, which Emerson would later call the "Over-Soul."

The idea of nature corresponded to the idea of man—both were part of a universal whole. In 1836, there occurred three major events in Emerson's life: the publication of Nature, the most complete exposition of his philosophy; the birth of his son Waldo, who would become the center of Emerson's life; and the first meeting of a conversation group of like-minded thinkers in Emerson's drawing room, which would come to be called “The Transcendental Club”.

Over the following years, Emerson's influence as a lecturer and an intellectual leader continued to grow. In 1837, he excited his student audience at Harvard with the lecture now known as "The American Scholar." In the speech, Emerson demanded that American scholars free themselves from the shackles of the past. "Our day of dependence," Emerson declared, "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." He reminded scholars of the importance of the present and of things that were apparently insignificant. Since all things are part of a larger whole, even the commonest matters could open a door to the eternal.

A year later, in 1838, he was invited back to Harvard by a small group of divinity students to speak, to them on the eve of their graduation. His speech—"The Divinity School Address"— called for a rejection of institutional religion in favor of a personal relation with God.

This lecture so outraged Harvard authorities (who seized on what they thought was its denial of the divinity of Christ) that three decades passed before Emerson was allowed to speak there again.

By this time, Emerson’s life had settled into a consistent pattern: an ever-widening series of lecture tours, punctuated by the publication of his lectures in essay form. Essays appeared in 1841; Essays: Second Series in 1844; Representative Men in 1850. There was something for everyone in his lectures and essays, but especially for the legions of people who were disappointed with the narrowing material or spiritual condition of their lives.

That optimism was dealt a severe blow in 1842 when Emerson's son Waldo died at the age of six from scarlet fever. Emerson was profoundly moved. By nature a rather cold, restrained man, he had found in Waldo someone to whom he could demonstrate his love directly and unaffectedly. At the child's death, Emerson shrank back into an emotional shell from which he never reemerged. "How can I hope for a friend," he wrote in his journal during his middle years, "who have never been one?"

In his later years, Emerson suffered from a severe loss of memory and had difficulty recalling the most ordinary words. This affliction resulted in his increasing public silence, and when he did appear in public, he read from notes. Near the end of his life, agreeing to such a performance, he remarked, "A queer occasion it will be—a lecturer who has no idea of what he is lecturing about, and an audience who don't know what he can mean."

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