Ralph Waldo Emerson

Early life, family, and education

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, to Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and his father's great-grandmother, Rebecca Waldo. He was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles. Three other children—Phoebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline—died in childhood. Emerson was of English ancestry, and his family had lived in New England since the early colonial period, with Ralph Waldo being a seventh-generation descendant of Mayflower voyagers John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley through their daughter Hope.

Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before young Ralph's eighth birthday. He was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, in particular, had a profound effect on him. She lived with the family on and off, and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863.

Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812, when he was nine years old. In October 1817, at age 14, Emerson entered Harvard College, where he was appointed freshman messenger for the college president, requiring him to fetch delinquent students and deliver messages to faculty. Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World". He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher working with his uncle Samuel and aunt Sarah Ripley in Waltham, Massachusetts.

By his senior year at Harvard, Emerson decided to go by his middle name, Waldo. He served as Class Poet, and as was the custom, he presented an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18. He did not stand out as a student, graduating in the exact middle of his class of 59 students.

In the early 1820s, Emerson worked as a teacher at the School for Young Ladies (which was run by his brother William). He next spent two years living in a cabin in the Canterbury section of Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he wrote and studied nature. In his honor, this area is now called Schoolmaster Hill in Boston's Franklin Park.

Early career

After Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William at a school for young women they established in their mother's house, after Waldo had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. When William went to Göttingen in Germany to study law in mid-1824, Ralph Waldo closed the school, but continued to teach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until early 1825. Emerson was accepted into the Harvard Divinity School in late 1824, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1828.

Emerson's brother Edward, two years younger than Waldo, entered the law office of Daniel Webster, after graduating from Harvard first in his class. Edward's physical health began to deteriorate, and he soon suffered a mental collapse as well; he was taken to McLean Asylum in June 1828 at age 25. Although he recovered his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834, apparently from long-standing tuberculosis. Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger brothers, Charles, born in 1808, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis, making him the third young person in Emerson's innermost circle to die in a period of a few years.

Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire, on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her two years later, when she was 18. The couple moved to Boston, and Emerson's mother, Ruth, moved with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already ill with tuberculosis.

Boston's Second Church invited Emerson to serve as its junior pastor, and he was ordained on January 11, 1829. His initial salary was $1,200 per year (equivalent to $36,281 in 2025), increasing to $1,400 in July. Along with his church role, Emerson took on other responsibilities: he served as the chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature, and was a member of the Boston School Committee. His church activities kept him busy during this period, and facing the imminent death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs.

Ellen Emerson died on February 8, 1831, at age 20, after uttering her last words, "I have not forgotten the peace and joy." Emerson was deeply affected by her death, and visited her grave in Roxbury daily. In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, he wrote, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin."

In the wake of his wife's death, Emerson began to disagree more openly with the church's approach to ministry, writing in his journal in June 1832, "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." His disagreements with church officials over the administration of the Communion service, and misgivings about public prayer, eventually led to his resignation in 1832. He wrote, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it." As one Emerson scholar has pointed out, "Doffing the decent black of the pastor, he was free to choose the gown of the lecturer and teacher, of the thinker not confined within the limits of an institution or a tradition."

Literary career and transcendentalism

On September 8, 1836, the day before the publication of Nature, Emerson met with Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley to plan periodic gatherings of other like-minded intellectuals. This was the beginning of the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the transcendentalism movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836. On September 1, 1837, women attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure that they would be present for the evening get-together. Fuller would prove to be an important figure in transcendentalism.

Emerson anonymously sent his first essay, "Nature", to James Munroe and Company to be published on September 9, 1836. A year later, on August 31, 1837, he delivered his now-famous Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar," then entitled "An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge"; it was renamed for a collection of essays (which included the first general publication of "Nature") in 1849. Friends urged him to publish the talk, and he did so at his own expense, in an edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a month. In the speech, Emerson declared literary independence in the United States and urged Americans to create a writing style all their own, free from Europe. James Russell Lowell, who was a student at Harvard at the time, called it "an event without former parallel on our literary annals". Another member of the audience, Reverend John Pierce, called it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible address".

In 1837, Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau. Though they had likely met as early as 1835, in the fall of 1837, Emerson asked Thoreau, "Do you keep a journal?" The question went on to be a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson's own journal was published in 16 large volumes, in the definitive Harvard University Press edition issued between 1960 and 1982. Some scholars consider the journal to be Emerson's key literary work.

In March 1837, Emerson gave a series of lectures on the philosophy of history at the Masonic Temple in Boston. This was the first time he managed a lecture series on his own, and it was the beginning of his career as a lecturer. The profits from this series of lectures were much larger than when he was paid by an organization to talk, and he continued to manage his own lectures often throughout his lifetime. He eventually gave as many as 80 lectures a year, traveling across the northern United States as far as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and California.

Philosophers Camp

In summer 1858, Emerson camped at Follensbee Pond in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York with nine others: Louis Agassiz, James Russell Lowell, John Holmes, Horatio Woodman, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Jeffries Wyman, Estes Howe, Amos Binney, and William James Stillman. Invited, but unable to make the trip, were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Charles Eliot Norton, all members of the Saturday Club (Boston, Massachusetts).

This social club was mostly a literary membership that met the last Saturday of the month at the Boston Parker House Hotel (Omni Parker House). William James Stillman was a painter and founding editor of an art journal called the Crayon. Stillman was born and grew up in Schenectady which was just south of the Adirondack mountains. He later traveled there to paint the wilderness landscape and to fish and hunt. He shared his experiences in this wilderness to the members of the Saturday Club, raising their interest in this unknown region.

James Russell Lowell and William Stillman led the effort to organize a trip to the Adirondacks. They began their journey on August 2, 1858, traveling by train, steamboat, stagecoach, and canoe guide boats. News that these cultured men were living like "Sacs and Sioux" in the wilderness appeared in newspapers across the nation. This became known as the "Philosophers Camp".

This event was a landmark in the nineteenth-century intellectual movement, linking nature with art and literature.

Although much has been written over many years by scholars and biographers of Emerson's life, little has been written of what has become known as the "Philosophers Camp" at Follensbee Pond. Yet, his epic poem "Adirondac" reads like a journal of his day-to-day detailed description of adventures in the wilderness with his fellow members of the Saturday Club. This two-week camping excursion (1858 in the Adirondacks) brought him face to face with a true wilderness, something he spoke of in his essay "Nature", published in 1836. He said, "in the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages".

Civil War years

Emerson was staunchly opposed to slavery, but he did not appreciate being in the public limelight and was hesitant about lecturing on the subject. In the years leading up to the Civil War, he did give a number of lectures, however, beginning as early as November 1837. A number of his friends and family members were more active abolitionists than he, at first, but from 1844 on he more actively opposed slavery. He gave a number of speeches and lectures, and welcomed John Brown to his home during Brown's visits to Concord. He voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, but was disappointed that Lincoln was more concerned about preserving the Union than eliminating slavery outright. Once the American Civil War broke out, Emerson made it clear that he believed in immediate emancipation of the slaves.

Around this time, in 1860, Emerson published The Conduct of Life, his seventh collection of essays. It "grappled with some of the thorniest issues of the moment," and "his experience in the abolition ranks is a telling influence in his conclusions." In these essays Emerson strongly embraced the idea of war as a means of national rebirth: "Civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution, [are] more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity."

Emerson visited Washington, D.C., at the end of January 1862. He gave a public lecture at the Smithsonian on January 31, 1862, and declared, "The South calls slavery an institution ... I call it destitution ... Emancipation is the demand of civilization". The next day, February 1, his friend Charles Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln was familiar with Emerson's work, having previously seen him lecture. Emerson's misgivings about Lincoln began to soften after this meeting. In 1865, he spoke at a memorial service held for Lincoln in Concord: "Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain as this has caused, or will have caused, on its announcement." Emerson also met a number of high-ranking government officials, including Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury; Edward Bates, the attorney general; Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war; Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy; and William Seward, the secretary of state.

On May 6, 1862, Emerson's protégé Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44. Emerson delivered his eulogy. He often referred to Thoreau as his best friend, despite a falling-out that began in 1849 after Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Another friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, died two years after Thoreau, in 1864. Emerson served as a pallbearer when Hawthorne was buried in Concord, as Emerson wrote, "in a pomp of sunshine and verdure".

Final years and death

Starting in 1867, Emerson's health began declining; he wrote much less in his journals. Beginning as early as the summer of 1871 or in the spring of 1872, he started experiencing memory problems and suffered from aphasia. By the end of the decade, he forgot his own name at times and, if asked how he felt, would respond "Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but am perfectly well".

In the spring of 1871, Emerson took a trip on the transcontinental railroad, barely two years after its completion. Along the way and in California he met a number of dignitaries, including Brigham Young during a stopover in Salt Lake City. Part of his California visit included a trip to Yosemite, and while there he met a young and unknown John Muir, a signature event in Muir's career.

Emerson's Concord home caught fire on July 24, 1872. He called for help from neighbors and, giving up on putting out the flames, all tried to save as many objects as possible. The fire was put out by Ephraim Bull Jr., the one-armed son of Ephraim Wales Bull. Donations were collected by friends to help the Emersons rebuild, including $5,000 gathered by Francis Cabot Lowell, another $10,000 collected by LeBaron Russell Briggs, and a personal donation of $1,000 from George Bancroft. Support for shelter was offered as well; though the Emersons ended up staying with family at the Old Manse, invitations came from Anne Lynch Botta, James Elliot Cabot, James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields. The fire marked an end to Emerson's serious lecturing career; from then on, he would lecture only on special occasions and only in front of familiar audiences.

While the house was being rebuilt, Emerson took a trip to England, continental Europe, and Egypt. He left on October 23, 1872, along with his daughter Ellen, while his wife Lidian spent time at the Old Manse and with friends. Emerson and his daughter Ellen returned to the United States on the ship Olympus along with friend Charles Eliot Norton on April 15, 1873. Emerson's return to Concord was celebrated by the town, and school was canceled that day.

In late 1874, Emerson published an anthology of poetry entitled Parnassus, which included poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Caroline Dorr, Jean Ingelow, Lucy Larcom, Jones Very, as well as Thoreau and several others. Originally, the anthology had been prepared as early as the fall of 1871, but it was delayed when the publishers asked for revisions.

Lifestyle and beliefs

Emerson's religious views were often considered radical at the time. He believed that all things are connected to God and, therefore, all things are divine. Critics believed that Emerson was removing the central God figure; as Henry Ware Jr. said, Emerson was in danger of taking away "the Father of the Universe" and leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum". Emerson was partly influenced by German philosophy and Biblical criticism. His views, the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to reveal the truth, but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly from nature. When asked his religious belief, Emerson stated, "I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the 'still, small voice', and that voice is Christ within us."

Emerson was a supporter of the spread of community libraries in the 19th century, having this to say of them: "Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom."

Emerson had romantic interest in various women throughout his life, including Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis.

Race and slavery

Emerson did not become an ardent abolitionist until 1844, though his journals show he was concerned with slavery beginning in his youth, even dreaming about helping to free slaves. In June 1856, shortly after Charles Sumner, a United States Senator, was beaten for his staunch abolitionist views, Emerson lamented that he himself was not as committed to the cause. He wrote, "There are men who as soon as they are born take a bee-line to the axe of the inquisitor. ... Wonderful the way in which we are saved by this unfailing supply of the moral element". After Sumner's attack, Emerson began to speak out about slavery. "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom", he said at a meeting at Concord that summer. Emerson used slavery as an example of a human injustice, especially in his role as a minister. In early 1838, provoked by the murder of an abolitionist publisher from Alton, Illinois, named Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Emerson gave his first public antislavery address. As he said, "It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live". John Quincy Adams said the mob-murder of Lovejoy "sent a shock as of any earthquake throughout this continent". However, Emerson maintained that reform would be achieved through moral agreement rather than by militant action. By August 1, 1844, at a lecture in Concord, he stated more clearly his support for the abolitionist movement: "We are indebted mainly to this movement, and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics".

Emerson is often known as one of the most liberal democratic thinkers of his time who believed that through the democratic process, slavery should be abolished. While being an avid abolitionist who was known for his criticism of the legality of slavery, Emerson struggled with the implications of race. Early in life, Emerson expressed explicitly racist views, including claims of Black intellectual inferiority, even as he also condemned slavery. His later antislavery activism developed alongside, and sometimes in tension with, these earlier racial assumptions. Many critics believe that it was his views on race that inhibited him from becoming an abolitionist earlier in his life and also inhibited him from being more active in the antislavery movement. Much of his early life, he was silent on the topic of race and slavery. Not until he was well into his 30s did Emerson begin to publish writings on race and slavery, and not until he was in his late 40s and 50s did he become known as an antislavery activist.

During his early life, Emerson seemed to develop a hierarchy of races based on faculty to reason, i.e. whether African slaves were demonstrably equal to white men in their ability to reason. In a journal entry written in 1822, Emerson wrote about a personal observation: "I saw ten, twenty, a hundred large lipped, lowbrowed black men in the streets who, except in the mere matter of language, did not exceed the sagacity of the elephant. Now is it true that these were created superior to this wise animal, and designed to control it? And in comparison with the highest orders of men, the Africans will stand so low as to make the difference which subsists between themselves & the sagacious beasts inconsiderable."

Legacy

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord—became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, commented in his book My Study Windows (1871), that Emerson was not only the "most steadily attractive lecturer in America," but also "one of the pioneers of the lecturing system." Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had "a defect in the region of the heart" and a "self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name", though he later admitted Emerson was "a great man". Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted Emerson's ability to influence and inspire others: "the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes".

Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson's influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson's godson. There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial—while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence. To T. S. Eliot, Emerson's essays were an "encumbrance". Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as "The prophet of the American Religion", which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson's lifetime, but also to mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts. In The Western Canon, Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: "The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne." Several of Emerson's poems were included in Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson's essays, which Bloom listed as "Self-Reliance", "Circles", "Experience", and "nearly all of Conduct of Life". In his belief that line lengths, rhythms, and phrases are determined by breath, Emerson's poetry foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson.

Namesakes

The following were named after or in honor of Emerson:

Harvard's philosophy department is housed in Emerson Hall (1900).

In May 2006, 168 years after Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address", Harvard Divinity School announced the establishment of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Professorship.

Author Ralph Waldo Ellison

Two-time F1, CART, and Indianapolis 500 winner Emerson Fittipaldi

The Emerson String Quartet, formed in 1976

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize is awarded annually by The Concord Review to high school students for essays on historical subjects.

The Emerson Collective, a company devoted to social change

Emerson Street in Napier, New Zealand

The town of Emerson, New Jersey

Emerson Community Charter School in Los Angeles, California

Selected works

Collections

Essays: First Series (1841)

Essays: Second Series (1844)

Poems (1847)

Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849)

Representative Men (1850)

English Traits (1856)

The Conduct of Life (1860)

May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Society and Solitude (1870)

Natural History of the Intellect: the last lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson Archived September 30, 2020, at the Wayback Machine (1871)

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

Individual essays

"Nature" (1836)

"Self-Reliance" (Essays: First Series)

"Compensation" (First Series)

"The Over-Soul" (First Series)

"Circles" (First Series)

"The Poet" (Essays: Second Series)

"Experience" (Essays: Second Series)

"Politics" (Second Series)

"Saadi" in the Atlantic Monthly (1864)

Musical settings of Emerson's works

Emerson's "Concord Hymn", written for Concord's Independence Day celebration on July 4, 1837, was on this occasion both read and sung as a hymn by a local choir, using the then-familiar tune "Old Hundredth".

Charles Ives has set a fragment from Emerson's poem "Voluntaries" (a tribute to the soldiers fighting for the Union) as a song entitled Duty, included in his collection for voice and piano 114 Songs (1919–24).

Ernst Toch has set Emerson's poem "Good-Bye" as the sixth and final movement of his work The Inner Circle, for mixed chorus a cappella (1945, revised 1953).

Three fragments from Emerson's essay Spiritual Laws (in Essays: First Series, 1841) form the backbone of Kaija Saariaho's True Fire for baritone and orchestra (2014), a work that collages texts from various sources. The work's title is taken from the essay's final sentence, that concludes also the setting: "We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises."