Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction

Known by his middle name Waldo, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a well-known American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who was a key figure in the transcendentalist movement in the middle of the 19th century. He became well-known for promoting independence and critical thought and for being a sharp critic of conformity and social forces. "The most gifted of the Americans," according to Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walt Whitman considered him to be his "master." Following his break from mainstream theological and social views, Emerson articulated transcendentalism in his essay "Nature" in 1836.

He delivered the seminal speech "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence." The foundation of Emerson's philosophical contributions are his two collections of essays, "Essays: First Series" (1841) and "Essays: Second Series" (1844), which he wrote after first crafting the majority of his important works as lectures and then polishing them for publication.

Early Years

Born in Newbury, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the son of Unitarian pastor Rev. William Emerson and Ruth Haskins. His paternal great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo and maternal uncle Ralph inspired his name. Together with his brothers William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles, Emerson was the second of five surviving sons. Sadly, Phoebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline were the three additional siblings who died when they were still small. Emerson was of English descent, deriving from the Mayflower voyagers John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley through a matriarchal lineage. Her mitochondrial DNA was passed down to him. Emerson's roots stretched back to early colonial New England.

Emerson was left in the care of his mother and the dependable ladies in the family when his father passed away from stomach cancer in 1811, shortly before Emerson turned eight years old. He was greatly influenced by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who was also very important in his upbringing. Emerson was fourteen when he enrolled in Harvard College in 1817, having started his official education at the Boston Latin School in 1812. In his junior year, he started a journal titled "Wide World" and started recording the books he read. Emerson took on a variety of tasks, including working as a courier at Harvard to help pay his bills. He changed his name to Waldo during his last year and graduated in 1821, placing him in the center of his class of 59 students.

After graduating, Emerson worked as a teacher at his brother William's School for Young Ladies. He then lived in a cottage in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for two years, where he wrote and studied the natural world. He went through a formative stage while residing in this cabin in Boston's Franklin Park, which is today called Schoolmaster Hill. Due to his deteriorating health in 1826, Emerson moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and then St. Augustine, Florida, in search of a milder climate. He became friendly with Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Prince Achille Murat, in St. Augustine, and they had insightful conversations on philosophy, politics, culture, and religion. Emerson said that Murat had a big impact on his growth as a thinker.

When Emerson went to a Bible Society meeting that was held in conjunction with a slave sale while he was living in St. Augustine, he had a seminal experience with slavery. He caught the contradiction of the occasion by pointing out the sharp contrast between the happy news inside and the unpleasant auction outside.

Early Career

Ralph Waldo Emerson helped his brother William run a school for young women after graduating from Harvard. The school was first started in their mother's home and subsequently relocated to Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo dissolved the school in the middle of 1824 when William left to study law in Göttingen, although he carried on teaching in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until the beginning of 1825. Emerson was admitted to Harvard Divinity School in late 1824, and in 1828, he was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating top in his class from Harvard, his younger brother Edward worked as an attorney for Daniel Webster, but he struggled with his physical and mental health. In June 1828, at the age of 25, he was admitted to McLean Asylum. Edward made a mental recovery, but in 1834, he passed away from TB.

During this time, Emerson experienced substantial upheavals in his personal life. On Christmas Day of 1827, he married Ellen Louisa Tucker, whom he had met the previous year in Concord, New Hampshire. After the couple relocated to Boston, Ruth, Emerson's mother, went with them to assist in caring for Ellen, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Sadly, Ellen died on February 8, 1831, less than two years later, at the age of 20. Emerson was so devastated by her passing that he opened her coffin and visited her grave every day, as he wrote in his journal.

Emerson was ordained in January 1829 after being asked to take on the role of junior pastor at Boston's Second Church. Emerson's views started to wane despite his active participation in church activities, which included acting as the Massachusetts legislature's chaplain. This was especially true in light of his wife's approaching death. His objections to church traditions, especially those related to public prayer and Communion service, grew worse after Ellen passed away. Emerson left the church in 1832, writing in his notebook that he was finding the ministry out of date and at odds with his changing views.

After leaving the church, Emerson traveled throughout Europe in 1833 and wrote about his experiences in "English Traits" (1856). He traveled to Italy, where he visited Voltaire's house in Ferney and got to know John Stuart Mill. He read the works of writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle while in England; the latter had a big impact. After arriving back in America in October 1833, Emerson stayed in Newton, Massachusetts, with his mother until he relocated to Concord in October 1834 to take up residence at The Old Manse with his step-grandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley.

Emerson saw a chance for a career as a speaker at Concord, where the growing Lyceum movement offered a venue for talks. His first lecture, "The Uses of Natural History," which he gave in Boston on November 5, 1833, signaled the start of an active lecturing career. He proposed to Lydia Jackson in January 1835, and the two were hitched in July. Emerson became well-known in Concord after he purchased a home there and gave it the name Bush. His ability to sustain his expanding family was made possible by his changing financial circumstances as well as a legacy from the family of his first wife. In 1834 and 1837, he received large sums of money that gave him financial security.

Civil War

Though he was first cautious to lecture on slavery, Ralph Waldo Emerson became more vocal in his opposition to it in the years preceding the Civil War. He was more ardent abolitionist than he was at first, his friends and family were, but starting in 1844, he began to take a more aggressive stand against slavery. During abolitionist John Brown's travels to Concord, Emerson hosted Brown at his home and gave speeches and lectures. He supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential contest, although he was dissatisfied with Lincoln's apparent preference for upholding the Union over outright abolishing slavery.

Emerson made it obvious when the Civil War started that he supported the rapid freedom of slaves. His sixth collection of writings, "The Conduct of Life," which explored modern themes and firmly embraced the notion of war as a tool for a country's rebirth, was released in 1860. During his January 1862 visit to Washington, D.C., Emerson gave a public speech at the Smithsonian and said, "The South calls slavery an institution; I call it destitution." Liberation is what society requires." When he met President Abraham Lincoln the following day, his early reservations about the latter started to fade.

During a Lincoln memorial ceremony in Concord in 1865, Emerson gave a speech in which he discussed the deep effects of Lincoln's passing on the country. During this time, Emerson also met a number of prominent government figures, including William Seward, Edward Bates, Edwin M. Stanton, Gideon Welles, and Salmon P. Chase. Henry David Thoreau, Emerson's close friend and protégé, died of TB on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44. Although the two had fallen out, their falling out started in 1849, when Emerson gave Thoreau's eulogy. Two years later, in 1864, Emerson assisted in carrying Nathaniel Hawthorne's casket during his funeral in Concord.

Life Style

A strong bond with nature, independence, and spirituality defined Ralph Waldo Emerson's distinctive lifestyle and views. His early 19th-century philosophical movement, transcendentalism, provided the foundation for his radical religious convictions. Emerson's philosophy placed a strong emphasis on how everything is related to God. He said that everything is divine since everything is related to God and that he perceived a spiritual presence in the natural world. Critics accused him of eliminating the conventional central character of God as a result of this viewpoint. For example, Emerson was perceived by Henry Ware Jr. as undermining the idea of "the Father of the Universe" and leaving behind "but a company of children in an orphan asylum."

Emerson's Transcendentalist beliefs, which were influenced by German philosophy and Biblical criticism, proposed that people may intuitively experience truth directly from nature without the use of conventional religious intermediaries. In response to a question concerning his religious views, Emerson said he was "more of a Quaker than anything else," citing his conviction in the existence of a "still, small voice" and recognizing it as the presence of Christ within each of us.

Emerson, who saw community libraries as archival spaces for knowledge and insight from antiquity, was a fervent advocate for their growth in the nineteenth century. He viewed libraries as priceless tools that gathered the thoughts of the brightest and most perceptive minds from all nations and eras. Emerson had a number of romantic partners in his private life, including Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis. Notably, between the ages of 14 and 16, in his early Harvard years, he composed sensual poetry about a student named Martin-Gay.

Emerson's way of life and convictions were characterized by a dedication to individuality, a profound respect for nature, and a spiritual philosophy that aimed to establish a direct line of communication between the divine and the human experience through intuition and experience.

Slavery and Race

Ralph Waldo Emerson's opinions on slavery and race changed throughout time, capturing the nuanced intellectual and social currents of his day. Though his notebooks reveal that he had misgivings about slavery from an early age, even dreaming about helping free slaves, he did not become an enthusiastic abolitionist until 1844.

Early views on race by Emerson seemed to imply a hierarchy based on perceived reason, raising doubts about the intellectual equality of African slaves and white men. In his early years, he first took a somewhat muted stand on the subject of race and slavery. But in his 30s, he started writing about it, and in his late 40s and early 50s, he started to participate in the antislavery movement actively.

Demise

Ralph Waldo Emerson stopped writing in his journals in 1867 when his health started to deteriorate. He began to have memory loss and aphasia by the summer or spring of 1871. His condition grew worse over the decade, sometimes to the point that he forgot his name. He expressed optimism in spite of these difficulties, saying, "Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but I am perfectly well."

Emerson traveled in the spring of 1871 on the newly finished transcontinental railroad when he saw a young John Muir in Yosemite and met leaders such as Brigham Young. Sadly, tragedy struck when Emerson's Concord house caught fire in July 1872. Despite efforts by neighbors to assist, the house sustained significant damage. The Emersons were able to rebuild with the abundance of support from friends like Francis Cabot Lowell and George Bancroft.

After the fire, Emerson stopped giving lectures on a regular basis and limited his speaking engagements to exceptional events and gatherings of close friends. He and his daughter Ellen visited England, continental Europe, and Egypt while his home was being rebuilt; they returned to the United States in April 1873. Concord celebrated Emerson's return by calling off classes that day.

Thoreau's poetry was featured in Emerson's "Parnassus," a collection of poems published towards the end of 1874. His memory issues became embarrassingly obvious, and by 1879, he had stopped making public appearances. Because of his memory problems and trouble finding words, Emerson turned down invitations.

As Emerson's condition worsened, it was discovered that he had pneumonia in April 1882. Ralph Waldo Emerson died on April 27, 1882, six days later. In Concord, Massachusetts' Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, he was laid to rest donning a white robe bestowed upon him by American sculptor Daniel Chester French. Although Emerson's passing signaled the end of an era, his influence as a key figure in American philosophy and literature persisted.