Ralph Waldo Emerson for APSDC..
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April
27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an
American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and
poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion
of individualism and
critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing
pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the
Americans," and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".
Emerson gradually moved away from his
contemporaries' religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating
and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, "Nature".
Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar," in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's
"intellectual Declaration of Independence".
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as
lectures, first, and then, revised them for print. His first two collections of
essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of
his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul,”
"Circles,” "The Poet,” and "Experience". Together, with "Nature", these
essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most
fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed
philosophical tenets,
but rather, by developing certain ideas, such as individuality, freedom, the
ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between
the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more
philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe
is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who
"took a more pantheist or pandeist approach,
by rejecting views of God as separate from the world".
He remains among the linchpins of
the American romantic movement,and his work has greatly influenced the
thinkers, writers, and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures,"
he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
private man." Emerson is also well-known as a mentor and friend
of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow Transcendentalist.
Early life, family, and education:
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. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons. Emerson
was of English ancestry, and his family had been in New England since
the early colonial period, with Emerson 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 Emerson's eighth birthday. Emerson 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 off and on 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. In
October 1817, at age 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and
was appointed freshman messenger for the president, requiring Emerson to fetch
delinquent students and send 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 Waldoas 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, Emerson decided
to go by his middle name, Emerson served as Class Poet; as was 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 and graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 people.
In the early 1820s, Emerson was 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.
In 1826, faced with poor health,
Emerson went to seek a warmer climate. He first went to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the
weather was still too cold. He then went farther south to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach
and began writing poetry. While in St. Augustine he made the acquaintance
of Prince Achille Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. The two engaged in enlightening
discussions of religion, society, philosophy, and government. Emerson
considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education.
While in St. Augustine, Emerson had
his first encounter with slavery.
At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society while
a slave auction was taking place in the yard outside. He wrote, "One ear
therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled
with 'Going, gentlemen, going!'"
Ralph Waldo Emerson 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 met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire, on
Christmas Day, 1827,
and married her when she was 18 two years later. The couple moved to
Boston, with Emerson's mother, Ruth, moving with them to help take care of
Ellen, who was already ill with tuberculosis. Less than two years after
that, on February 8, 1831, Ellen died, at age 20, after uttering her last
words, "I have not forgotten the peace and joy." Emerson was
strongly 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."
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 $34,335 in 2023, increasing to $1,400
in July, but with his church role he took on other responsibilities: he
was the chaplain of
the Massachusetts Legislature and a
member of the Boston School Committee. His church
activities kept him busy, though during this period, and facing the imminent
death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs.
After his wife's death, he began to
disagree with the church's methods, 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.
As 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."
Emerson in Europe:
Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and
later wrote of his travels in English Traits (1856). He
left aboard the brig Jasper on Christmas Day, 1832, sailing
first to Malta.
During his European trip, he spent several months in Italy, visiting
Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John
Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas
Carlyle. He went to Switzerland and had to be dragged by fellow passengers
to visit Voltaire's
home in Ferney, "protesting all the way upon the unworthiness of his
memory". He then went on to Paris, a "loud modern New York of a
place", where he visited the Jardin des Plantes. He was greatly moved by the
organization of plants according to Jussieu's system of classification, and
the way all such objects were related and connected. As Robert D. Richardson says,
"Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the
Jardin des Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him
away from theology and toward science."
Moving north to England, Emerson
met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas
Carlyle. Carlyle in particular was a strong influence on him; Emerson would
later serve as an unofficial literary agent in the United States for Carlyle,
and in March 1835, he tried to persuade Carlyle to come to America to lecture. The
two maintained a correspondence until
Carlyle's death in 1881.
Emerson returned to the United
States on October 9, 1833,
and lived with his mother in Newton, Massachusetts. In October 1834, he
moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live with his
step-grandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley, Given the budding Lyceum
movement, which provided lectures on all sorts of topics, Emerson saw a
possible career as a lecturer. On November 5, 1833, he made the first of what
would eventually be some 1,500 lectures, "The Uses of Natural
History", in Boston. This was an expanded account of his experience in
Paris. In this lecture, he set out some of his important beliefs and the
ideas he would later develop in his first published essay, "Nature":
Nature is a language and every new
fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and
dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant
and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new
grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.
On January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote
a letter to Lydia Jackson proposing marriage. Her
acceptance reached him by mail on the 28th. In July 1835, he bought a house on
the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in
Concord, Massachusetts, which he named Bush; it is now open to the public as
the Ralph Waldo Emerson House. He gave a
lecture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of Concord on
September 12, 1835.Two days later, he married Jackson in her hometown of
Plymouth, Massachusetts and moved to the new home in Concord together with
Emerson's mother on September 15.
Emerson quickly changed his wife's
name to Lidian, and would call her Queenie, and
sometimes Asia, and she called him Mr. Emerson
Emerson was poor when he was at
Harvard, but was later able to support his family for much of his
life. He inherited a fair amount of money after his first wife's death, though
he had to file a lawsuit against the Tucker family in 1836 to get it. He
received $11,600 in May 1834 (equivalent to $354,032 in 2023), and a
further $11,674.49 in July 1837 (equivalent to $314,374 in 2023). In
1834, he considered that he had an income of $1,200 a year from the initial
payment of the estate, equivalent to what he had earned as a pastor.
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 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. 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.
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.
On July 15, 1838, Emerson was
invited to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity
School, to deliver the school's graduation address, which came to be known
as the "Divinity School Address". He was denounced as an atheist and
a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply,
leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at
Harvard for another thirty years.
The Transcendental group began to
publish its flagship journal, The Dial,
in July 1840. They planned the journal as early as October 1839, but did
not begin work on it until the first week of 1840. Unitarian minister George Ripley was the
managing editor. Margaret Fuller was the first editor, having been
approached by Emerson after several others had declined the role. Fuller
stayed on for about two years, when Emerson took over, using the journal to
promote talented young writers including Ellery Channing and Thoreau.
In 1841 Emerson published Essays,
his second book,
which included the
famous essay "Self-Reliance". His aunt called it a "strange medley of
atheism and false independence", but it gained favorable reviews in London
and Paris. This book, and its popular reception, more than any of Emerson's
contributions to date laid the groundwork for his international fame.
In January 1842 Emerson's first
son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. Emerson wrote
of his grief in the poem "Threnody" ("For this losing is true dying"), and
the essay "Experience".
In 1844, Emerson published his
second collection of essays, Essays: Second Series. This collection
included "The Poet", "Experience", "Gifts", and
an essay entitled "Nature", a different work from the 1836 essay of
the same name.
Emerson made a living as a popular
lecturer in New England and much of the rest of the country.
He had begun lecturing in 1833; by the 1850s he was giving as many as 80
lectures per year. He addressed the Boston Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Gloucester
Lyceum, among others. He eventually gave some 1,500 lectures in his
lifetime. His earnings allowed him to expand his property, buying 11 acres
(4.5 ha) of land by Walden
Pond and a few more acres in a neighboring pine grove. He wrote that
he was "landlord and water lord of 14 acres, more or less".
Emerson was introduced to Indian
philosophy through the works of the French philosopher Victor
Cousin. In 1845, Emerson's journals show he was reading the Bhagavad
Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on
the Vedas. He was strongly influenced by Vedanta, and
much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples
of this can be found in his essay "The Over-soul":
The central message Emerson drew
from his Asian studies was that "the purpose of life was spiritual
transformation and direct experience of divine power, here and now on
earth."
In 1847–48, he toured the British
Isles. He also visited Paris between the French Revolution of 1848 and the
bloody June Days. When he arrived, he saw the stumps of
trees that had been cut down to form barricades in the February riots.
On May 21, he stood on the Champ de
Mars in the midst of mass celebrations for concord, peace and labor. He wrote
in his journal, "At the end of the year we shall take account, & see
if the Revolution was worth the trees."The trip left an important imprint
on Emerson's later work. His 1856 book English Traits is based
largely on observations recorded in his travel journals and notebooks. Emerson
later came to see the American Civil War as a "revolution" that
shared common ground with the European revolutions of 1848.
In a speech in Concord, Massachusetts on May 3, 1851,
Emerson denounced the Fugitive Slave Act: The act of Congress is a law
which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion—a law which no man
can obey, or abet the obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of
the name of gentleman.
That summer, he wrote in his diary: “This filthy enactment was made
in the nineteenth century by people who could read and write. I will not obey
it.”
In February 1852 Emerson and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited an
edition of the works and letters of Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850.[116] Within
a week of her death, her New York editor, Horace Greeley, suggested to Emerson
that a biography of Fuller, to be called Margaret and Her Friends,
be prepared quickly "before the interest excited by her sad decease has
passed away". Published under the title The Memoirs of
Margaret Fuller Ossoli,
Walt
Whitman published the innovative poetry collection Leaves
of Grass in 1855 and sent a copy to Emerson for his opinion.
Emerson responded positively, sending Whitman a flattering five-page letter in
response.This edition quoted a phrase from Emerson's letter, printed in gold
leaf on the cover: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great
Career". Emerson took offense that this letter was made public and
later was more critical of the work.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.Donations were
collected by friends to help the Emersons rebuild. 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.
The problems with his memory had
become embarrassing to Emerson and he ceased his public appearances by 1879. In
reply to an invitation to a retirement celebration for Octavius B. Frothingham, he wrote, "I am not in
condition to make visits, or take any part in conversation. Old age has rushed
on me in the last year, and tied my tongue, and hid my memory, and thus made it
a duty to stay at home." The New York Times quoted his reply and
noted that his regrets were read aloud at the celebration. Holmes wrote of
the problem saying, "Emerson is afraid to trust himself in society much,
on account of the failure of his memory and the great difficulty he finds in
getting the words he wants. It is painful to witness his embarrassment at times".
On April 21, 1882, Emerson was
found to be suffering from pneumonia. He
died six days later.
Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. He
was placed in his coffin wearing a white robe given by the American
sculptor Daniel Chester French.
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."
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. 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".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.[181] His
usual liberal leanings did not clearly translate when it came to believing that
all races had equal capability or function, which was a common conception for
the period in which he lived. 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 or rather,
whether African slaves were distinguishably equal to white men based on their
ability to reason.
As with many supporters of slavery,
during his early years, Emerson seems to have thought that the faculties of
African slaves were not equal to those of white slave-owners. But this belief
in racial inferiorities did not make Emerson a supporter of slavery. Emerson
wrote later that year that "No ingenious sophistry can ever reconcile the
unperverted mind to the pardon of Slavery; nothing but tremendous familiarity,
and the bias of private interest". For Emerson, slavery was a
moral issue, while superiority of the races was an issue he tried to analyze
from a scientific perspective based on what he believed to be inherited traits.
Emerson saw himself as a man of
"Saxon descent". In a speech given in 1835 titled "Permanent
Traits of the English National Genius", he said, "The inhabitants of
the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the
people of England and have inherited the traits of their national
character". He saw direct ties between race based on national
identity and the inherent nature of the human being. White Americans who were
native-born in the United States and of English ancestry were categorized by
him as a separate "race", which he thought had a position of being
superior to other nations. He believed that native-born Americans of English
descent were superior to European immigrants, including the Irish, French, and
Germans, and also as being superior to English people from England, whom he
considered a close second and the only really comparable group.
Later in his life, Emerson's ideas
on race changed when he became more involved in the abolitionist movement while
at the same time, he began to more thoroughly analyze the philosophical
implications of race and racial hierarchies. His beliefs shifted focus to the
potential outcomes of racial conflicts. Emerson's racial views were closely
related to his views on nationalism and national superiority, which was a
common view in the United States at that time. Emerson used contemporary
theories of race and natural science to support a theory of race development. He
believed that the current political battle and the current enslavement of other
races was an inevitable racial struggle, one that would result in the
inevitable union of the United States. Such conflicts were necessary for the
dialectic of change that would eventually allow the progress of the nation. In
much of his later work, Emerson seems to allow the notion that different
European races will eventually mix in America. This hybridization process would
lead to a superior race that would be to the advantage of the superiority of
the United States.
Legacy:
As a lecturer and orator,
Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord—became the leading voice of intellectual
culture in the United States.[187] 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." 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.
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, 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. 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.
The following were named after or
in honor of Emerson:
·
Emerson
college (various campuses, https://emerson.edu/)
·
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.
·
Stephen
Emerson Whicher, one of the leading Emerson scholars of the 20th century
·
The Emerson String Quartet, formed in 1976
·
The Ralph
Waldo Emerson Prize is awarded annually 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
·
The Carleton
College track runner Emerson
Lange
Emerson 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 (1875)
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)
·
"History"
·
"Fate"
Poems
·
"Concord Hymn"
·
"The Rhodora"
·
"Brahma"
·
"Uriel"
·
"Merlin"
Letters
·
The
Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–72[207][208]
Musical settings:
·
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[209]) as a
song entitled Duty, included in his collection for voice and
piano 114 Songs (1919–24).[210]
·
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).[211]
·
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."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Born |
May
25, 1803 Boston,
Massachusetts, U.S. |
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Died |
April
27, 1882 (aged 78) Concord, Massachusetts, U.S. |
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Alma mater |
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Spouse(s) |
Ellen
Louisa Tucker (m. 1829;
died 1831) (m. 1835) |
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Era |
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Region |
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Institutions |
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Main
interests |
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Notable
ideas |
Self-reliance, transparent eyeball, double consciousness, stream of thought |
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Ecclesiastical
career |
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Religion |
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Church |
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Ordained |
11
January 1829 |
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Laicized |
1832 |
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Signature |
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A
Nation's Strength
What makes
a nation's pillars high
And its
foundations strong?
What makes
it mighty to defy
The foes
that round it throng?
It is not
gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in
battle shock;
Its shafts
are laid on sinking sand,
Not on
abiding rock.
Is it the
sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires
passed away;
The blood
has turned their stones to rust,
Their
glory to decay.
And is it
pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed
to nations sweet;
But God
has struck its luster down
In ashes
at his feet.
Not gold
but only men can make
A people
great and strong;
Men who
for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast
and suffer long.
Brave men
who work while others sleep,
Who dare
while others fly...
They build
a nation's pillars deep
And lift
them to the sky.
Theme: The main
theme of this poem is the strength of nations. Specifically, the poet is
interested in analyzing and describing how and why some nations maintain their
strength and endure the passage of time while others do not. He poses a few
reasons why a country might endure before settling on what he says is the main
reason—the people/leaders they contain.
Structure and Form: ‘A Nation’s Strength’ is a six-stanza poem that is
divided into quatrains or sets of four lines. The lines follow a simple rhyme
scheme of ABAB; changing end sounds from stanza to stanza. The poet uses
similar-length lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
This means that the odd-numbered lines have a total of eight syllables (with a
few exceptions), and the even-numbered lines have a total of six syllables,
with some exceptions.
Poem Summary: In the first lines of this poem, the speaker begins by asking two
rhetorical questions. He wonders what it
is about a nation that makes its “foundations strong?” What is that a nation does that allows
it to stand up to and “defy” surrounding foes? Here, he’s suggesting that it’s not easy
to stay together as a country in the face of adversity. Time, enemies, and the many other conflicts that countries face usually
result in governments and ideologies falling apart.
The second stanza provides
some suggestions as to what the speaker thinks about strong countries. The
speaker makes it clear from the start that they do not believe that it is gold
or wealth that makes a nation or kingdom great. Just because a nation has money
doesn’t mean that it’s going to be able to defend itself and its ideologies. If
it depends on its wealth to get it through difficulties, then it’s going to
find itself “on sinking sand” rather than “abiding,” long-lasting rock. It’s
this kind of “rock” or foundation that the speaker is interested in.
Another
suggestion the speaker has is that it could
be a “sword” or the power to win important battles. If a country is filled with
warriors or a good army, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the country is going
to withstand the true tests of time.
In answer to his own rhetorical question, the
speaker says that all one has to do is turn to ask the “empires passed away”
that had such armies but are now nothing more than broken monuments.
The blood of these once-great empires has
rusted the stone of their great accomplishments and led to decay (just as rust
destroys metal).
The fifth
stanza of the poem says that it is not gold
that inspires and makes people great; it is only “men.” People are only made
great through the inspiration and direction they receive from their leaders.
It’s critical to have leaders who are interested in truth and honor for the
sake of those things alone and not to any other end. People must be able to
suffer for a cause they believe in as well.
The
men that it takes to make a nation great are those who work long hours when
others are sleeping and who are capable of pushing people to be the best
versions of themselves.
Literary Devices: In this poem, the poet uses a few literary devices. They include:
·
Enjambment: can be seen
when the poet cuts off a line before its natural stopping point, for example,
the transition between lines one and two
of stanza one.
·
Parallelism: the use of
the same line structure multiple lines. For example, the poet begins
several stanzas with a rhetorical question like “Is it the
sword?” before answering the question.
·
Caesura: can be seen
when the poet inserts a pause into the middle of a line of verse.
For instance, “It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand.”
·
Rhetorical Question: a question that does not expect an answer.
For example,
“What makes it mighty to defy / The foes that round it throng?”
Answer these questions:
1.
What are
the things that, according to the poet, do not make a nation strong?
According
to the poet- Not gold, nor the sword, nor pride make a nation strong.
2.
What do a
nation’s foes do?
A
nation’s foes are the enemies of the nation that surround it.
3.
What can
happen to a nation’s pride?
A nation’s pride can quickly lose its sheen if
God so wills it. An act of nature can
destroy monuments, towns and places of natural beauty.
4.
What are
the qualities that make a nation strong?
The
people who can stand by truth and honesty and who can suffer long for these great virtues can make their country
great and strong. In other words, determined people with the right attitude
make a nation strong.
5.
State the
rhyme scheme used in the poem.
The
rhyme scheme used in the poem is abab where
alternate lines rhyme.
6.
What
happens if a shaft is put on sand?
A
shaft put on sand will sink into the sand.
7.
What is
the result of a shaft being laid on rock?
A shaft that is laid on rock is steady.
8.
What is
the shaft a symbol of in these lines?
The shaft is
a symbol of the foundation stones of the nation.
9.
Whose
blood does the line refer to?
The
line refers to the blood of empires from ancient times.
10. What does the phrase ‘turned their stones to rust’
refer to?
The
phrase ‘turned their stones to rust’ refers to the reddish tinge of the stones where
blood has been spilt.
11. Whose ‘glory’ has diminished?
The
empire’s glory has diminished. They build a nation’s pillars deep And lift them to the sky.
12. Who is ‘they’ in the above line?
The
‘they’ in the line are the people of the nation.
13. How are the
nation’s pillars built deep?
A nation’s pillars are built deep by the
people who work hard, suffer and who dare to do things that make others run
away.
14. How are a nation’s pillars lifted to the sky?
A
nation’s pillars are lifted to the sky because they have deep foundations built
on the solid ground of bravery and honor.
15. Who are the real enemies of a nation? Do these enemies
reside in a country or
outside?
The
real enemies of a nation are people who run away from danger, don’t defend the
country or work hard. These real enemies reside within the country.
16. Why are wealth, pride and war not enough to make a
country strong?
Wealth,
pride and war are not enough to make a country strong because it is people,
determined people with the right attitude who make a country strong.
17. What is the poet’s definition of bravery?
The
poet’s definition of bravery is people who work while others sleep and who dare
to do things that would have other people run away.
18. ‘Pride goeth before a fall’ is a well-known
proverb. Explain what it means.
The
proverb ‘Pride goeth before a fall’ means that a person who is overly proud is
invariably brought down by fate so that he/she remembers to be humble. A man
succeeds in life only because of character and not because of wealth
and
possessions.
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