Ralph Waldo Emerson
gigatos | March 30, 2022
Summary
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803 – Concord, Massachusetts, April 27, 1882) was an American writer, philosopher and poet. A leader of the Transcendentalism movement in the early 19th century, his teachings contributed to the development of the “New Thought” movement in the mid-19th century.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, the son of Ruth Haskins and William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named Ralph after his mother”s brother, and Waldo after his great-grandmother”s father. He was the second of five children who survived to adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley and Charles. The other three children-Phebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline-died in early life.
His father was a Unitarian pastor who died of stomach cancer almost two weeks before Emerson”s eighth birthday, leaving his family in absolute poverty, from which they escaped by accepting charity and taking in boarders. He was raised by his mother, with the help of another woman in the family, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who had a particular effect on Ralph. He lived a few seasons with the family and corresponded constantly with Emerson until his death in 1863. His mother arranged for all her children to be admitted to Harvard University on scholarship, and that is where Ralph Waldo ended up when he was fourteen.
His formal teaching began at the Boston Latin School in 1812, when he was 9. In October 1817, when he was 14, he went to Harvard College and was chosen as an apprentice messenger under the president of the institution. His task was to accuse his fellow students in their criminal activities by reporting it to the faculty. In the meantime, Emerson began keeping a list of the books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called Wide World. He worked odd jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a porter for the Junior Commons and occasionally working as a teacher with his Uncle Samuel in Waltham, Massachusetts.
At the university he began his famous Diary, an anthology and centon of passages that surprised or admired him in his readings, with their corresponding commentaries that ended up reaching 182 volumes and that would be the basis from which he would draw his later works, from his sermons to his lectures and essays. After obtaining his degree with a much more discreet academic record than those of his brothers, he helped his brother William in a school for young ladies that he had established in his mother”s house, after having founded his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
When his brother William left for Göttingen to study theology, Emerson took over the direction of the school, which ensured his support for many years and left him enough time to study theology at Harvard Divinity School and become a Unitarian pastor in 1829.
Emerson”s brother Edward, two years his junior, entered the office of attorney Daniel Webster after graduating from Harvard. Edward”s psychic health began to deteriorate and he quickly suffered a mental breakdown; he was taken to the McLean Asylum in June 1828, at the age of 23. Although he regained his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834 from tuberculosis, which he apparently had been carrying for some time. Another of his brilliant and promising brothers, Charles, born in 1808, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis, the third person in his close circle to die within a few years.
Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire, on Christmas Day 1827, marrying when she was only 18 years old. The couple moved to Boston, along with Emerson”s mother, who traveled with them to care for Ellen, who was already suffering from tuberculosis. Less than two years later, Ellen died at the age of 20 on February 8, 1831, after breathing her last words, “I did not forget peace and joy.” In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, Emerson wrote, “I visited Ellen”s grave and opened her bed.”
Emerson was invited by the Second Church (Unitarian Church) to serve as an associate pastor and joined the order on January 11, 1829. His initial salary was $1200, growing to $1400 in July, and along with his church responsibilities he took on others: he was chaplain to the legislature in Massachusetts and a member of the Boston school committee. These activities kept him busy, even though in this period, facing the approaching death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs.
After the death of his wife, he began to disagree with the methods of the Church, writing in his diary in June 1832:
I thought many times that, to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is old-fashioned. In an altered age, we venerate the dead forms of our ancestors.
His disagreements with the official Church over the administration of the Communion service and over suspicions about public prayers led to his resignation in 1832 after a conflict with the leaders of this church. As he wrote:
This way of commemorating Christ is not adequate; it does not suit me. That is reason enough to abandon the office.
As one of Emerson”s students had noted, “Removing the decent black garb of the pastor, he was free to choose the garb of the reader and the teacher, being a thinker not locked in the confines of an institution and its traditions.”
In fact, his older brother William had returned from Göttingen so stunned by what he had learned from the new historical criticism of the Bible that he had abandoned theology and begun to study law. Emerson ceased to believe it possible to base religion on empirical evidence.
In his senior year at Harvard, Emerson decided to take his middle name, Waldo. He attended Poetry Class; as was customary, he presented an original poem on Harvard”s Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18 years old. He did not excel as a student and graduated with the exact average of his class of 59 students.
In 1826, faced with declining health, Emerson set out in search of warmer climes. He went first to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the climate still too cold. He then went even further south to St. Augustine, where he took long walks on the beach and began to write poetry. There he met Prince Achille Murat. Murat, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was only two years his senior; they became great friends and enjoyed each other”s company. The two would engage in enlightening discussions on religion, philosophy, and government. Emerson later regarded Murat as an important figure in his intellectual development.
While at St. Augustine he had his first experience with slavery. On one occasion, he witnessed a Bible Society meeting while a slave auction was being held in the garden. He wrote: “One ear at the time listened to the glad tidings of the good news, while the other was regaled with “Come on, gentlemen, come on!”.”
He made a long voyage through Europe between 1832 and 1833; he left aboard the Jasper on Christmas Day 1832, going as far as Malta. He spent several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. While in Rome, he met John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. He went to Switzerland, dragged by a group of passengers to visit Voltaire”s house in Ferney “protesting all the way for the contempt of his memory”.
He stopped in Paris, “a sort of noisy and modern New York”, where he visited the “Jardin des Plantes”, Museum of Natural History. He was genuinely moved by the organization of the plants according to Jussieu”s classification system, and by the way all the objects were related and connected. As Richardson says, “Emerson”s moment of penetration among the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des Plantes was an instant of almost visionary intensity, which led him away from theology and drew him into science.”
Moving north to England, he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle in particular exerted a great influence on Emerson, who would later become – albeit unofficially – his literary agent in the United States. In March 1835 he tried to convince Thomas to travel to the United States on the basis of some readings. The two would correspond until his death.
Emerson returned to the United States on October 9, 1833, and moved with his mother to Newton, Massachusetts, to live with his grandfather Dr. Ezra Ripley in a house that would later be called The Old Manse. Seeing the growth of the Lyceum movement, which lectured on all sorts of subjects, Emerson believed in the possibility of a career as a professor. On November 5, 1833, he gave what would be the first of more than 1500 lectures, discussing the Uses of Natural History in Boston. This was an extended account of his experiences in Paris. In this lecture, he laid the foundation for his most important beliefs and ideas that he would later develop in his first published essay on Nature:
La naturaleza es un lenguaje y cada nuevo hecho que se aprende es una nueva palabra; pero no es una lengua hecha pedazos y muerta en el diccionario, sino la lengua reunida en un sentido muy significativo y universal. Deseo aprender esta lengua, no para conocer una nueva gramática, sino para leer el gran libro que está escrito en esa lengua.La naturaleza es un lenguaje y cada nuevo hecho aprendido es una nueva palabra; pero este no es un lenguaje desarmado y muerto en un diccionario, sino un lenguaje puesto en conjunto en un sentido significativo y universal. Deseo aprender este lenguaje, no para conocer una nueva gramática, sino para poder leer el gran libro escrito en esa lengua.
On January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote a letter to Lydia Jackson proposing marriage. Her confirmation reached him by mail four days later. In July 1835, he bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Road in Concord (now open to the public as the “Ralph Waldo Emerson House”. He quickly became one of the town”s personalities. He gave a reading to commemorate the bicentennial of the town of Concord on September 12, 1835. Two days later he married Lydia Jackson in his Massachusetts hometown, moving into his new home with his new wife and 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. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith and Edward Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named after his first wife, at Lidian”s suggestion.
Emerson was poor when he was at Harvard, and later took care of his family for the rest of his life. He inherited a good sum of money after the death of his first wife, although he had to sue the Tucker family to obtain it. He received $11,600 in May 1834, and later $11,674 in July 1837.
On September 8, 1836, the eve of the publication of Nature, Emerson met with Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley to plan periodic meetings for other intellectuals of his ilk. This was the beginning of his Transcendental Club, which served as the center of the movement. Their first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836. On September 1, 1837, some women attended the Transcendental Club meeting for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley to dinner at his own home prior to the meeting to make sure they were “presentable” for the evening gathering. Fuller would prove to be a vital figure in Transcendentalism.
He published anonymously his first book, Nature, on September 9, 1836, in which he laid out the foundations of his philosophy.
He became great friends with the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Although they had met in 1835, in the winter of 1837 Emerson asked him, “Do you keep journal entries?” The question became a constant inspiration to Thoreau. Emerson”s own personal diary, which was published posthumously by Harvard University Press between 1909 and 1914, became a 16-volume journal in the definitive compilation published between 1960 and 1982. Some scholars consider Emerson”s diary to be his key work. In March 1837 Emerson gave a series of lectures at the Masonic Temple for the Philosophy of History in Boston. This was the first opportunity for him to organize a lecture series on his own, and it was the beginning of a serious career as a lecturer. The profits from this series of lectures were far greater than previous ones organized by any organization, and Emerson would from here on begin to organize his lectures himself throughout his life. He would eventually give as many as 80 master classes per year, traveling throughout the northern United States. He traveled through St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis and California.
On August 31, 1837 he delivered a now famous address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, The American Scholar, later known as An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge. It was collected for a collection of essays (which included the first edition of Nature) in 1849. Friends prompted him to publish the talk, and he did so, at his own expense, in an edition of 500 copies that sold out within a month. In this speech, Emerson declared literary independence in the United States and called on Americans to create a style of their own, independent of the European, a slogan that Walt Whitman would take as one of his main literary purposes. James Russel Lowell, a Harvard student at the time, called it “an event without parallel in our literary annals.” Another audience member, the Reverend John Pierce, called it “an apparently incoherent and unintelligible speech.”
On July 15, 1838 he was invited to Divinity Hall of the Harvard Divinity School for the commencement address, which became known as his The Divinity School Address, decisive for the history of Unitarianism. He collected some of these papers, speeches and lectures in his first book of Essays (1841). Unusually for a philosophical product of American origin, they were soon translated into French and German and were respectfully reviewed in the French publication Revue des Deux Mondes.
Emerson disbelieved the biblical miracles and proclaimed that although Jesus was a great man, he was not God: historical Christianity, he said, made Jesus into a “demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks described Osiris or Apollo.” His comments infuriated the establishment and the Protestant community. For this, he was denounced as an atheist and a poisoner of young minds. Despite the harsh criticism, he gave no answers, leaving it to others to defend him. He was not invited to Harvard for another oratorical act for thirty years.
The transcendental group began publishing their battle diary, The Dial, in July 1840. They planned the journal in October 1839, but work did not begin until the first week of 1840. George Ripley was its general editor and Margaret Fuller the first editor, being handpicked by Emerson after many others turned down the position. Fuller stayed on for two years until Emerson took over, using the paper to promote talented young writers such as Ellery Channing and Thoreau.
In 1841 he published his second book, Essays, which included his famous Self-Control. His uncle called it a “strange jumble of atheism and false independence,” but it received favorable reviews in London and Paris. It was this book and its good reception that contributed most to Emerson”s international fame.
Emerson lost his firstborn son Waldo to scarlet fever in January 1842. His grief inspired two major works: the poem Threnody and the essay Experience. In the same year William James was born and Emerson agreed to be his godfather.
Influenced by the German rationalist and romantic philosophy that he met through Carlyle and by the Hinduism that his friend Max Müller made him study, Emerson proposed transcendentalism, an intuitive path based on the capacity of individual consciousness, without the need for miracles, religious hierarchies or mediations. Later he participated with other intellectuals in the founding of the magazine The Dial, whose first issue came out in 1840 to help the propagation of Transcendentalism, and which would be published uninterruptedly until 1844.
In 1846 he published Poems. He collected his lectures on great figures of history and culture in Hombres representativos (including the essays Poder, Riqueza, Destino y Cultura). Later he published a second collection of poems, Día de mayo y otros poemas (1867). His production is reduced since then, although his fame as a writer was already enormous. Society and solitude (1870) is another collection of conferences and in Parnassus (1874) he collects his favorite poems. Other works are Letters and Social Objectives (1876) and Natural History of the Intellect (1893).
Emerson”s philosophy is typically liberal: it enhances the values of the individual and the self, it is affirmative, vitalistic and optimistic. Hence the praise he received from thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and others. He is considered one of the first American essayists; he published two series of this type of writings, among which titles such as Nature, Books, Self-Reliance, Old Age, American Civilization, History, Self-Reliance, The Poet, Compensation, Experience, Politics or The Transcendentalist stand out.
Bronson Alcott announced in November 1842 his plans to find “a farm of about one hundred acres in excellent condition with good buildings,” Charles Lane purchased a 90-acre farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, in May 1843 for what was to become Fruitlands, a utopian community based on ideals based on Transcendentalism. The farm would be run on the basis of common effort, with no animals as tillage; its members would eat no meat and wear no wool.
Emerson would later say he felt “sad at heart” that he did not personally fit into the project. Despite that, he felt Fruitlands would not become a successful project. “Their whole doctrine is spiritual,” he wrote, “but they end up always asking for silver and land.” Even Walcott admitted to being unprepared to manage Fruitlands wisely. “None of us were prepared to implement the ideal life we dreamed of. That”s how isolated we felt.” After the failure, Emerson helped Alcott buy a farm for his family.
The Dial ceased publication in April 1844; Horace Greeley said of it at the end that it was “the most original and lucid paper ever published in this country.” A not very famous magazine would be published in 1929 under the same name.
In 1844 he published his second collection of essays, entitled Essays: Second Series. This collection included The Poet, Experience, Gifts, and an essay entitled Nature, a different work from the one published in 1836 under the same name.
Emerson made his living as a popular lecturer in New England and in many areas of the rest of the country. He began his lectures in 1833; by 1850 he was giving nearly 80 a year. He spoke on a wide variety of subjects and many of his essays were derived from his lectures. He charged between $10 and $50 per appearance, giving him about $2,000 in a typical winter season. This was more than his earnings from other media. In some years, he earned no more than $900 for about six lectures, and for a series of lectures in Boston he charged $1600. He gave approximately 1500 lectures during his lifetime. His earnings enabled him to expand his holdings, buying 11 acres (almost 5 ha) of land on Walden Pond, and a few more acres on land nearby.
Emerson was introduced to Hindu philosophy when he read the works of the French philosopher Victor Cousin. In 1845, Emerson”s diaries gave away that he was reading the Bhagavad-gītā and Henry Thomas Colebrooke”s Essays on the Vedas. Emerson was highly influenced by the Vedas, and many of his writings had strong features of the doctrine of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this influence can be found in his essay entitled The Over-soul:
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. And this profound power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is fully accessible to us, is not only self-sufficient and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the vaticination and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are bright parts, is the soul.
He will still make one more trip to England, Scotland and Ireland between 1847 and 1848, to give lectures, where he will meet the Lakist poets of the first English romanticism, William Wordsworth and Coleridge; also the philosophers John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle; with the latter and with Max Müller he will maintain an active correspondence; Emerson”s biographies Representative Men (1850) recall Carlyle”s Heroes (1840). He also visited Paris during the days of the February Revolution and the bloody “June Days.” When he arrived, he saw the elements that were used for the purpose of cutting down trees in the February uprisings-trees used to create barricades. On May 21 he was at the Champ de Mars in the midst of the massive celebration for concord, peace and work. He wrote in his diary:
At the end of the year we will see if the revolution was worth the trees cut down.
On these travels he printed his travel book English Traits (1856). On his return he publicly advocated for abolitionism.
In February 1852 Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Ellery Channing edited the collected works and letters of Margaret Fuller, who died in 1850. In the week of her death, her editor of the New York Tribune, 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 death should die away.” Published under the title Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Fuller”s words were heavily censored or rewritten. The three editors were not concerned with accuracy; they believed that public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure. Nevertheless, it was for a time the best-selling biography of the time and was reprinted thirteen times by the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1855 Walt Whitman published his groundbreaking poetry collection Leaves of Grass and sent a copy to Emerson asking for an opinion. Emerson responded with an enthusiastic five-page letter of praise. This approval from Emerson for ”Leaves of Grass” made the work of great interest, and convinced Whitman to generate a new edition shortly thereafter. This edition carried a sentence from Emerson”s letter, printed in gold lettering on the cover, which read, “I bless you in the beginning of a great career.” Emerson took it as offensive that his letter had been made public and was later critical of Whitman”s work.
Emerson was staunchly anti-slavery, but he did not appreciate being in the public eye on the subject and was also hesitant to lecture on it. He did, however, give a series of lectures during the years leading up to the Civil War in 1837. Some of his friends and family were more active in abolitionism than he was at first, but after 1844 he took a more active role in opposing slavery. He gave a series of talks and lectures, and hosted John Brown in his home for the duration of Brown”s visits to Concord. He voted for Lincoln in 1860, but Emerson was disappointed when he realized that the president preferred to preserve the Union rather than eliminate slavery at its roots. Once the American Civil War broke out, Emerson made his belief clear: he thought slaves should be immediately freed.
In 1860 he published The Conduct of Life, his final collection of essays. In this book, Emerson “wrestles with the most difficult issues of the day” and “his experience in the ranks of the abolitionists were notable arguments for his conclusions.” In the essay that opens the book, Fate, Emerson wrote: “The question of all ages resolved itself into a practical question about the conduct of life. How am I to live?”
Emerson visited Washington D. C. in late January 1862. He gave a public lecture at the Smithsonian Institution in which he declared, “The South calls slavery an institution…I call it destitution. Emancipation is a demand of civilization.” The next day, February 1, his friend Charles Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln was well acquainted with Emerson”s work, and had witnessed his earlier lecture. Emerson”s doubts about Lincoln began to wane after this meeting. In 1865 he spoke at a memorial service in Lincoln”s honor, saying, “Old as history is, and by the manifold of its tragedies, I doubt if any death has ever caused as much pain as this one has caused, or will cause in the future, now, at the time of its announcement.” Emerson also met high government officials, including the Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Secretary of the Navy.
Henry David Thoreau, his protégé, died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 on May 6, 1862. Emerson gave the farewell address. He would later refer to Thoreau as his best friend, despite a minor feud that began in 1849 after Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Another friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, died two years after Thoreau”s death. Emerson attended Hawthorne”s burial ceremony “in sunny, green pomp” as Emerson would write. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year, 1864.
In 1867 Emerson”s health began to decline; he wrote much less in his journals. Between the summer of 1871 and the spring of 1872, he began to have memory problems and to suffer from aphasia. Toward the end of the decade he would at times forget his name, and when someone asked him how he felt, he would reply, “quite well; I lost my mental faculties, but I am perfect.”
His house in Concord caught fire on July 24, 1872; Emerson asked some neighbors for help and with no hope of putting out the fire, he tried to save as many objects as possible. His friends took up a collection for the reconstruction of the house. The fire marked a before and after in Emerson”s lecturing career; from that moment on, he would only give lectures on rare occasions and in front of familiar and scarce audiences.
While his house was being rebuilt Emerson traveled to England, continental Europe and Egypt. He left on October 23, ”72, with his daughter Ellen, while his wife Lidian spent time at The Old Manse with friends. Emerson and his daughter returned to the United States on the ship Olympus on April 15, 1873, with Charles Eliot Norton. Emerson”s return to the city was celebrated as a great event and school was even suspended that day.
In late 1874 he published an anthology of poetry entitled Parnassus, which included poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Carolina Dorr, Jean Ingeloy, Lucy Larcom, Jones Very, Thoreau and many others. There are no known collected poems from Whitman”s work. The anthology was ready by the fall of 1871 but was delayed by minutiae of publicists seeking revisions.
The problem with his memory began to disturb Emerson to the point of embarrassment, so he ceased his public appearances around 1879 (he was 76 years old). As Colmes wrote, “Emerson is afraid to confide much in society, and is mindful of the failings of his memory and the great difficulty he has in finding the words he desires. It is painful to witness his moments of modesty.”
In April 1882 a sudden rainstorm caught him while he was walking. The cold was intense. Two days later he was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died a week later on April 27, 1882 in Concord and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. He was laid in his coffin wearing a white mantle given to him by the American sculptor Daniel Chester French.
Emerson”s religious views were considered radical in his time. He believed that all things were related to God, and therefore all things were divine. Critics believed he was running down the central figure of the God center; as Henry Ware Jr. put it, Emerson was in danger by downplaying “the Father of the Universe” and leaving only “a bunch of kids in an orphan asylum.” Emerson was particularly influenced by German philosophy and biblical criticism. His views, the basis of transcendentalism, suggested that God did not have to reveal truth but that truth could be intuitively experienced from nature, directly. His love of the cosmos was pantheistic. Or as he wrote in his journal, “there is a confluence between the human soul and all that exists in the world.”
Emerson did not become a fervent abolitionist until 1844, a year in which his notes show a growing interest in slavery-which he had begun in his youth-even dreaming of helping to free the slaves. In June 1856, shortly after Charles Sumner, a U.S. senator, was beaten for his closeness to abolitionism, Emerson regretted that he had not been as close to the cause. He wrote. “There are men who as soon as they are born take a definite line toward the axis of the inquisitor…Beautiful is the way by which we are saved from this inexhaustible supplement of moral factor.” After the summer attack, Emerson began to say everything about slavery. “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom,” he said in a talk in Concord that same summer. Emerson used slavery as a prime example of human injustice, especially in his role as a minister. In early ”38, provoked by the murder of an abolitionist named Elijah Parish Lovejoy, he gave his first public speech against slavery. As he said, “It was the other day that brave Lovejoy put 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 Lovejoy”s murderous mob “was like one of those continental earthquakes.” However, Emerson would argue that reform would come more by a change of moral accord than by military action. In August 1844, lecturing in Concord, he made clear his support for the abolitionist movement. He stated, “We owe intimately to this movement, and to its continuators, the popular discussion of every point of ethical practice.”
Emerson may have had several erotic thoughts related to men. During his undergraduate years at Harvard, he was attracted to a young man named Martin Gay about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry. He also had several affairs with women throughout his life, obviating his wives.
As a lecturer and speaker, Emerson – nicknamed “the sage of Concord” – began as the leading voice of American intellectual culture. Herman Melville, who met Emerson in 1849, thought he had a “defect in the region of the heart” and a “self-consciousness so intellectually intense that at first one hesitates to call it by name,” and would later admit that Emerson was “a great man.” Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted his ability to influence and inspire others: “Emerson”s bright genius arose in the wintry nights, and swept over Boston, making the eyes of naive young men lift to that great beginning, a beauty and a mystery, which fascinated for the time, while it gave them an everlasting inspiration, led them into new paths and to new hopes.”
Emerson”s work not only influenced his contemporaries such as Whitman and Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world to this day. Nietzsche and William James acknowledged the influence of the “Sage of Concord.” Also in Henri Bergson, whose élan vital is a literal transcription of what he called vital force.
In his book American Religion Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as “the prophet of American religion,” which in the context of the book relates to American creeds such as Mormonism and scientific Christianity, which were prominent in Emerson”s time, and also to Protestant lines that Bloom asserts have become more knowledgeable than their European counterparts. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: “The only equivalent I know of is to reread indefinitely Emerson”s annotators and journals, the American version of Montaigne.” Several of Emerson”s poems were included in Bloom”s anthology The Best Poems of the English Language.
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