Biography:
(b. 1803; d. 1882)
The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson spent a sheltered childhood in Boston. During his youth the publications of the German Higher Critics and their progeny, as well as translations of Hindu and Buddhist poetry, were causing controversy in American academic circles. Emerson's class at Harvard Divinity School was affected by these influences; consequently, upon assuming the pastorate of a Boston church in 1829, Emerson experienced many doubts concerning traditional Christian belief. He resigned from his pulpit in 1832, moved to nearby Concord, and then spent the next few years studying and traveling in Europe. After visiting a Paris botanical exhibition, Emerson resolved to be, as he termed it, a "naturalist." Upon returning to the United States, he began his career as a lecturer in the country's new lyceum movement. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, Emerson published the works that present his thought at its most idealistic and optimistic. The lyrical essay Nature (1836), a pamphlet repudiating both materialism and conventional religion, declares nature the divine example for inspiration and the source of boundless possibilities for humanity's fulfillment. The American Scholar, an address delivered before Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837, attacks American dependence on European thought and urges the creation of a new literary heritage. Emerson's Divinity School Address, delivered at Harvard in 1838, caused tremendous controversy for renouncing the tenets of historical Christianity and defining Transcendental philosophy in terms of the "impersoneity" of God. The doctrines formulated in these three works were later expanded and elaborated upon in his Essays (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), of which "Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," and "The Poet" are among the best-known.

Influences:
A founder of the Transcendental movement and the founder of a distinctly American philosophy emphasizing optimism, individuality, and mysticism, Emerson was one of the most influential literary figures of the nineteenth century. Raised to be a minister in Puritan New England, Emerson sought to "create all things new" with a philosophy stressing the recognition of God Immanent, the presence of ongoing creation and revelation by a god apparent in all things and who exists within everyone. Also crucial to Emerson's thought is the related Eastern concept of the essential unity of all thoughts, persons, and things in the divine whole. Traditional values of right and wrong, good and evil, appear in his work as necessary opposites, evidencing the effect of German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel's system of dialectical metaphysics. Emerson's works also emphasize individualism and each person's quest to break free from the trappings of the illusory world (maya) in order to discover the godliness of the inner Self.

Selected Quotes:
"We do not see virtue is height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by law of nature, must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not."

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

"The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant."

Writings:
· Poems, essays (list)

Links:
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