Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is the chief figure in the American literary movement called Transcendentalism, which was also a philosophical and religious movement. Transcendentalism is complex, drawing upon Platonic, Christian, Stoic, and Hindu thought, but its most immediate affinity is with German Idealism as worked out from Kant to Schelling.

Indeed Emerson himself said in a lecture called "The Transcendentalist," delivered in December 1841, "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism." He then described it: "As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses gives us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture."

Materialist criticism focuses on facts, on literary history, on the life and mind of the author and his or her intention, and on the text itself. Emerson's ethical and idealist criticism concentrates almost entirely upon the reader and his or her response to a text. Emerson is mainly concerned not with the fact of literary history but with the uses of literature, with its effects on the reader, and its power or lack of power to move us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803.Ê From a young age, Emerson experienced great emotional suffering and hardship.Ê His mother was forced to become a landlady in 1808 after EmersonÕs father died.Ê Emerson worked his way through Harvard only to later suffer temporary loss of vision in one eye and lung disease.Ê Soon after, he experienced the deaths of his first wife, two of his brothers, and his first son.ÊÊÊ Emerson was dissatisfied as a schoolteacher.Ê

Like Thoreau, this probably stimulated his negative feelings concerning public education.Ê In ÒEducation,Ó Emerson confessed to being Òutterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching.Ê No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.ÓÊÊ After teaching, Emerson attempted work in the church as a pastor, but was forced to resign due to doctrinal difference with the church.Ê

Not only did Emerson question traditional Christian beliefs, he publicly denounced the traditional beliefs of the masses regarding many area of thought. Emerson was able to use his lectures and writing to formulate new transcendental views regarding religion, education, and many areas of social and political reform. [Jessica Gordon]

In July of 1872, Emerson's house burned, and the event precipitated a sharp downturn in his health. In the fall, he went abroad with his daughter Ellen, traveling to Europe and Egypt, and returned just after his seventieth birthday to a cheering crowd and a restored home. But his gentle decline into aphasia had begun. He died on April 27, 1882. Standing by his grave nine days later, Whitman, noted: "A just man, poised on himself, all-loving, all-inclosing, and sane and clear as the sun."