Emerson, Ralph Waldo . Emerson achieved some reputation with his verse, corresponded with many of the leading intellectual and artistic figures of his day, and during an off and on again career as a Unitarian minister, delivered and later published a number of controversial sermons. Transcendentalism in America, of which Emerson was the leading figure, resembled British Romanticism in its precept that a fundamental continuity exists between man, nature, and God, or the divine. What is beyond nature is revealed through nature; nature is itself a symbol, or an indication of a deeper reality, in Emerson.
Matter and spirit are not opposed but reflect a critical unity of experience. Emerson is often characterized as an idealist philosopher and indeed used the term himself of his philosophy, explaining it simply as a recognition that plan always precedes action. For Emerson, all things exist in a ceaseless flow of change, and . Emerson remained throughout his lifetime the champion of the individual and a believer in the primacy of the individual. In the individual can be discovered all truths, all experience. For the individual, the religious experience must be direct and unmediated by texts, traditions, or personality. Central to defining Emerson. Self- reliance and independence of thought are fundamental to Emerson. To trust oneself and follow our inner promptings corresponds to the highest degree of consciousness. Emerson College Find Emerson College. Get More Results on the Look Smart! MFA in Creative Writing . The MFA in Creative Writing program at Emerson College fosters a. Emerson concurred with the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that originality was essentially a matter of reassembling elements drawn from other sources. From the English Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emerson borrowed his conception of . Writing about the Greek philosopher Plato, Emerson asserted that . Emerson also anticipates the key Poststructuralist concept of diff. Biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 2. Boston to Ruth Haskins Emerson and William Emerson, pastor of Boston's First Church. The cultural milieu of Boston at the turn of the nineteenth century would increasingly be marked by the conflict between its older conservative values and the radical reform movements and social idealists that emerged in the decades leading up through the 1. Emerson was one of five surviving sons who formed a supportive brotherhood, the financial and emotional leadership of which he was increasingly forced to assume over the years. The pattern of Emerson's intellectual life was shaped in these early years by the range and depth of his extracurricular reading in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, the extent of which took a severe toll on his eyesight and health. Equally important to his intellectual development was the influence of his paternal aunt Mary Moody Emerson. Though she wrote primarily on religious subjects, Mary Moody Emerson set an example for Emerson and his brothers with her wide reading in every branch of knowledge and her stubborn insistence that they form opinions on all of the issues of the day. Mary Moody Emerson was at the same time passionately orthodox in religion and a lover of controversy, an original thinker tending to a mysticism that was a precursor to her nephew's more radical beliefs. His aunt's influence waned as he developed away from her strict orthodoxy, but her relentless intellectual energy and combative individualism left a permanent stamp on Emerson as a thinker. In 1. 82. 9, he accepted a call to serve as junior pastor at Boston's Second Church, serving only until 1. Lord's Supper. Emerson would in 1. East Lexington Church but did preach there regularly until 1. Emerson (NYSE: EMR) is a global manufacturing and technology company solving today's toughest challenges. Emerson Businesses Emerson Process Management Emerson Industrial Automation Emerson Network Power Emerson Climate Technologies. LE., & Clerehan, R. Writing program administration outside the North American context. Gunner (Eds.) The Writing Program Interrupted: Making Space for. In 1. 83. 0, Emerson married Ellen Tucker who died the following year of tuberculosis. Together they had four children, the eldest of whom, Waldo, died at the age of five, an event that left deep scars on the couple and altered Emerson's outlook on the redemptive value of suffering. In 1. 83. 7 Emerson delivered his famous . Compelled by financial necessity to undertake a career on the lecture circuit, Emerson began lecturing in earnest in 1. While providing Emerson's growing family and array of dependents with a steady income, the lecture tours heightened public awareness of Emerson's ideas and work. From 1. 84. 0- 1. Emerson edited The Dial with Margaret Fuller. Essays: First Series was published in 1. Essays: Second Series in 1. Emerson's reputation as a philosopher. In 1. 84. 4, Emerson also purchased the land on the shore of Walden Pond where he was to allow the naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau to build a cabin the following year. While sympathetic to the experimental collective at Brook Farm, Emerson declined urgent appeals to join the group and maintained his own household in Concord with Lydia and their growing family. Emerson attempted to create his own community of kindred spirits, however, assembling in the neighborhood of Concord a group of writers including Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the social thinker Margaret Fuller, the reformer Bronson Alcott, and the poet Ellery Channing. English Traits was inspired by a trip to Britain during 1. By the 1. 85. 0s, Emerson was an outspoken advocate of abolition in lectures across New England and the Midwest and continued lecturing widely on a number of different topics. Emerson spent the final years of his life peacefully but without full use of his faculties. He died of pneumonia in 1. Concord. Major Works. As a philosopher, Emerson primarily makes use of two forms, the essay and the public address or lecture. His career began, however, with a short book, Nature, published anonymously in 1. Nature touches on many of the ideas to which he would return to again and again over his lifetime, most significantly the perspective that nature serves as an intermediary between human experience and what lies beyond nature. Emerson expresses a similar idea in his claim that spirit puts forth nature through us, exemplary of which is the famous . While Emerson characterizes traversing the common with mystical language, it is also importantly a matter of knowledge. The fundamental knowledge of nature that circulates through him is the basis of all human knowledge but cannot be distinguished, in Emerson's thought, from divine understanding. The unity of nature is the unity of variety, and . Man ought to live in a original relation to the universe, an assault on convention he repeats in various formulas throughout his life; however, . Emerson begins with a familiar critique of American and particularly New England culture by asserting that Americans were . Continuing in this theme, Emerson argues against book knowledge entirely and in favor of lived experience: . Emerson calls for both creative writing and . The object of scholarly culture is not the bookworm but . Emerson set out defiantly to insist on the divinity of all men rather than one single historical personage, a position at odds with Christian orthodoxy but one central to his entire system of thought. The original relation to nature Emerson insisted upon ensures an original relation to the divine, not copied from the religious experience of others, even Jesus of Nazareth. Whether Emerson characterized it as compensation, retribution, balance, or unity, the principle of an automatic response to all human action, good or ill, was a permanent fixture of his thought. Indeed, the various titles of Emerson's do not limit the subject matter of the essays but repeatedly bear out the abiding concerns of his philosophy. As a philosopher- poet, Emerson employs a highly figurative style, while his poetry is remarkable as a poetry of ideas. The language of the essays is sufficiently poetical that Thoreau felt compelled to say critically of the essays. Like the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Emerson disavowed nineteenth century notions of progress, arguing in the next essay of the book, . For everything that is given, something is taken. The emphasis on the unity of experience is the same: . Emerson wove this explicit theme of self- trust throughout his work, writing in . No less a friend of Emerson's than Herman Melville parodied excessive faith in the individual through the portrait of Captain Ahab in his classic American novel, Moby- Dick. Nevertheless, Emerson argued that if our promptings are bad they come from our inmost being. If we are made thus we have little choice in any case but to be what we are. Translating this precept into the social realm, Emerson famously declares, . Equally memorable and influential on Walt Whitman is Emerson's idea that . Emerson's aesthetics stress not the object of art but the force that creates the art object, or as he characterizes this process in relation to poetry: . While Emerson does not accept in principle social progress as such, his philosophy emphasizes the progress of spirit, particularly when understood as development. This process he allies with the process of art: . He wrote, whether out of conviction or helplessness, . Emerson's Representative Men (1. American literature in at least one respect: none of his representative characters were American. Emerson structures the book around portraits of Plato, the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, the French essayist Montaigne, the poet William Shakespeare, the statesman Napoleon Bonaparte, and the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Each man stands in for a type, for example, Montaigne represents the . Like Nietzsche, Emerson did not believe that great men were ends in themselves but served particular functions, notably for Emerson their capacity to . Unity, or Identity; and, 2. The English poet possessed the rare capacity of greatness in that he allowed the spirit of his age to achieve representation through him. Nevertheless the world waits on . In The Conduct of Life, Emerson describes . Emerson's moral summary of Napoleon.
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