Ralph Waldo Emerson

American essayist, poet and lecturer (1803–1882), born in Boston into a lineage of Unitarian clergymen, himself an ordained Unitarian minister before resigning his pastorate in 1832 following an institutional crisis of faith — he chiefly disagreed with the doctrine of the Eucharist — and the founding and most influential figure of American transcendentalism, the first genuinely original philosophical and literary movement to emerge in the United States. Settled in Concord, Massachusetts, he formed the nucleus of an intellectual circle that included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott, among others, giving the nascent American culture a voice of its own, independent of the European tradition. His programmatic essay Nature (1836) established the principles of transcendentalism: nature is not merely inert matter but a living symbol of spirit, and the individual can access spiritual and divine truth directly through intuition and immediate contact with the natural world, without need for ecclesiastical, dogmatic or even historical mediation — a position of radical idealism, influenced by Kant, Hinduism, Neoplatonism and English and German Romanticism. His most famous and enduring essay, Self-Reliance (1841), is a vibrant manifesto of American moral individualism: it exhorts the reader to trust their own intuitive judgement above social conformity, tradition and even their own past consistency — 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds', he writes in one of his most quoted lines — arguing that each individual contains a spark of the same universal spirit that animates the whole cosmos. A tireless lecturer across the country for decades, his influence extended from Nietzsche and William James to the American civil rights movement and contemporary American popular culture, which continues to invoke his ideal of the self-reliant individual.

12 works

• English Traits
• Essays — First Series
• Essays — Second Series
• Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Letters and Social Aims
• Miscellanies embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
• Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers
• Nature
• Poems
• Representative Men Seven Lectures
• Society and solitude Twelve chapters
• The Conduct of Life