A Brief Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Writer).

                                                                              BHAVESH G PARAMAR.

                                                                                       PhD (PURSUING), M.A. (ENG)

                                                                                      JRF, NET, GSET, GATE 2022/23. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

 

                                              

“Trust Thyself.”

                              - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803. He was a poet, essayist, lecturer, and philosopher. He was one of the most prominent writers and philosophers in the United States of America during the nineteenth century. Emerson's initial encounter with non-Western works came through his father, William Emerson, a Unitarian preacher with a polite interest in learning and letters. Emerson's formal education began in 1812, when he was nine years old, at the Boston Latin School. Emerson entered Harvard College at the age of 14 in 1817. Emerson had few opportunities to study the different literary and religious traditions of Asia and the Middle East while at Harvard.

However, as seen by his diaries and library borrowing records, Emerson paid close attention to the wider European Romantic interest in the "Orient" or "East" in his spare time. Emerson gained much of his knowledge of India from British colonial agents, reading treatises, travelogues, and translations of legal, theological, and poetic literature published in the aftermath of Britain's imperial push into India.

Emerson's "Indian Superstition," a densely allusive poem he wrote for the graduation ceremonies at Harvard College in 1822. Emerson portrays in the 156-line poem how "Superstition," the personification of religious oppression in Asia, has enslaved "Dishonoured India." "Indian Superstition" may be closer to caricature than literary art, with its Romantic primitivism and enormous imagery. Emerson's poem is significant for diverging from a popular era formula that held that a debased India could only be rescued by Western colonialism.

Emerson's wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of TB in 1831, causing a flurry of personal and professional events in his life. Emerson was deeply impacted by her death and paid frequent visits to her grave in Roxbury. He wrote in his journal on March 29, 1832, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin."

Emerson returned to his ancestral home in Concord, Massachusetts, after travelling around Europe and meeting literary giants such as William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. He launched a nearly 50-year career as a public lecturer and married Lydia Jackson, whom he affectionately referred to as "Mine Asia"—a play on Asia Minor, the location of Lydia's ancient kingdom.

“Nature”, Emerson's first significant declaration of mature philosophy and a landmark book that generated the Transcendentalist movement in New England, was released in 1836. Following this effort, he delivered a speech titled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. saw as America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau were among the New England Transcendentalists, a diverse group of theological, literary, educational, and social reformers. In July 1840, the transcendental group launched its flagship journal, The Dial. Emerson published The Dial, a Transcendentalist periodical, from 1842 to 1844. They began planning the journal in October 1839, but it did not begin until the first week of 1840. The managing editor was George Ripley. Margaret Fuller was the initial editor, when Emerson approached her after numerous others declined the position. When Emerson took over, Fuller stayed on for nearly two years, utilising the journal to promote brilliant young authors such as Ellery Channing and Thoreau.

 

Emerson frequently wrote poetry. His poetry reflects spiritualism, religion, and man's first relationship with God. Emerson's poetry was written between 1844 and 1854. Poems was the first book published in 1847. May-Day and Other Poems was published twenty years later in 1867. Emerson, like Thomas Hardy and D.R. Lawrence, preferred poetry over prose. His first love was poetry. In his March 1842 address in New York, he made it quite plain.

 

Emerson considered poets to be seers. The old English refer to him as a bard. Bede is referred to as venerable, while Shakespeare is referred to as 'Bard of Avon.' The poet is an idea collector. Emerson considers the poet to be the sayer, namer, and representer of beauty.

 

Emerson considers literature to be a magnificent art form in and of itself. There, words are deeds. Poetry is visual music. It's an enlightening experience. Poetry's duty is to make visible and specific the link between the human and the divine. It was taught to Emerson by English metaphysical poets. At the same time, Emerson believed that poetry should accompany science. Emerson made use of symbol appropriations. He felt that the mystic and the science must become one, and that the symbol is the only way to achieve this union.

 

In his essay "The Poet," Emerson outlines his conviction that poetry, like any other kind of art, should be organic rather than metrically or musically beautiful. Emerson employs imagery. 'Mottoes,' 'Days,' 'The Sphinx,' 'Hamatreya,' 'Uriel,' 'Brahma,' 'The Snow-Storm,' and 'Merlin' are examples. According to Robert Spiller, the poet used his full rights with volatile nature, employing the evidences of the pines, the sea, and the stars to its own ends and demonstrating the relationship of the law of things to the law of God.

 

"Woodnotes," "Threnody," his odes, and "The Rhodora" are examples of his message and effect. Dickinson's use of imagery is reminiscent to Emerson's use of visual image. In "Days," his intricate and ascending imagery come together to form a singular sign of revelation.

His Essays in 1841 and Essays: Second Series in 1844, Emerson emerged as a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity. Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address, which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.

Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans" and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master". Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

 

“Many time the reading of a book has made the future of a man.”

                                                                                   - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Collections

·         Essays: First Series (1841)

·         Essays: Second Series (1844)

·         Poems (1847)

·         Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849)

·         Representative Men (1850)

·         English Traits (1856)

·         The Conduct of Life (1860)

·         May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

·         Society and Solitude (1870)

 

Essays

·         Nature (1836)

·         Self-Reliance

·         Compensation

·         The Over-Soul

·         Circles

·         The Poet

·         Experience

·         Politics

·         The American Scholar

·         New England Reformers

·         History

·         Fate

 

Poems

·         Concord Hymn

·         The Rhodora

·         Brahma

·         Uriel