Ralph Waldo Emerson

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at Ralph Waldo Emerson, an author living during an era known as The Romantic Age. This paper also investigates the events of his life, examines some of his ideas, and evaluates his status in and influence on American Literature.

From the Paper:

"In Europe he visited many famous thinkers--Walter Savage Lando, Lafayette, John Stuart Mill, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. These people's ideas influenced his developing philosophy of Transcendentalism. His response to his wife's untimely death was to establish ideas and principles on which he would base his life, plus he developed a faculty for more acute mental discernment--more perspicacity--toward life. He proved that wisdom could be achieved through experience.
When Emerson returned in 1833, he began to give lectures. In those days, lectures were a form of social entertainment (there were no movies or TV), and he was paid well for giving them. Sometimes he still preached while he wrote new lectures and planned his first book. In 1834 he married Lydia Jackson and moved to Concord. His brother Edward died of TB the same year, but the following year his first son Waldo was born. By 1835, Emerson's unusual and overgenerous spirit was ready to be unleashed. He used his deep feelings, emotions, and thoughts to create truth the way he arrived at truth, within himself: "To believe your own idea, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent belief and it shall be the universal sense; for at all times the inmost becomes the outmost and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment."

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