Emerson Poems

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.

Born in Boston in 1803, Emerson was the son of a Unitarian minister. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1820, and subsequently studied at Harvard Divinity School, becoming an ordained minister, continuing a long line of ministers in his family. He supported himself as a schoolteacher from 1821-26. In 1826 he was “approbated to preach,” and in 1829 became pastor of the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. That same year he married Ellen Louise Tucker, who died of tuberculosis seventeen months later.

In 1832 Emerson resigned his pastorate and traveled to Europe, where he met prominent figures like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834, where he began a new career as a public lecturer and married Lydia Jackson a year later. A circle of intellectuals who gathered around Emerson in Concord came to be known as “the Concord school,” and included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller.

Emerson made an annual lecture tour, and these lectures formed the basis for most of his essays. His first published work, Nature (1836), encapsulated his transcendental philosophy, which perceived the phenomenal world as symbolic of the inner life and emphasized individual freedom and self-reliance. Emerson’s address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard (1837) and another address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838) applied his doctrine to the roles of the scholar and the clergyman, sparking significant controversy. An ardent abolitionist, Emerson lectured and wrote extensively against slavery from the 1840s through the Civil War.

His principal publications include two volumes of Essays (1841, 1844), Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870). Emerson died of pneumonia in 1882 and was buried in Concord.

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