Ralph Waldo Emerson

1803-1882

Life

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Issues and themes

Although he wrote no fiction and less poetry than many other poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the most important figure in the history of American literature. As a writer of essays and lectures, he was a master stylist, renowned for the clarity and rhythms of his prose. Several of his essays--notably Nature, "Self-Reliance," and "The American Scholar"--are among the finest in English. Among the principles that Emerson eloquently addressed in these and other works are the individual's unity with nature, the sanctity of the individual, the need to live in the present, and the role of the poet in society.

Emerson's chief contribution to American letters, however, came in the form of his enormous influence on other writers and thinkers. In the 1830s, for example, he became a leader of American Transcendentalism--a philosophical, literary, and social movement--and so influenced Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson and Transcendentalism even shaped the ideas of non-adherents, such as Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, who defined their own philosophical and aesthetic principles partly by criticizing the Transcendentalists.

Emerson's ideas about poetry--perhaps in particular his contention that "it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem" in the essay "The Poet"--also profoundly influenced Walt Whitman. Indeed, Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass reiterates many of the same principles expressed in The Poet, including the role of the poet as voice of the people. Like Thoreau, Whitman also owed much of his recognition to Emerson, whose praise of Leaves of Grass--"I greet you at the beginning of a great career. . . . "I find incomparable things said incomparably well."--Whitman printed on the back of the books. Through Whitman, whose free verse influenced scores of poets from T.S. Eliot to Allen Ginsburg, Emerson achieved additional impact on the course of American literature.

Finally, Emerson's insistence that humans live in the present and trust their own impulses helped American writers forge their own identities at a time when European influence was still high and American confidence perhaps was still low. After hearing Emerson deliver address called The American Scholar to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837, fellow writer Oliver Wendell Holmes called the speech "our intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Work

"Self-Reliance"

Bibliography

© Mark Canada, 1997

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