#Most embarrassing moments essay series

Įmerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before Emerson's eighth birthday. Emerson was entirely of English ancestry, and his family had been in New England since the early colonial period. Three other children-Phoebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline-died in childhood. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and his father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Early life, family, and education Įmerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, a son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. 'In all my lectures,' he wrote, 'I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.' Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist. He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. Emerson's 'nature' was more philosophical than naturalistic: 'Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.' Emerson is one of several figures who 'took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.'

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. They include the well-known essays ' Self-Reliance', ' The Over-Soul', ' Circles', ' The Poet', and ' Experience.' Together with 'Nature', these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

#Most embarrassing moments essay series

His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. considered to be America's 'intellectual Declaration of Independence.' Įmerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled ' The American Scholar' in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him “the most gifted of the Americans” and Walt Whitman referred to him as his “master”.Įmerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay ' Nature'. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.