"The Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson -an essay expressing Transcendentalist ideas

Ralph Waldo Emerson's life story

Ralph Waldo Emerson is an American essayist, lecturer and poet; he was born on May25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts and died in April 27, 1882 in Concord. He was one of eight children of William Emerson, a Congregational minister and Ruth Haskins Emerson; his father was a clergyman, died on 12 May 1811 and his mother was forced to take in boarders to help make ends meet. Emerson began attending the Boston School of Latin in 1812 and graduated in 1817, the year he entered Harvard College, he had undetermined progress there, graduating thirty in a category of fiftynine. He was delegated as minister in 1826 and directed to the Unified Church in 1829.
Port stated that:
Ralph, who lost his father when he was eight, seemed destined to continue the ministerial line, and passed in due course through Boston Latin School, Harvard College (1821), and a year of divinity studies at Harvard (which were interrupted by eye trouble). Approbated to preach in the fall of 1826, he became pastor of Boston's Second Church two and a half years later, but left that post in the fall of 1832 because he could no longer serve the Lord's Supper (communion) in good conscience. (Joel Porte 35)¹.
Emerson was seen as a champion of individualism and a predictive critic of peer pressure. His writings were expensive and prolific. He gave more than 1,500 public lectures throughout the United States. In October 1817, he went to Harvard, where he occupied a poet of class, but did not emerge as a graduate student in the middle of his class. After graduation, he went to Florida in search of warmer climates for his sensitive health.
Emerson worked as a teacher at the school and later as a pastor at the Second Boston Church. But he gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and articulating the Transcendentalism philosophy in his 1836 essay Nature. After this pioneering work, he delivered a speech titled The American Scholar in 1837, which was considered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the father's Declaration of Intellectual Independence of America.
In 1838, he was invited to Harvard Divinity School, where he gave a famous address claiming early Christianity and discounting the miracles in the Bible. This radical approach was heavily criticized by members of the establishment. Emerson was absolutely against slavery, after 1844, he became more interested in the antislavery movement. He struggled against slavery through his writing and motivated people to be independent. He supported the election of Abraham Lincoln who was also against slavery.
Emerson famous works was essays; they had made a strong noise in the United States with his writings, divided into two series the first and the second series (1841, 1844). The first series includes his famous essay Self-Reliance where the readers will reconsider their positions and start to build a special relationship with nature and God, and to trust on themselves far from the judgment of the others. There are other works from Emerson’s first series such as: Compensation, Spiritual Law, love, friendship, Over-soul, Circle, and Intellect. In another hand, the second series contains: Gifts, Politics, and Nominalist¹.
Emerson’s later work was The Conduct of Life 1860 which supported a more moderate balance between individual non-conformity and wider societal concerns. He encouraged for the abolition of slavery and continued to lecture across the country throughout the 1860s.
Emerson’s style of writing influenced the society of the nineteenth century. He is considered as a prose writer with his incisive observation and his vivid expression. Although he dealt with complex concepts his writing contains directness, clarity, and careful progression from one idea to the next. The phraseology of Emerson and construction always suggest the spoken rather than the written word.
Emerson became known as the central figure in his literary and philosophical collection, now known as the American transcendentalism. This writer shared the main belief that each individual can transcend, or exceed, the physical world of the senses to a deeper spiritual experience through intuition and Self-Reliance is a good model to speak about it in order to know more about Emerson’s writing and how he defended transcendentalism.