In one line
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a minister who left the pulpit to become a lecturer and essayist, and the leading voice of the movement called Transcendentalism. His essays, above all "Self-Reliance," argue that every person has direct access to truth, and that the worst thing you can do is live on borrowed opinions.
The life
Emerson was born in Boston on 25 May 1803, the son of William Emerson, a Unitarian minister, and Ruth Haskins. His father died in 1811, when Ralph was eight, leaving the family poor. His mother took in boarders, and the boys shared a single winter coat, taking turns. A formidable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, read widely, wrote endlessly, and pushed her nephew toward big questions; he later called her one of his great teachers.
He entered Harvard at fourteen, graduated in 1821 near the middle of his class, taught school, and trained for the ministry. In 1829 he became minister of Boston's Second Church and married Ellen Louisa Tucker, who was already ill with tuberculosis. She died in February 1831, aged nineteen. Emerson's grief was profound. More than a year after her death, he wrote in his journal that he had visited her tomb and opened the coffin.
Doubts that had been building came to a head. In 1832 he told his congregation he could no longer in conscience administer the Lord's Supper as a sacrament, and he resigned. He sailed for Europe, where he met the writers he admired, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and had a turning-point experience at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Looking at the natural history collections, he wrote in his journal that he felt moved by strange sympathies and resolved, "I will be a naturalist."
Back in America, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834, married Lydia Jackson (whom he renamed Lidian) in 1835, and began a new career as a public lecturer. In 1836 he published Nature, a small book arguing that nature is a language through which spirit speaks, and that every person can read it for themselves. That year a circle of writers and ministers began to meet around him; the press dubbed them Transcendentalists.
Two speeches made him famous and notorious. "The American Scholar" (1837), given to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa society, called on Americans to stop imitating Europe and think for themselves; Oliver Wendell Holmes later called it America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence." The "Divinity School Address" (1838) told Harvard's graduating ministers that the church had made Jesus into a dead idol and that they should seek God directly. Harvard did not invite him back to speak for nearly thirty years.
Essays (1841), which includes "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The Over-Soul" and "Circles," and Essays: Second Series (1844), established him as the country's best-known man of letters. In January 1842 his five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever. The essay "Experience," in the second series, is his attempt to face that loss, and it is one of the most honest pieces he wrote.
Emerson was a mentor to the young Henry David Thoreau, who lived in his household for periods and built his cabin at Walden on Emerson's land. He was a friend and supporter of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he wrote an enthusiastic letter to an unknown Walt Whitman in 1855 on reading Leaves of Grass. For decades he traveled the lecture circuit, as far as California, speaking on everything from history to manners.
He came slowly to public activism, but after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northern citizens to help return people who had escaped slavery, he denounced it bitterly and spoke out for abolition. He supported the Union in the Civil War.
In his last decade his memory failed, and he could no longer find common words. He died in Concord on 27 April 1882 and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Thoreau and Hawthorne.
The big ideas
Self-reliance
The essay's core, in his own words: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." And: "Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist." Emerson's self-reliance is not selfishness or rugged individualism in the economic sense. It is intellectual and moral honesty: to believe your own thought, to speak it, and to act on what you see is true, even when others disagree. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself," the essay ends.
Against foolish consistency
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he writes in "Self-Reliance." The word "foolish" matters. He is not against keeping your word; he is against refusing to change your mind out of fear of looking inconsistent. "Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again."
Nature as teacher
In Nature he describes crossing a bare common at twilight under clouded sky and feeling "glad to the brink of fear." In the woods, he says, we return to reason and faith. Nature is not scenery but a direct line to the spirit that runs through all things.
The Over-Soul
Emerson believed there is a single universal mind, "the Over-Soul," in which every person shares. That is why self-trust is not arrogance: when you trust your deepest intuitions, you are trusting something larger than your personal self. He drew on Plato, on the German idealists by way of Coleridge, and on the Hindu scriptures he read in translation, including the Bhagavad Gita.
Compensation
In "Compensation" he argues that the world keeps a kind of balance: every gain has a cost, every loss a hidden gain, and you cannot cheat the law of cause and effect. It is an old idea, close to the Stoics, made American and optimistic.
Circles
"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn," he writes in "Circles." No achievement is final. Every horizon opens another.
What their lines mean for you
At work. "Self-Reliance" is the founding text for anyone who has had to back their own judgment against a room. "Insist on yourself; never imitate," he says. Your own gift, developed, is worth more than a borrowed one perfected.
In training. "Circles" is the training mindset: there is always another level. And Emerson's habits were his own discipline: a journal kept for over fifty years, read, mined and revised into lectures and essays.
In grief. Emerson lost his father, his first wife, two brothers and his son. In "Experience" he admits, with painful candor, that grief did not teach him as much as he expected; it slid off him, and he hated that it did. It is one of the few great essays on grief that does not pretend to have the answer.
In anger. Emerson's advice is mostly about not letting others' opinions run you. The essay mocks the person who adjusts his face and opinions to every passing frown. Calm comes from self-trust.
On the ocean. Emerson crossed the Atlantic several times and wrote often of the sea. In his journal and essays it is a figure of the infinite: a reminder that the self is small and the whole is vast.
With ambition. "Hitch your wagon to a star," he wrote in an essay on civilization. Aim high, but in your own direction. The ambition Emerson admired was to become fully yourself.
Where people get them wrong
- "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Widely credited to Emerson. It does not appear in his published works, and researchers have not found it before the 20th century.
- "To laugh often and much..." ("Success"). Often credited to Emerson. It derives from a prize-winning 1905 essay by Bessie Anderson Stanley, of Kansas, later reworked by others.
- "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Not Emerson. The earliest known source is Henry Stanley Haskins's Meditations in Wall Street (1940).
- "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." People drop the key word: foolish consistency.
- Self-reliance means self-sufficiency or "every man for himself." For Emerson, self-trust was a spiritual idea, grounded in a universal mind that all people share.
Read them yourself
- Essays: First Series (1841), including "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The Over-Soul" and "Circles": Project Gutenberg #2944
- Essays: Second Series (1844), including "Experience": Project Gutenberg search
- Nature, "The American Scholar" and other works: Project Gutenberg search
- Emerson's works on Wikisource: en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
All quotations in this essay are Emerson's own published words, which are in the public domain.
Timeline
- 1803: born in Boston on 25 May
- 1811: his father, William Emerson, dies
- 1817 to 1821: attends Harvard College
- 1829: becomes minister of Boston's Second Church; marries Ellen Tucker
- 1831: Ellen dies of tuberculosis
- 1832: resigns from the ministry and sails for Europe
- 1833: meets Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth; visits the Jardin des Plantes in Paris
- 1834: settles in Concord
- 1835: marries Lydia (Lidian) Jackson
- 1836: publishes Nature
- 1837: delivers "The American Scholar"
- 1838: delivers the "Divinity School Address"
- 1841: Essays (First Series), with "Self-Reliance"
- 1842: his son Waldo dies, aged five
- 1844: Essays: Second Series, with "Experience"
- 1850: denounces the Fugitive Slave Act
- 1855: writes to Walt Whitman praising Leaves of Grass
- 1862: delivers the eulogy for Henry David Thoreau
- 1882: dies in Concord on 27 April