Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pre-reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the most thoughtprovoking American cultural leader of the mid-19th century. In his unorthodox ideas and actions he represented a minority of Americans, but by the end of his life he was considered a sage. Although he studied philosophy extensively, he was not a critical or systematic thinker, but rather a channel for many religious, literary, and philosophical currents of the early 19th century.
Meetings with Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1833, and a continuing friendship with Carlyle, enthused Emerson with a fusion of the Protestant doctrine of self-reliance with the romantic doctrine of the primacy of personality, to both of which were added reverence for the genius and hero. Emerson encouraged a new generation to find “an original relation to the universe”. His romantic advocacy of self-reliance, based on a notion of the “god within”, diminished the authority of institutions and traditions and empowered the self. His famous works include “Nature” “Self-Reliance” “The Over-Soul” “Circles” “The Poet” and“Experience”. His speech “The American Scholar” is considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”.
“Nature” was published anonymously in 1836. The essay brings together all of the basic tenets of Transcendentalism through a discussion of nature and its uses (commodity, beauty, language, discipline). It contends that expansion of the human soul is possible through a reconnection with nature and develops Emerson’s idea of the “Over-Soul”.
Prompts for Your Reading
1.What is your expectation of a philosopher’s account about nature?
2.Emerson suggests that we should look for solitude by simply looking at the stars. What does he mean? What does “what he touches” (Paragraph 1) refer to?
3.In what sense does the author speak of nature in this passage?
4.What does the author mean by “the most poetical sense”?