Ralph Waldo Emerson
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AI overview
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American philosopher who lived from 1803 to 1882 and shaped intellectual thought during the 19th century. His ideas about self-reliance, nature, and individualism influenced American culture and continue to be studied as important contributions to philosophy.
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Person · Open Library
- Born
- 25 May 1803
- Died
- 27 April 1882
- Works
- 2016
Top works
- Early poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Essays
- Emerson's essays ; and, Representative men
- Compensation
- Representative men
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 791
- Total plays
- 6,982
Article
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. His speech "The American Scholar", given in 1837, was called America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence" by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.