Emerson, Ralph Waldo(1803–1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American author and leader of New England transcendentalism, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, a locally distinguished Unitarian clergyman, died in 1811 leaving Emerson and five other children in the care of a pious mother and a very learned aunt on the father's side. From 1813 to 1817 Emerson attended the Boston Latin School; then, after four undistinguished years at Harvard, he became a schoolmaster while he continued to study extramurally at Harvard Divinity School. "My reasoning faculty is proportionally weak," he confessed in his Journal in 1824, on deciding to become a minister, "nor can I ever hope to write a Butler's Analogy or an Essay of Hume. … [But] the preaching most in vogue at the present day depends chiefly on imagination [italics added] for its success, and asks those accomplishments which I believe are most within my grasp." Made just before he was twenty-one, this acute piece of self-analysis marks the stage in Emerson's life when he really began to understand himself and gain a genuine premonition of his future role as literary artist. For Emerson is, more than anything else, an imaginative writer. (Thus Friedrich Nietzsche, who was at an early stage influenced by Emerson—admiring his "manifoldness" and "cheerfulness"—recognized him as one of the nineteenth century's few great masters of prose.)
Formative Experiences
Unitarianism was at first the main formative influence on Emerson, but it was not the most far-reaching, and the sort of preaching he was eventually to excel in had little to do with any established church or, for that matter, with Christianity as such.
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