Emerson's Essays - Emerson, Ralph Waldo

. .

Résumé :
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th century American essayist, poet and leader in the transcendentalist movement. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s. Emerson published his first essay, Nature in 1836. After writing this essay Emerson gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence. Some of his more well-known essays include Nature, Self-Reliance, Compensation, The Over-Soul, The Poet, Experience, and The American Scholar.

Biographie:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882)[5] was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
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. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's intellectual Declaration of Independence.[6]
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays Self-Reliance,[7] The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet, and Experience. Together with Nature,[8] these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's nature was more philosophical than naturalistic: Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Emerson is one of several figures who took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.
He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement,[10] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. In all my lectures, he wrote, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.[11]Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.