Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nineteenth-century American essayist, poet, and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement.
His essays, particularly "Self-Reliance" and "Nature," championed individualism, nonconformity, and the inherent goodness of people and nature.
Emerson's influence on American thought was profound; phrases like trust thyself and a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds have entered common usage.
He remains a touchstone for discussions of American identity and intellectual independence.
- philosopherStudent of fundamental questions
- poetWriter of verse
- New EnglandNortheast U.S. region
- American Renaissance1850s literary-philosophical flourishing
- transcendentalismIntuition-based idealist philosophy
Henry David Thoreau · Nature · self-reliance · John Muir · essayist · literature · intellectual · lecturer · individualism · abolitionism · idealism · spiritual growth · pantheism · civil disobedience · Walt Whitman · romanticism · Boston · spiritual exploration
- TranscendentalistsHenry David Thoreau, Thoreau
- poetspoet, Homer, Dante, Milton, Emily Dickinson
- American ClassicsMoby-Dick, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Leaves of Grass
- American LiteratureThe Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Moby Dick
- American AuthorsMark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne
- American PoetryWalt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes
Ralph Waldo EmersonThomas Hobbes
English political philosopher
pessimist · Karl Marx · David Hume · B.F. Skinner · Thomas Malthus
Ralph Waldo EmersonHerman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe · Samuel Beckett · nihilist · Nathaniel Hawthorne · Thomas Hardy
Ralph Waldo EmersonT.S. Eliot
John C. Calhoun · conformist · traditionalist · institutionalist · authoritarian