EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. - American thinker and writer, b. in Boston on May 25, 1803 to a Puritan family, d. at Concord on Apr. 25, 1882. He studied at Harvard. He became a Unitarian minister; from 1827 he was a famous preacher and pastor. Later (1832), in keeping with his critical-philosophical ideas, he withdrew from pastoral activity. In 1833 he made his first journey to Europe; having returned to America, in 1836 he published his first essay, Nature: an obscure and vague message for an American spiritual renewal. He insisted on this in 1837 with The American Scholar: a clamorous appeal for detachment from the European past. In 1838, in a lecture, he openly took his stand against Christianity, with which he broke definitively. In 1841-44 he published the Essays, winning international fame. He played a leading part in American transcendentalism, a vast movement of romantic-idealistic and immanentistic-subjective renewal. In 1847 he gave several lectures in England on the spirit and customs of the time; from these Representative Men is drawn, the most celebrated work of E. He returned to Europe again in 1872.

Besides religious and Enlightenment influences, E. underwent the currents of Romanticism and transcendental idealism; investing everything with the mystical-sentimental pathos of his personality. The result is a cosmic-spiritual pantheism centering on man. With an intuitive, aphoristic, contradictory procedure, in which clarity, organic structure and depth are lacking, poorly substituted by a suggestive and wholly obscure lyrical-spiritual quality. The profound essence of reality is an "over-soul": divine spirit that quickens and binds everything. Man must be himself, reacting against every conformism and every mediocrity; attentive to grasp and confess to himself his states of mind as felt and lived. A meeting of American psychologism, Puritan fervor and European Romanticism in the exaltation of a vague moralism. Representative men are such by being truly, profoundly men, in intimate and continuous communion with the "over-soul," sharers in "its infinite life, as every wave shares in the infinite pulse of the sea." Even his poetry (the first Poems are from 1847) has a rather philosophical and didactic content. His work influenced European intuitionism and existentialism.

Bibliography10 works

BIBL.: Works: The Complete Works, 12 vols., Boston 1903-1904; Journals, 10 vols., ibid. 1909-14; besides various correspondence. Italian translation: Saggi: L'anima suprema, trans. by P. Zampini Salazar, Milan 1904; L'anima, la natura, la saggezza, trans. by M. Cossa, Bari 1911; La guida della vita, trans. by D. Petroello, Turin 1923; Uomini rappresentativi, trans. by A. Bancotti, ibid. 1934. - Studies: J. E. Cabot, Memoirs of W. E., 2 vols., Boston 1887; M. Dugard, R. W. E., sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris 1907; G. W. Cooke, A bibliography of R. W. E., New York 1908; P. Sakmann, E.s Geisteswelt, Stuttgart 1927; R. Michaud, La vie inspirée d'E., Paris 1930. Further indications in W. Ziegenfuss, Philosophen - Lexikon, I, Berlin 1949, pp. 280-83.

Giacomo Seleri

(from M. Dugard, R. W. E., sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris 1907) EMERSON, RALPH WALDO - Portrait.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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