Home › E › Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

clergyman, lecturer, author, was born May 25, 1803, in Boston, Mass. He was the most distinguished of American essayists, and by some critics ranked as the foremost American poet when the substance of his poetry is considered apart from its form. He was ordained in 1829 as a unitarian minister in Boston, but retired from the profession in 1833, and the next year settled in Concord, Mass., where the remainder of his life was spent.

He succeeded Margaret Fuller as editor of The Dial, and was the most prominent figure among the transcendentalists.. As a lecturer he was frequently before the public, and in his writings faced a worldwide public as a philosophical thinker. His first volume of poems appeared in 1847, followed in 1867 by May-Day and Other Pieces. His prose writings are comprised in Nature; Essays, first and second series; Representative Men; English Traits; Conduct of Life; Society and Solitude; Letters and Social Aims; Lectures and Biographical Sketches; Miscellanies; and Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers. He died April 27, 1882.