emerson

Early life, family, and education
• born in a priest family
father: a Unitarian(一神论) minister.
• went to Harvard College at 14
• During college years, he began keeping a list of books he had read and
Transcendentalism
Stress the power of intuition
Place spirit first and matter second
Took nature as a symbolic of spirit of god
strong belief in the power of the individual.
than being persuasive
Influence
• He embodied a new nation’s desire and struggle to assert its own identity in its formative period.
• His aesthetics brought about a revolution in American literature. • He called for an independent culture, which represented the desire
they longed for a more intense spiritual experience. • “The recognition in man of the capacity of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of
the sense” (knowing truth intuitively) • The publication of 1836 essay Nature & Transcendental Club
The Oversoul 《论超灵》 Self Reliance 《论自立》
• Poems 《诗集》 1846
• Representative Men 《代表人物》1850
• English Traits 《英国人的特性》1856
Emerson’s aesthetics
a. poets should function as preachers who gave directions to the mass. b. True poetry should serve as a moral purification c. The argument (or his thought or experience) should decide the form of the poem instead of traditional techniques. d. The poets should express his thought in symbols. e. Poets should use words for their pictorial and imaginative meaning. f. As for theme, Emerson called upon American authors to writer about peculiar American matters.
Communication between individual soul and the universal “over-soul”
“over-soul” existed in nature and humanity
Literary career
• wrote most of his important essays as lectures first
• “the Concord Sage” “the prophet of American religion”
• “American Confucius” “the father of American
civilization”
-- Lincoln
• “the only equivalent reading experience that I know is reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Emerson, the American version of Montaigne”
• Essay：Nature 《论自然》1836
• Speech：The American Scholar 《论美国学者》 1837
“America‘s Intellectual Declaration of Independence” --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr
• Divinity School Address 《神学院演讲》1838
started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World".
• became the Unitarian minister of the Second Church of Boston in 1829
• Abandoned Unitarianism and went to Europe searching for truth during 1832
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brief introduction
• 1803～1882
• American essayist, philosopher, poet, and leader of the transcendentalist movement.
Contents
• Early life, family, and education • Transcendentalism • Literary career • Emerson’s aesthetics • Literary style • Influence • Others’ Comments
to 1833.
• met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle,
which had a strong influence on him.
Transcendentalism
• Developed the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the value of intellectual reason. • not content with the sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Instead,
↓ became a major cultural movement • began to publish their journal, The Dial, in 1840. Emerson had been a very active editor of it.
Principles of Emerson’s
Literary style
• Major theme: the love to country and nature
• Poetic • Especially skillful in metaphor and
simile • Casual • Full of philosophical points rather
“Jesus is a ‘demigod’” →denounced as an atheist, and a poisoner of young men's minds
• Essays: First Series 《散文一集》1841s 《散文二集》 1844
--Harold Bloom
of the whole nation to develop a culture of its own. • Directly influenced his contemporary writers like Walt Whitman and
Henry David Thoreau.
Others’ Comments