Definition
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) quit his pulpit as a Boston minister in 1832 and settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where he wrote the book Nature in 1836. Critics called his circle the Transcendentalists, a word borrowed from a German philosopher, and they held that truth lives in each person and in nature, not in a church. In 1837, in a speech called The American Scholar, he told Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society that Americans had listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe, and in the essay Self-Reliance, published in 1841, he urged readers to trust themselves. Many Americans heard him at lyceum lectures rather than reading his books.
Why it matters on the AP exam
Emerson is the leading example of Transcendentalism and of the effort in the 1830s and 1840s to build a culture that was distinctly American instead of copied from Europe. His belief in individual conscience and human perfectibility fed the reform movements of the period, and he later wrote in his journal that he would not obey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Questions ask students how Transcendentalism, Romanticism or the Hudson River School expressed a new American culture, or how ideas of individualism and perfectibility inspired reform.
In the sources
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Connections
- Henry David Thoreau: his friend and fellow Transcendentalist in Concord, who lived at Walden Pond from 1845
- Transcendentalism: the movement Emerson led, which placed truth in the individual and in nature
- Margaret Fuller: edited the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial and asked in 1843 whether women shared the same spark