Ralph Waldo Emerson - Properly Acknowledged

Essay by Anonymous UserCollege, UndergraduateA-, April 1993

download word file, 4 pages 3.7

Ralph Waldo Emerson certainly took his place in the history of American Literature . He lived in a time when romanticism was becoming a way of thinking and beginning to bloom in America, the time period known as The Romantic Age. Romantic thinking stressed on human imagination and emotion rather than on basic facts and reason. Ralph Waldo Emerson not only provided plenty of that, but he also nourished it and inspired many other writers of that time. 'His influence can be found in the works of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Robert Frost.'. No doubt, Ralph Waldo Emerson was an astute and intellectual man who influenced American Literature and has rightly received the credit that he deserves from historians. He has been depicted as a leading figure in American thought and literature, or at least ranks up there with the very best.

But there is so much more to Ralph Waldo Emerson when we consider the personal hardships that he had to endure during the course of his life and when we see the type of man that he becomes. He certainly was a man of inspiration who knew how to express himself by writing the best of poems and philosophical ideas with inspiration.

To get an idea of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have become such an inspiration to the people, some background on his life is essential. Can you imagine living a life with all your loved ones passing away one by one? A persons life could collapse into severe depression, lose hope, and lose meaning. He can build a morbid outlook on life. Ralph Waldo Emerson suffered these things. He was born on May 25, 1803 and entered into a new world, a new nation just beginning. Just...