In September 1836, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the
Transcriptal Club, which served as a center for the movement, but did not publish its journal
The Dial, until July
1840. Emerson anonymously published his first essay,
Nature, in September 1836.
In 1838 he was invited back to
Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School, for the school's graduation address, which came to be known as his
Divinity School Address. His remarks managed to outrage the establishment and shock the whole
Protestant community at the time, as he proclaimed that while
Jesus was a great man, he was not
God. At the time, such statements were rather unheard of. For this, he was denounced as an
atheist, and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of his critics, he made no reply, leaving it to others for his defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another 30 years, but by the mid-1880s his position had become standard
Unitarian doctrine.
Early in 1842, Emerson lost his first son, Waldo, to
scarlet fever. Emerson wrote about his
grief in two major works: the poem "
Threnody", and the essay "Experience." In the same year,
William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his
godfather.
In the 1840's Emerson was hospitable to Nathanial Hawthorne and his family, influencing Hawthorne during his three joyous years with Emerson.
Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in
New England and the rest of the country outside of the
South. During several scheduled appearances that he was not able to make,
Frederick Douglass took his place. Emerson spoke on a wide variety of subjects. Many of his essays grew out of his lectures.
Emerson associated with
Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Henry David Thoreau and often took walks with them in Concord. Emerson encouraged Thoreau's talent and early career. The land on which Thoreau built his cabin on
Walden Pond belonged to Emerson. While Thoreau was living at Walden, Emerson provided food and hired Thoreau to perform odd jobs. When Thoreau left Walden after two years' time, it was to live at the Emerson house while Emerson was away on a lecture tour. Their close relationship fractured after Emerson gave Thoreau the poor advice to publish his first book,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, without extensive drafts, and directed Thoreau to his own agent who made Thoreau split the price/risk of publishing. The book found few readers, and put Thoreau heavily into debt. Eventually the two would reconcile some of their differences, although Thoreau privately accused Emerson of having drifted from his original philosophy, and Emerson began to view Thoreau as a
misanthrope. Emerson's eulogy to Thoreau is largely credited with the latter's negative reputation during the
19th century.
Emerson was noted as being a very abstract and difficult writer who nevertheless drew large crowds for his speeches. The heart of Emerson's writing were his direct observations in his journals, which he started keeping as a teenager at Harvard. The journals were elaborately indexed by Emerson. Emerson went back to his journals, his bank of experiences and ideas, and took out relevant passages, which were joined together in his dense, concentrated lectures. He later revised and polished his lectures for his essays and sermons.
He was considered one of the great
orators of the time, a man who could enrapture crowds with his deep voice, his enthusiasm, and his egalitarian respect for his audience. His outspoken, uncompromising support for
abolitionism later in life caused protest and jeers from crowds when he spoke on the subject. He continued to speak on abolition without concern for his popularity and with increasing
radicalism. He attempted, with difficulty, not to join the public arena as a member of any group or movement, and always retained a stringent independence that reflected his
individualism. He always insisted that he wanted no followers, but sought to give man back to himself, as a self-reliant individual. Asked to sum up his work late in life, he said it was his doctrine of "the infinitude of the private man" that remained central.
In 1845, Emerson's Journal records that he was reading the
Bhagavad Gita and
Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. Emerson was strongly influenced by the
Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of
nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay "
The Over-soul":
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.<ref>The Over-Soul from Essays: First Series (1841)</ref>
Emerson was strongly influenced by his early reading of the
French essayist
Montaigne. From those compositions he took the conversational, subjective style and the loss of belief in a personal God. He never read
Kant's works, but, instead, relied on
Coleridge's interpretation of the
German Transcriptal Idealist. This led to Emerson's non-traditional ideas of
soul and
God.
Emerson is buried in
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.
Emerson's "Collected Essays: First (1841) and Second (1844) Series," including his seminal essays on "History," "
Self-Reliance," "
Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The
Over-soul," "Circles," "Intellect," and "Art" in the first and "
The Poet," "
Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Nature," "Politics," and "Nominalist and Realist" in the second, is often considered to be one of the 100 greatest books of all time.
