Ralph Waldo Emerson huge biography

8/10/2019 Ralph Waldo Emerson huge biography

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Ralph Waldo Emersona New England preacher, essayist, lecturer, poet, and

philosopherwas one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century in the

United States. Emerson was also the first major American literary and intellectual figure towidely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for classical

Asian and Middle Eastern works. He not only gave countless readers their first exposure to non-

Western modes of thinking, metaphysical concepts, and sacred mythologies; he also shaped theway subsequent generations of American writers and thinkers approached the vast culturalresources of Asia and the Middle East.

Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 in the thriving seaport town of Boston, Massachusetts. As aboy, his first contact with the non-Western world came by way of the exotic merchandise that

bustled across the India Wharf in Boston harbor, a major nexus of the Indo-Chinese trade that

flourished in New England after the Revolutionary War. Emersons first contact with writings

from and about the non-Western world came by way of his father, William Emerson, a Unitarianminister with a genteel interest in learning and letters. The elder Emerson was a member of the

Massachusetts Historical Society, a group that once invited Sir William Jones, the British

orientalist who founded the Asiatic Society, to correspond with them from his colonial outpost inSouth Asia. By the time the Massachusetts society sent its letter, Jones had already been dead for

nine months, a testament to the practical difficulties of communicating between Boston and

Bengal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. William Emerson also edited theMonthly

Anthology, and Boston Review,a periodical that helped to bring British accounts of South Asiato a New England readership. The Monthly Anthologyfeatured such works as M. M. Cliffords

Asia, an Elegy and reviews of Charles Grants A Poem on the Restoration of Learning in the

East. In July 1805 theMonthly Anthologypublished Sir William Joness translation ofKalidasas play Sakuntala, or the Fatal Ring, one of the first works of Sanskrit literature

printed in the United States.

In 1817, at the age of fourteen, Emerson entered Harvard College. While at Cambridge, Emersonhad little opportunity to develop a scholarly approach to the diverse literary and religious

traditions of Asia or the Middle East. The curriculum focused on Greek and Roman writers,

British logicians and philosophers, Euclidean geometry and algebra, and post-Enlightenmentdefenses of revealed religion. As his journals and library borrowing records attest, however, in

his spare time, Emerson paid keen attention to the wider European Romantic interest in the

Orient or the East. These terms had an antiquarian ring for Emerson, usually denoting theancient lands and sacred traditions that lay east of classical Greece, such as Egypt, the Arabian

Peninsula, Persia, China, and India. In the early years of his personal journal, which he referred

to as his Wide World, Emerson began a decades-long practice of writing about Eastern life and

letters, accumulating quotations, pondering questions, and otherwise mulling over thesignificance of the non-Western world. All tends to the mysterious east, Emerson copied into

his journal in 1820, quoting from a lecture by the Harvard professor Edward Everett. A half

century later, in 1872, Emerson recalled the adage in a speech that he delivered in front of the

Japanese Embassy, suggesting how formative these initial impressions were to his lifelonginterest in the East. In other journal entries, Emerson gave expression to some of his signature

ideas while ruminating about the relationship between East and West. For example, in 1822

Emerson wrote searchingly about how a transcendent experience of nature could help to recoverthe spirit of Egyptian Antiquities, an early exploration of the sublime possibilities of the


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natural world that he would famously celebrate in the transparent eye-ball passage inNaturein

1836.

In his extracurricular reading as a Harvard student, Emerson sampled the treatises, travelogues,

and translations of legal, religious, and poetic texts that were produced in the wake of Britains

imperial expansion into India. Some of these works, such as William RobertsonsAn HistoricalDisquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India(1791) which includedan appendix on Indian law, civil policy, and religious institutions, focused on Indian antiquity.

Other texts, such as Alexander Fraser Tytlers Considerations on the Present Political State of

India(1815), took a more contemporary view of India. An aspiring poet, Emerson alsogravitated to selections of Eastern poetry and poetry that took up Eastern themes. Notable

examples include Thomas Duer Broughtons Selections from the Popular Poetry of the Hindoos

(1814), which offered Anglicized versions of Hindi-language poems along with their English

translation. Emerson read the first volume of The Asiatic Miscellany(1787), which includedworks by two Persian poets, Saadi and Hafiz, whom he would embrace in his adulthood.

Emerson also read deeply in Thomas MooresLalla Rookh(1817), a book-length poem about the

daughter of a Mughal emperor who falls in love with a poet while betrothed to another man. Inhis later years Emerson fondly recalled that MooresLalla Rookhwas some of my best

travelling.

Like other Anglo-American readers of his period, Emerson relied heavily on British colonialagents for his knowledge of India. As a consequence, Emersons writing about South Asia (as

well as China, Persia, and Arabia) often traffics in the menagerie of nineteenth-century Euro-

American stereotypes and misconceptions. Examples can be found in Emersons IndianSuperstition, a densely allusive poem that he composed for Harvard Colleges graduation

ceremonies in 1822. In the 156-line poem, Emerson describes how Superstition, the

personification of religious tyranny in Asia, has enslaved [D]ishonored India. Not only does

Superstition drive maddened mothers to hurl their children into the Ganges River; it alsoseduces people to throw themselves under the car of fiends. Emersons reference to the car of

fiends is an allusion to the juggernaut, or the massive wagon bearing a likeness of the diety

Jagannatha. Like most Westerners at this time, Emerson wrongly believed that religiousadherents crushed themselves under its wheels in an act of suicidal devotion. Emerson also

laments how the Brahmin class, who are at the top of the Hindu caste system, crush with a

daemons yelling storm any vain ambition by lower-caste Indians to rise in social status.With its Romantic primitivism and bombastic imagery, Indian Superstition is perhaps closer to

caricature than considered literary art. Yet, for all its excess, Emersons poem is notable for

departing from a common formula of the period according to which a debased India could only

be redeemed through Western colonialism. Instead, Emerson urges Indians to resist the shacklesof the British Empire as forcefully as they should resist the mental chains of religious

superstition. He exhorts ordinary Indians to look upon the example of post-revolution America,

embodied by the laureled figure of Columbia, as an emblem of what a modern democratic nation

could achieve.

After he graduated from Harvard, Emersons enthusiasm for non-Western subjects waned,

primarily because he devoted himself to becoming a Unitarian minister. Scholars often markEmersons shift in interest with a letter he wrote to Mary Moody Emerson on 10 June 1822.


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Mary Moody was Emersons aunt on his fathers side and a spiritual and intellectual mentor

whom he often referred to by the pseudo-Sanskrit anagram Tnamurya. In an earlier letter toher

nephew, Mary Moody shared Sir William Joness paraphrase of the Hindu Hymn to Narayana,which concludes with the line, God only I perceive, God only I adore. Emerson was

profoundly impressed by Joness treatment of the hymn, and he later anthologized it in

Parnassus,the book of poetry he edited in 1874. In his 10 June letter to Mary Moody, Emersonacknowledged his aunts previous inclusion of Joness piece by admitting that he was curious toread [her] Hindu mythologies. But his interest was tempered by doubts about what he would

find there. One is apt to lament over indolence and ignorance, when we read some of those

sanguine students of the Eastern antiquities, Emerson explained. He was dubious of those whoseem to think that all the books of knowledge, and all the wisdom of Europe twice told, lie hid in

the treasures of the Bramins and the volumes of Zoroaster. Emerson decided that instead of

reading his aunts Eastern literatures, he would dream of their possible contents as if they were

the Seal of Solomon, calling their unread pages learnings El Dorado.For the rest of the 1820s, El Dorado remained unexplored. Emerson only made sporadic

reference to Eastern subjects and literatures in his journals, often in relation to articles he read in

British periodicals, like theEdinburgh Review. In the early 1830s, however, he read two worksthat changed the way he viewed ancient Eastern philosophy and religion. The first, which he read

in October 1830, was Joseph-Marie de Grandos sprawlinglytitledHistoire compare des

systmes de philosophie, considrs relativement aux principles des connaissances humaines

(1804, Comparative History of Philosophical Systems, Considered in Relation to the Principlesof Human Knowledge). Grando offered a history of philosophy that focused on what he

believed to be the primary questions that had engaged serious thinkers for millennia. Drawing

evidence from non-Western works like the IndianMahabharataand the Chinese The InvariableMileau,Grando convinced Emerson that Hindu, Chinese, and Persian schools of thought were

at least as valuable as their Hebrew, Greek, and Christian counterparts. The second important

work from this period was Victor Cousins Cours de lhistoire de la philosophie(1829;

translated as Course of the History of Modern Philosophy,1852) which Emerson read in 1831.Cousin identified four recurring systems in the development of philosophical thinking

sensationalism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism. He posited that the earliest cycle had

occurred in India with theBhagavad Gita,which he described as the most interestingmonument of mysticism in ancient India. Following Cousins analysis of the Gita,Emerson

began to read the Hindu scripture as an argument for the fundamental identity of all things, as

well as proof that there was an underlying equilibrium of cosmic justice at work in the universe.

In 1831 Emersons wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis, an event that galvanized a

series of personal and professional changes in his life. The next year Emerson resigned his pulpit

at the Second Church of Boston, publicly citing the fact that he did not believe in the specialdivinity of Jesus and thus could no longer administer the sacrament of communion. After

traveling through Europe, where he met literary luminaries such as William Wordsworth and

Thomas Carlyle, Emerson returned to his ancestral home in Concord, Massachusetts. He began a

career as a public lecturer, which lasted almost fifty years, and he married Lydia Jackson, whomhe affectionately referred to as Mine Asiaa pun on Asia Minor, the location of the ancient

kingdom of Lydia. In 1836 Emerson publishedNature,the first major statement of his mature

philosophy and a groundbreaking book that catalyzed the Transcendentalist movement in NewEngland. Along with Emerson, the New England Transcendentalists were an eclectic group of


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religious, literary, educational, and social reformers that included Margaret Fuller, Bronson

Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement grew out of Unitarianism in

the greater Boston area; was deeply influenced by British and German Romanticism, especiallyas interpreted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and revolved around a form of philosophical and

spiritual idealism that valued intuition over the senses.

As Emerson moved further away from the precepts of Protestantism in the 1830s and 1840s, hedrew on Eastern religious and philosophical ideas to frame his belief in spiritual impersonality

(that is, instead of a spirituality centered on the personhood of God), as well as the notion that the

world could be illusory without being nonexistent. Emerson also shared his growing library ofIndian, Persian, and Chinese texts with his Transcendentalist friends as well as a wider public.

From March 1842 to April 1844, Emerson served as editor of theDial,the primary literary organ

for the New England Transcendentalists. In theDial,he created a recurring feature called

Ethnical Scriptures to demonstrate that religious texts fromthroughout the world wererepositories of time-tested truths concerning the nature of man and the laws for human life.

With the assistance of Thoreau, Emerson excerpted key passages in the Ethnical Scriptures

section from notable Asian and Middle Eastern works, for example, the HinduHitopadesa,theConfucianFour Books,the PersianDesatir,and the Chaldean Oracles. At the same time,

Emersons reading began to expand into new traditions. In the mid 1840s Emerson read about

Islam in W. F. Thompsons translation of theAkhlak-I-Jalaly,published as The Practical

Philosophy of the Muhammedan People(1839). Thompsons translation, which aspired to endthe depreciation of the Muhammadan system among its English-language readers, gave

Emerson his first glimpse into Sufism, which Thompson described as the practical pantheism of

Asia. Emerson also read Abul Kasim Mansurs Shanamehor theBook of Kings,a compendiumof Persian poetry seven times longer than theIliad,and Specimens of the Popular Poetry of

Persia as Found in the Adventures and Improvisations of Kurroglou, the Bandit-Minstrel of

Northern Persia(1842), a collection of oral poetry compiled by the Slavic Iranologist

Aleksander Chodzko.With the publication of hisEssaysin 1841 andEssays: Second Seriesin 1844, Emerson emerged

as a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity. In his essays from this period Emerson did not explicitly

take up Eastern subjects or ideas; however, scholars agree that there are similarities betweenEmersons Over-Soul in his 1841 essay of that name and the Hindu conception ofBrahman.

Scholars also agree that there are similarities between Emersons belief described in his 1841

essay Compensation and the Hindu doctrine of karma. Moreover, in his published writingsduring this period, Emerson cited maxims, referred to prominent figures, and otherwise

incorporated allusions drawn from Asian and Middle Eastern literatures with surprising

regularity. He added these lustres to his nonfiction writing for at least two reasons. First, by

treating non-Western texts with the same respect afforded cultural authorities in the Westerntraditions, he could disrupt the parochial expectations of his American and European audiences.

Second, by adducing evidence from traditions outside of America and Europe, he could assert

the universality of his observations on society, fate, ethics, and philosophy.

Emersons engagement with Eastern cultural sources is also evident in his poetry from the 1840s.

For example, inspired by his reading of Persian verse, Emerson wrote Saadi in 1842, a poetic

tribute to the aphorist, panegyrist, and lyrical poet of the same name. In Emersons portrayal,Saadi is a sympathetic man of the people who resists full assimilation into the everyday world.


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He [loves] therace of men (No churl or anchorite is he immured in cave or den), and yet

he has no companion; / Come ten, or come a million, but dwells alone. He embodies the

wisdom of the gods and commands reverence, and yet he is also a lighthearted cheererofmens hearts who refrains from over clever subtleties. A muse boldly enjoins Saadi to forego

absorption in the distracting trials of war and trade and camp and town, and instead to

[s]eek the living among the dead, liberating men from themselvesbecause [m]an in man isimprisoned. In the poems conclusion, Saadi is celebrated as a masterly conjurer of worlds inwhose every syllable / Lurketh Nature veritable, so that as far as his words carry, Suns rise

and set in Saadis speech. As scholars have observed, Emersons portrayal of Saadi can be

approached as an idealized self-portrait as well as a cross-cultural encomium. Emerson oftenreferred to himself by the poetic penname, Sayed, an apparent gesture to his felt kinship with

Saadi.

Hamatreya, published in 1846, is another poem that crystallized from Emersons reading inancient Eastern literatures, in particular, a passage from the Vishnu Puranathat he had copied

into his journal in 1845. Hamatreya is Emersons adaption of the name Maitreya, a figure in

the Vishnu Puranawho asks his teacher Parasara to tell the story of the kings who have ruled theworld. After providing a summary of the sovereigns of history, Parasara observes that the rule of

kings is ultimately transitory. Even though they indulge feelings that the earth is mineit is my

sonsit belongs to my dynasty, they invariably perish along with their progeny while the earth

remains. In Hamatreya, Emerson takes up the similar theme of sovereign possession andhuman mortality. The poem opens with a list of the first European settlers of Concord,

MassachusettsMinott, Lee, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint. In a later version of the poem,

Emerson even added the name of his own Concord ancestor Bulkeley to the list of settlers. Asthese founders stride their fields, they marvel at the intimate connection they feel with the land,

holding fast to the same thoughts of ownership as Parasaras rulers: Tis mine, my childrens and

my names. But Concords settlers, like Parasaras sovereigns, ultimately die. They are able to

steer the plow over the land but unable to steer their feet / Clear of the grave, so that in NewEngland, as in ancient India, human pretensions to earthly ownership are ended by death. How

am I theirs, gently asks the Earth, If they cannot hold me / But I hold them?

When scholars discuss the limitations of Emersons writing about the East, they often refer to theessay Plato; or the Philosopher, published inRepresentative Menin 1850. In that volume,

Emerson collected a series of biographical writings organized around the Romantic belief that a

general mind expresses itself with extraordinary intensity in certain individuals. In PlatoEmerson argues that the Greek philosopher brought together the two cardinal facts at the core

of all philosophy: Unity and Variety. According to Emerson, the tendency to dwell in the

conception of the fundamental Unity is primarily an Eastern trait, while the impulse toward

variety is a Western one. Emerson praises in Plato what he probably valued in himselfanability to synthesize the best aspects of unity and variety, immensity and detail, East and West.

And yet Emersons conceptualization of the East in the Plato essay poses problems that are

worth noting, particularly in the following passage:

The country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting inabstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable,

immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this fate in the social institution of caste. On the other side,

the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a


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discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West

delighted in boundaries.

As scholars have observed, when Emerson claims to speak about Asia, he seems to have India

in mind (that is, the country with the social institution of caste). It is a muddling of distinctions

that suggests Emerson was unconcerned about the vital differences among the cultures of Asiaand the Middle East. Emerson also eschews political or economic comparisons in favor of

idealized intellectual ones, supporting the notion that the East was more for him an abstract

idea than a place inhabited by actual people. Also, even though Emerson purports to offer abalanced view of an East that [loves] infinity and a West that [delights] in boundaries, his

language seems to favor Europewith its activity, creativity, discipline, arts, inventions,

trade, freedomover Asia, with its immovable institutions and deaf, unimplorable, immense

fate. Emersons vague and polarized thinking in Plato closely aligns with the stereotypicaltypologies about East and West that prevailed in the wider culture, pointing to the limits of

Emersons intellectual vision when trying to imagine the Eastern Other.

In 1856 Emerson composed a lyric poem originally called Song of the Soul and later publishedin theAtlanticin 1857 under the title, Brahma. The poem dramatizes an idea that Emerson

closely associated with Hinduism; namely, that the material world is essentially an illusory maskof the divine spirit that dwells in all beings. Although it stands to reason that the poem is written

from the perspective of Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, or even Brahman, the absolute or

universal soul, the speaker in the poem does not name itself. Instead, the speaker enumerates the

ways in which it eludes characterization. The opening lines of the four-stanza verse exemplifythe riddle-like quality of the poem as a whole:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,They know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again.

In many ways, Brahma is a distillation of Emersons reading of Hindu sacred literatures overthe previous two decades, from theBaghavad Gitato theKatha Upanishad. For example, the

red slayer is likely an allusion to Siva the Destroyer, one of the three aspects of the Godhead in

Hinduism. Siva is an agent of dissolution, but nothing is ultimately destroyed or dissolved in the

Hindu cosmos; Brahman is without end, so everything that emanates from Brahman is alsodeathless. When Brahma inspired dozens of mocking parodies in the Atlanticits paradoxical

style proved to be too much for many antebellum American readers, who objected to its exotic

obscuritiesEmerson told his daughter that one did not need to adopt a Hindu perspective to

understand the poem. One could easily substitute Jehovah for Brahma, he explained, and notlose the sense of the verse.

In 1858 Emerson published a long essay, Persian Poetry, in theAtlantic. As a way of

introducing American readers to what was most likely an unfamiliar poetic tradition, Emerson


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drew parallels between Persian poetry and Homeric epics, English ballads, and the works of

William Shakespeare. He also noted that the legends of Persian mythology could sometimes be

found in the Hebrew Bible. As part of his exposition, Emerson included his own Englishtranslations of the poets Hafiz, Saadi, Khayyam, and Enweri, by way of the German translations

of Persian poetry by Baron von Hammer-Purgstall. Emerson had no competence in any Asian or

Middle Eastern language, and he never read a non-Western text in its original language. ButEmerson had been translating von Hammers German texts in his journals since 1846. By the endof his life, Emerson produced at least sixty-four translations, totaling more than seven hundred

lines of Persian verse, many of which can be found in Orientalist, a notebook he began to keep

in the 1850s. The Persian Poetry essay in the Atlanticalso served as a prelude for theintroduction that Emerson wrote for the first American edition of Saadis Gulistan,published by

Ticknor and Fields in 1865.

In 1872 Emerson sailed for England and then Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. As he toured the

cities of Alexandria and Cairo, Emerson noted observations about the Pyramids, the Nile River,

and his woeful ignorance of the Arabic language. But at seventy years old, Emersons most

significant writings about the East were behind him. Ten years later, on 27 April 1882, Emersondied in Concord, leaving an enduring legacy as the seminal figure of modern American

Orientalism. His lifelong excursions into the libraries of classical Asian and Middle Easternliteratures were those of an enthusiast instead of a rigorous scholar, and he often relied on crudeRomantic stereotypes and failed to recognize the differences among the cultures and peoples of

the East. But Ralph Waldo Emerson was a pioneering figure of what is now called

multiculturalism who expanded the Eastern horizons of generations of American readers andwriters, and he persuasively demonstrated how classical Indian, Chinese, and Persian works

could be used as a means to bring the inquiring self into a fresh appreciation of its own profound

powers.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson huge biography