Ralph Waldo Emerson Essay

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803. He was the son of Ruth Haskins and William Emerson who is a reverend of the Unitarian minister. Emerson got his name from his uncle, Ralph, and great great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Emerson was the second of five sons who lived long enough to become adults; the others were Edward, William, Robert, and Charles. Three other siblings of Emerson died as a child.
Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, two weeks before Ralph’s eighth birthday. Emerson was raised by his mother alone. Later on, other women from the family started to help them out. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, had a big effect on Emerson; he would always look up to her for everything. She lived with the family on some days, and would always be with Emerson until she died in 1863.
Emerson began school at the Boston Latin School in 1812. He was nine at the time. In October 1817, Emerson attended Harvard College. He was 14 at the time. His was awarded a job to be a messenger for the president. His job required him to get other students to help send the messages to different faculties across the country. Halfway in his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had to read. This inspired him to make a journal in a bunch of notebooks that was called the "Wide World". In order for him to pay his bills he had to take other jobs, which includes a waiter and an occasional teacher. Emerson served as Poet; he made an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his graduation on August 29, 1821
In 1826, He started feeling sick so he went to seek out warmer and better weather climates. The first place he went to was Charleston, South Carolina, but left in a couple of week...

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...ropean trip, he spent a couple of months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice. When he was in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill, a man who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. He went to Switzerland to visit Voltaire's home in Ferney. He then went on to Paris where he visited the Jardin des Plantes. As Richardson says, "Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science."
When Emerson moved to England, He met a couple of people named William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle had a strong influence on Emerson; Emerson would later serve as a literary agent in the United States for Carlyle, and in March 1835, he tried to convince Carlyle to come to America to lecture.