Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Ralph Waldo( 1803–82),born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister who was a member of an old Puritan family. After his father's death, he was raised by his mother and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a zealously pious woman who expressed her sardonically critical mind in a style her nephew admired and imitated. At Harvard in 1820 he began to keep the voluminous journals that he continued throughout his life, and that formed the basis of most of his essays and poems. After graduation (1821) he took over his brother's Boston school for young ladies, although with some misgivings, and when he moved to Canterbury with his family in 1823 he expressed his relief at returning to the natural beauties of the countryside in the poem “Good-bye.” He taught for two more years, then entered the Divinity School at Harvard, where ill health and doubts on dogma made him a desultory student. Although approved as a candidate for the Unitarian...
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