Ralph Waldo Emerson

This quote comes from Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance." In this essay, originally a speech given to college graduates, Emerson urges young people on the cusp of adult life to look inward rather than...

Personification is the attribution of human qualities to something which is not human. In chapter 1, Emerson states that Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort...

Emerson uses various rhetorical devices, such as the ones you have mentioned, making him sound much more conversational than cerebral and philosophical. He wants his ideas to be accessible to...

In "Self-Reliance," Emerson regards the prayers of most people, which are prayers of petition for worldly goods or favors, to be "vicious." These prayers are wrong-headed, in his opinion, because...

Emerson contributed to American literature by being at the forefront of bringing European—and particularly English—Romanticism to the United States under a particularly American guise called...

This quote is from the essay "Self-Reliance." In this essay, Emerson's main argument is that people should trust their own thoughts and beliefs rather than bowing to what society thinks is right....

In his essay, "Self-Reliance", Emerson says, "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." He says that people know themselves better than they know anyone else...

According to Emerson, some of the barriers to self-reliance are: The Overwhelming Need To Conform In Order To Fit In In his treatise, Emerson contends that society is a "joint-stock company, in...

I would suggest that their primary similarity is that both thinkers believed in the idea of individuals engaging in self- definition through their own emotional states. In his essay on Self-...

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, the poet praises the natural world. Nature is Emerson's first book, and his love and respect for nature and the guidance he believes mankind can find in the...

Figurative language is language that goes beyond the literal meanings of words to create an enhanced effect. One example of figurative language Emerson uses in this essay is the following: the...

The text that I can find of this essay by Emerson gives the following in the thirteenth paragraph: Whilst thus the world exists for the mind; whilst thus the man is ever invited inward into...

Did you mean Emerson's essay, entitled "Circles"?In "Circles" Emerson compares the eye and horizon to circles with all of nature following this pattern: "The eye is the...

In "Self-Reliance," Emerson argues that individuals should allow themselves to be guided by the voice of God within them, which will lead them to their right vocation. Reliance on property is...

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Transcendentalist, felt that the self is an autonomous spirit which acts according to universal moral laws. Located in all objects, this spiritual self develops from...

The poet, according to Emerson, has to be just about everything. He has to be a seer into the soul of man, he must be an interpreter and a prophet. I know not how it is that we need an...

The implications of "Self-Reliance" stem from Ralph Waldo Emerson's belief that people are responsible for their own lives and should spend time developing themselves, accepting control of their...

While Emerson would be pleased at elementary education's advancement, he would say there is more to do to create a system of formal elementary instruction that maximizes student choice. Emerson was...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born a New Englander and later became a transcendentalist, and these two formative aspects of his life contributed to his sturdy belief in self-reliance. His essay entitled...

This is an essay in which Emerson presents his typically Transcendentalist views on education, arguing against the traditional education system and broadening the term in our thinking to encompass...

I think you can extrapolate a lot of metaphors from "nurse." Two that I believe Emerson was going for are "to nurture" and "provide sustenance or entice." Emerson may have been describing schools...

The great Transcendentalist who wrote Nature perceives in the bureaucracies of public school the "costly machinery against nature" in which the modes of education aim to save labor and expedite...

Transcendentalism was a movement in the late 1820s and 1830s. The ideas are not religious in nature, but an understanding of life and how everyone is connected in the world. Key concepts of the...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's protégé Henry David Thoreau had more experience and inspiration with regard to solitude as he spent so much time living in isolation and seclusion (by choice). In March 1845,...

Margaret Fuller, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, advocated for the rights of people to whom they had been denied in US society, especially women but also enslaved African Americans. Feminism...

In "The Poet," Emerson writes: For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The...

Emerson's quote, "It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do,'" could be understood as follows. First, Emerson's use of "high counsel"...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "Sursum Corda" is a short work that highlights the power of the Holy Spirit and its intents and comings and goings as the wind. The poem is one stanza of eleven lines....

In his seminal work, "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson touts the merits of rugged individualism. Conspiring against this individualism is society, which is against the manhood of all its...

"The Poet" by Emerson is a difficult essay to follow, without a doubt. It needs time and patience, best broken down paragraph by paragraph, to understand it. Emerson explains how the poet fits...

What he's trying to say here is that you shouldn't spend a lot of time trying to think about stuff or whine about stuff, but rather take everything as it comes, deal with what life gives you. In...

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote extensively on nature, to the extent that he wrote more than one work with this title. It seems you are here referring specifically to Emerson's poetic output rather than...

Certainly there are many such incidents of discovering the beauty of nature in the everyday that I could quote, but I guess if I had to pick one, it would have to be when I climbed up a mountain in...

Early in his 1836 essay, Emerson observes that there is a difference in the way a man regards nature as he moves from childhood to adulthood. The relationship is still there, but it evolves from...

An imperative sentence can do a number of things, but they all amount to one goal: an imperative sentence tells someone what to do. Most often, they amount to a command or a piece of instruction....

For individualism and conformity, I would start with Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” You can find elements of individualism, nature and conformity in their other...

I think the key is in the opening paragraph when he asks, "Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe." He says this in response to the question that precedes this...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, "The Poet" discusses the poet's role in society and the qualities that make up a true poet. He believes that poets are visionaries who are able to receive and...

American author, philosopher, and leader of the transcendentalist movement Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) presented his impassioned “Address on the Fugitive Slave Law” to the people of Concord,...

This poem, unusual in that the first-person narrator is declaring an association to beauty, is both a salute to the Rhodora’s beauty and a declaration that the narrator is of the same stuff. It...

Emerson's primary contribution to the Transcendental movement was the assertion of individual voice in all circumstances. Emerson's belief in human "transcendence," the ability to perceive and...

Oh my gosh, PLEASE don't use the term "theology" here in regards to Transcendentalism. I had to spend an entire class period convincing one of my more fundamentalist Christian students that I was...

In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson uses the philosophy of transcendentalism from other schools of thought on humankind’s acquisition of knowledge. Expanding upon rationalist and empiricist...

There was an interesting philosophical discussion going on in Emerson's time about the way we "learn" about or apprehend the world. Locke and others had posited that everything we learn...

The concept is rooted in Emerson's readings of eastern philosophies such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Advaita Vadanta school of Hindu philosophy. In addition, Emerson further elaborated the concept...

In one sense, Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson are both Romantics because both privilege the individual and the individual's unique emotions and experiences. Emerson directly advocates for...

Like other American writers in the early days of the republic, Emerson tries to establish an equalitarian American identity, distinct from the European reliance on tradition and hierarchy. In...

This passage comes from the fourth section of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s major essay “Nature” (1836). This essay is one of the defining documents of the nineteenth-century American literary,...

In the passage in "The American Scholar" in which Emerson mentions an "analogous political movement," he does not state what this political movement is. However, given transcendentalism's strong...

I think that if you are assigned to write a review there are several points on which you can focus. I like the idea of being able to construct a vision of individual consciousness that lies...