Nature, addresses, and lectures. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. This item is unavailable.Nature, addresses, and lectures. By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, "Nature". Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading proponent of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister at Harvard Divinity School but served for only three years before developing his own spiritual philosophy based on individualism and intuition. His essay Nature" is arguably his best-known work and was both groundbreaking and highly controversial when it was first published. Emerson also wrote poetry and lectured widely across the US.