Dirge By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dirge by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Poet and Poem Analysis Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in201 Boston, Massachusetts. Emerson was the fourth son out of eight children born of William, a Unitarian minister previously of a liberal Congregationalist, and Ruth (Haskins) Emerson. Religious and intellectual development was very important to William and Ruth Emerson and each parent were respected in the community and expected the same things out of their children. In 1800, Ralph lost a sister, Phebe Ripley, and then lost a brother in 1807, John Clarke, from tuberculosis, which almost killed Ralph Waldo Emerson several times throughout his life. Ralph lost Robert Bulkeley, another brother who was also mentally retarded, in 1859. Emerson started

In 1812, Emerson attended the Boston Public Latin School and at the age of 14, in 1817, Emerson enrolled into Harvard College where he grew more and more into the literary works. He began to focus his attention on Greek and Roman writers, British logicians and philosophers and soon became infatuated with learning and writing about the East. Writing about relationships between the West and the East became a lifelong interest. Emerson expressed all of these writings in his essay Nature written in 1836. After graduating from Harvard College in 1821, Emerson became a teacher for the Boston school for girls for his brother but soon enrolled into the Harvard Divinity School in 1825 to follow in his father’s footsteps and devote himself into

Emerson had already been reading constantly texts relating to Britain’s imperial expansion into India, Eastern poetry and themes, and even writing about them within his own poems and other works such as “Indian Superstition,” and then expanding his personal reading to the works of Aristotle, Plato, Montaigne, and British Romantic writers. However, Emerson’s wife, Ellen, died of tuberculosis on February 8, 1831 causing Emerson to pursue back towards his ministry duties but then resign. At this point is when Emerson began his career in the literary world, publishing Nature in 1836 as his first major statement on the Transcendentalist movement. He became a lecturer and a well-known and prominent citizen because of his lectures such as the “American Scholar” address and the “Divinity School Address.” Along with Emerson’s new career choices in life, he also got married to Lydia Jackson during this time. Through his growing involvement with the Transcendentalist movements, Emerson published his Essays in 1841 alone with Essays: Second Series in 1844 which made him a literary celebrity at the time. Emerson’s infatuation with the East steadily grew over time from when he was young and kept growing in his later years of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous poem was “Brahma” published in 1857 along with many others in a collection of poems. Throughout a life of traveling,