Ralph Waldo Emerson Thesis

Bert Zeng

Period: 5

3/16/2023

Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson became a prominent figure during the 1870s and one of the most widely known man of letters in America. Emerson established himself as a legendary lecturer, essayist, and poet producing brilliance from his pen. Surprisingly enough, many people today “do not know Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many of those who do, consider him at best a 19-century transcendentalist or, at worst, the Dale Carnegie of belles lettres” (“Turner” Still Ahead of His Time). While his writings were passionate, they were heavily controversial as well making his ideologies liked or hated by certain demographics. Firstly, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a prodigy of his time, “At the age of 14, Emerson was the youngest student in his class at Harvard. He graduated from Harvard Divinity school as a Unitarian

“He is interested in portraying the emotions which go along with remembrance and the need to continue to speak about the brave men and women of the past” (“Baldwin” Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson). For instance, Emerson writes “On this green bank, by this soft stream, / We set today a votive stone; / That memory may their deed redeem, / When, like our sires, our sons are gone” (“Emerson” Concord Hymn). This implies that after the fight, they achieved peace. His description of the stream being “soft” in the third stanza is the outcome of the “flooded” stream in the first stanza of Concord Hymn. Though things have become for the better, he mentions “our sons are gone”. Thus, showing the honorable sacrifices they made to achieve peace for the future of America. With His favorite topic catching up, “By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature” (Carlyle 5). Emerson sets the various circumstances simply using “streams”, nature’s body of