50 Fun Facts About Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Emerson's Nature, what does the speaker become while standing on bare ground in the woods?

A transparent eyeball is Emerson's image for losing all egotism: he is nothing, sees all, and feels the currents of the Universal Being pass through him.

Which famous phrase about the American Revolution comes from Emerson's 1837 Concord Hymn?

The shot heard round the world comes from the hymn's first stanza, which was later inscribed beneath the Minute Man statue at Concord's North Bridge.

Which writer read Nature in college and later built a cabin on woodland Emerson owned?

Henry David Thoreau took the essay to heart at Harvard, and its ideas shaped the book he later wrote about his two years in that cabin.

Emerson famously wrote that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of what?

Little minds cling to consistency, Emerson argued in 1841, and the full sentence adds that little statesmen, philosophers and divines adore it.

In Emerson's Nature, which sight would people adore if seen only one night in a thousand years?

The stars come out every night, Emerson notes, yet if they appeared just once people would keep the memory of that city of God for generations.

Which poet annoyed Emerson by printing praise from his private letter in gold leaf on a new edition?

Walt Whitman had mailed Emerson the first Leaves of Grass in 1855 and received a flattering five-page reply, which he then used to sell the second edition.

A hostile 1837 review of Emerson's Nature gave which movement the name it has carried ever since?

Transcendentalism began as a sneer: the reviewer used the label disparagingly, and the public then pinned it on Emerson's circle of like-minded friends.

Ralph Waldo Ellison, a writer named after Emerson, is best known for which 1952 novel?

Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, and Ellison spent the rest of his life on a second novel that he never finished.

Which young, unknown naturalist did Emerson meet at Yosemite on his 1871 trip to California?

John Muir was still unknown when Emerson crossed the country on the two-year-old transcontinental railroad, and the meeting became a signature event in his career.

Emerson bought eleven acres on the shore of which small lake, later the site of a famous cabin?

Walden Pond, plus a pine grove he bought beside it, made Emerson in his own words landlord and water lord of 14 acres, more or less; a friend later cleared part of the woodlot in exchange for a house site.

In Emerson's Nature, which use of nature ranks lowest, covering the advantages our senses owe to it?

Commodity comes first of the essay's four uses and ranks lowest: Emerson calls it the only use of nature that all men apprehend, a means to work rather than an end.

How was Emerson's first book, Nature, issued in 1836 at his own expense by James Munroe and Company?

Anonymously: the 1836 book named no author, while the new edition of 1849 printed R. W. Emerson on its title page.

A visit to which Paris garden in 1833 turned Emerson toward science and helped inspire Nature?

Jardin des Plantes beds laid out by Jussieu's system of classification showed Emerson how everything living was related, an insight he lectured on in Boston that November.

In Emerson's Nature, a man in the woods casts off his years as which animal casts off its slough?

A snake shedding its skin is his picture of renewal: in the woods, he writes, is perpetual youth, whatever a person's age.

In Emerson's Nature, the sun lights only the man's eye but shines into the eye and heart of whom?

The child sees nature whole, Emerson argues, so the true lover of nature is an adult who has kept the spirit of infancy into the era of manhood.

Near the end of Emerson's Nature, a poet's song declares that a man is a god in what condition?

In ruins is the verdict, and the song goes on to call infancy the perpetual Messiah that pleads with fallen men to return to paradise.

In the closing pages of Emerson's Nature, what is every reader told to build?

Your own world is the essay's final charge: conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, the voice promises, and its great proportions will unfold.

In Emerson's Nature, the word supercilious is traced back to the physical act of raising what?

The eyebrow example backs Emerson's claim that every word for a moral or mental fact was borrowed from something physical: right meant straight and wrong meant twisted.

In Emerson's Nature, health and a single day are enough to make ridiculous the pomp of whom?

Emperors lose out to a sunrise: Emerson calls the dawn his Assyria, broad noon his England of the senses, and the night his Germany of mystic dreams.

Which disease killed Emerson's first wife, Ellen Tucker, and later two of his brothers?

Tuberculosis took Ellen in 1831; the grieving Emerson visited her tomb daily and, a year later, wrote in his journal that he had opened the coffin.

Emerson quit as pastor of Boston's Second Church in 1832 after objecting to which rite?

Communion, he had come to believe, was not what Jesus originally intended; though well liked by his congregation, he gave a final sermon explaining his views and left.

Which Scottish writer did Emerson visit in 1833 and later serve as unofficial American agent?

Thomas Carlyle saw his Sartor Resartus appear as a book first in Boston, thanks to Emerson's intercession, and the two men wrote to each other for nearly four decades.

After marrying Lydia Jackson in 1835, Emerson promptly changed her first name to what?

Lidian may have been his way of stopping New Englanders from pronouncing her name Lidiar; he also called her Queenie, while she always called him Mr. Emerson.

What name did Emerson give the Concord house he bought in 1835 and kept for the rest of his life?

Bush had been a summer house known as Coolidge Castle; Emerson paid $3,500 for it and moved in the day after his wedding, bringing his mother along.

Which Emerson speech did Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. call an intellectual Declaration of Independence?

The American Scholar urged its Phi Beta Kappa audience to stop parroting other men's thinking; Emerson printed 500 copies at his own expense and they sold out in a month.

Which 1841 Emerson essay warns its readers that imitation is suicide?

Self-Reliance insists that whoever would be a man must be a nonconformist; Emerson's own aunt called the book it appeared in a strange medley of atheism and false independence.

In his 1838 Divinity School Address, Emerson outraged Harvard's ministers by discounting what?

Biblical miracles mattered less than moral intuition, he told the graduates, and Jesus was a great man but not God; Harvard did not invite him back for about thirty years.

Who became the first editor of The Dial, the journal Emerson's circle launched in 1840?

Margaret Fuller took the job after several others had declined it, ran the journal for about two years, then handed it over to Emerson himself.

In Emerson's 1850 book Representative Men, which figure is profiled as the Man of the World?

Napoleon is the one conqueror among the six portraits, which began as lectures; the others stand for the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet and the writer.

Emerson wrote the elegy Threnody after scarlet fever killed which member of his family in 1842?

His first son, Waldo, was five when he died that January, and the grief also runs through Emerson's essay Experience.

Emerson agreed to be godfather to which future psychologist, born in New York City in January 1842?

William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, went on to be dubbed the father of American psychology and counted his godfather among his influences.

Emerson gave the 1855 dedication speech for which Concord cemetery, where he was later buried?

Sleepy Hollow was designed as a natural garden in keeping with Emerson's ideas, and he was laid to rest there in a white robe given by the sculptor Daniel Chester French.

Which federal law did Emerson denounce in an 1851 speech, vowing in his journal not to obey it?

The Fugitive Slave Act was, he told his neighbours, a law no one could obey without losing self-respect; in his diary he called it a filthy enactment.

What 1872 disaster prompted friends to raise money for Emerson and sent him travelling to Egypt?

A house fire damaged his Concord home; while it was rebuilt he sailed abroad with his daughter Ellen, and the town cancelled school on the day he came back.

Which nickname did Emerson earn as the leading voice of American intellectual culture?

The Sage of Concord drew crowds across the country: he gave some 1,500 lectures in his lifetime, as many as 80 of them in a single year.

After the utopian farm Fruitlands failed, Emerson helped buy a home for which friend's family?

Bronson Alcott later admitted that none of the group had been prepared to live out the ideal life they dreamed of; Emerson had doubted the farm from the start.

Where did Emerson camp with Louis Agassiz and James Russell Lowell at the 1858 Philosophers' Camp?

The Adirondacks trip put ten friends beside Follensbee Pond for two weeks; newspapers across the nation reported it, and Emerson turned it into his long poem Adirondac.

In which house, built for his grandfather beside the North Bridge, did Emerson first draft Nature?

The Old Manse witnessed the 1775 fight at the bridge, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a later occupant, named a collection of stories after its mosses.

Which German thinker admired Emerson's essays and called him the most gifted of the Americans?

Friedrich Nietzsche read the essays in German translation, copied passages into his journals, and wrote that he had never felt so much at home in a book.

Emerson's Nature opens by calling our age what, an age that builds the sepulchres of the fathers?

Retrospective is his charge against a generation that sees God and nature only through its ancestors' eyes; he demands an original relation to the universe instead.

Which 17th-century English poet's verses on Man does Emerson quote in the last chapter of Nature?

George Herbert, whom the essay calls the beautiful psalmist of his century, supplies stanzas claiming that man is all symmetry and that winds, earth and fountains exist for our good.

Which Shakespeare play does Emerson cite in Nature to show a poet reshaping the world?

The Tempest gives Emerson a promontory made to shake and Prospero calling for music, proof for him that a poet's passion can dwarf the great and magnify the small.

Which adjective does Emerson give the unnamed poet whose songs fill the final chapter of Nature?

Orphic is the word he uses when the songs end, and through this voice he says that man is the dwarf of himself and that nature is not fixed but fluid.

In Emerson's Nature, what label covers everything separate from us, even one's own body?

The Not Me sweeps in far more than woods and rivers: Emerson's philosophical definition of nature includes other people and even his own body.

Emerson's essays Fate, Power and Wealth open which 1860 collection, based largely on his lectures?

The Conduct of Life set out to answer one question, how shall I live, and sold so fast that its publisher announced a third edition a week after the first.

Emerson's 1836 discussion club was first named for which member who visited from Bangor, Maine?

Frederic Henry Hedge was a minister whose visits set the meeting dates, so friends called the group by his surname until outsiders gave it a grander name.

In Emerson's Nature, a perfect exhilaration comes while crossing what, in snow puddles at twilight?

A bare common under a clouded sky, with no good fortune in mind, is all it takes: he reports being glad to the brink of fear.

Which 1841 Emerson essay describes a unity in which every person's particular being is contained?

The Over-Soul is Emerson's name for that shared soul, the common heart of all people; the Indian teacher Meher Baba later used the same word for the Sanskrit Paramatman.

In Emerson's Nature, which word names the mixture of human will with natural things, as in a canal?

Art, in his examples, covers a house, a canal, a statue and a picture, yet he shrugs off all such human operations as a little chipping, baking, patching and washing.

Which utopian community led by George Ripley did Emerson never join, despite several invitations?

Brook Farm was not good for him, Emerson told its founder in 1840, and he later noted that one member ploughed all day while another looked out of a window for the same wages.