Ralph Waldo Emerson Was Born

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in New England in 1803 and is known for his essays, poetry, and lectures. He entered Harvard College at the young age of fourteen and after that attended divinity school. In 1829, he became a minister of Boston's Second Church (Richardson). The poet was also married in 1829. He and his wife suffered the loss a child in 1931 and his wife died later of tuberculosis. By 1832, he was "reluctant to remain as minister to his church" (Richardson) and resigned, claiming the "immediate reason being that he felt he could no longer officiate at a ceremony (communion) that had become meaningless to him" (Richardson). After these losses and disappointments, he sold everything he owned and traveled to Europe. He spent time in Italy, Rome, Florence, Venice, Switzerland, and Paris. While in Paris, his interests broadened to botanical and zoological sciences, with a decisive shift from "theology to science, vowing to become a naturalist" (Richardson). In England, he met Thomas Carlyle, a "lifelong friend and correspondent" (Richardson). Upon returning to his roots in America, he became a lecturer and writer with messages of self-reliance and optimism.

Richard Hutch asserts that Emerson is "perhaps the most influential and pivotal figure in American literary history" (Hutch). He is the "most renowned New England Transcendentalist" (Harvey) and a "major nineteenth-century craftsman of American cultural identity" (Hutch). His writing "brought about an awareness of what it could mean to be an American, as distinct from being a colonial subject of the British Empire" (Hutch). Emerson should be considered a poet because his "concentration on the concrete image, the simplicity of his symbols and words, and his willingness within limits to let form follow function were practices that profoundly influenced such widely divergent followers" (Gerber). His poem, "Friendship" illustrates these notions as well as celebrating friendship and all friendship brings to our lives.

John McNutty notes, "the warmth of friendship was almost a novel sensation" (McNutty) to the poet and "Friendship demonstrates this fact. The poem explores a healthy respect for good friends and the friendship that they bring. While the world's uncertainty "comes and goes" (Emerson 3), true friends remain. A long-lost friend returns to set the poet's "careful heart free again" (9). The poem closes with an interesting notion. We read:

Me too they nobleness has taught

To master my despair;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendships fair. (17-20)