His time..

“Be not the slave of your own past.

Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep

and swim far, so you shall come back

with self respect, with new power, with

an advanced experience that will explain

and overlook the odd”

-    Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A major American poet, who worked first as a Unitarian priest. In his hometown, Concord, Emerson founded a literary circle called New England Transcendentalism, a hodgepodge of fashionable thoughts, in which participated among others Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau. During his travels in England he met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence from the 1830s and whose opinions of the importance of great historical figures influenced his own writings. Later Emerson became involved in the antislavery movement and worked for women's rights.

The sun set, but set not his hope: 
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye; 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again: 
His action won such reverence sweet 
As hid all measure of the feat. 
('Character,' Essays: Second Series, 1844)

                                                                                                

Emerson's first and only settlement was at the important Second Unitarian Church of Boston, where he became sole pastor in 1830. Three years later he had a crisis of faith, finding that he "was not interested" in the rite of Communion. Her once remarked, that if his teachers had been aware of his true thoughts, they would not have allowed him to become a minister. Eventually Emerson's controversial views caused his resignation. However, he never ceased to be both teacher and preacher, although without the support of any concrete idea of God.

Like Wordsworth, Emerson drew inspiration from Nature. His first book, Nature, a collection of essays, came out when he was 33 and summoned up his ideas. Emerson emphasized individualism and rejected traditional authority. He invited to "enjoy an original relation to the universe," and emphasized "the infinitude of the private man." All creation is one, he believed – people should try to live a simple life in harmony with nature and with others. "... the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God," he wrote in Nature, the manifesto of American transcendentalism. His lectures 'The American Scholar' (1837), and 'Address at Divinity College' (1838) challenged the Harvard intelligentsia and warned about the formalism of the clergy of his time. He was ostracized by Harvard for many years, but his message attracted young disciples, who joined the informal Transcendental Club, organized in 1836 by the Unitarian clergyman F.H. Hedge.

Born in 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson is enjoying one of his periodic revivals. His patrician Yankee features and sideburns, his essays with titles like "Self-Reliance" and "Compensation" can make Emerson seem forbidding. But those essays--many of them comfortably short, though often as dense as poetry--reveal that Emerson was warmly human, and his struggles with faith completely recognizable to us moderns. His skepticism, his spirituality anchored in experience and his insistence on exploring every religious tradition are the hallmarks of the modern seeker.