American poet, essayist, and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leading figure of the Transcendentalist movement in which intuition is paramount. Emerson was one of the defining writers of his generation, and his Transcendentalist motto “Trust thyself” characterizes his body of work and influenced many of his contemporaries, including W.E. Channing, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 to an Anglican family. His father, Reverend William Emerson, died in 1811 when Emerson was just seven years old but he left a lasting impact on Emerson’s perspective on religion. In 1817 Emerson began his studies at Harvard. He graduated in 1821 and started to work as a teacher while he prepared to study at Harvard Divinity School. In 1829 Emerson was ordained to the Unitarian ministry at the Second Church, Boston and married Ellen Louisa Tucker. However, after his wife died of tuberculosis in 1831, just two years after their marriage, Emerson began to seriously question Christian doctrines and this sense of doubt led him to leave the ministry. After resigning his pastorate, Emerson sought clarity from God in the form of his own revelation. He traveled to Europe for a brief period before he began to write Nature in 1833, which established him as a popular lecturer. In 1835 Emerson settled in Concord, Massachusetts and married his second wife Lydia Jackson.

Widely referred to as “The Sage of Concord,” Emerson became a leading figure and spokesman of Transcendentalism, a literary movement centered on the importance of intuition over the senses. Transcendentalism emerged and developed in New England during the nineteenth century as a reaction against the contemporary mindset of scientific rationalism. Emerson’s Nature became a model of the Transcendentalist movement through its assertion that every single element of the natural world is a reflection of the universe. He also references an “Over-Soul,” or a Supreme Mind that every individual shares, which places an emphasis on the importance of personal experiences over outside authority. Some of his most famous Transcendentalist writing includes Essays: First and Second Series (1841, 1844), which contains “Self-Reliance,” one of Emerson’s most popular essays. “Self-Reliance” famously asks its reader to believe his own judgment above that of any external voices, and to utilize his own individual relationship with nature and God in order to find meaning for himself.

In 1840 Emerson played a key role in launching The Dial, which was initially edited by Margaret Fuller before Emerson took on the position as editor. This publication, though short-lived, acted as an outlet for emerging Transcendentalist lines of thinking and helped to unite younger Transcendentalists around core ideas. Emerson also established his reputation as a didactic poet throughout the 1840s, through the publication of his Poems in 1846 followed by May Day in 1847. In 1849 he released Representative Men, which consists of biographies of highly influential thinkers, including Plato, Goethe, Napoleon, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. In 1860 Emerson published what is widely viewed as his most mature work, The Conduct of Life, which develops a sense of humanism while also acknowledging inherent human limitations.

By the 1860s, Emerson had become a key American cultural figure, and his voice impacted thousands of people over the course of his numerous lecture series spanning from 1834 to the beginning of the Civil War. His travels to Europe allowed him to spread various aesthetic and philosophic ideals to the U.S. and he was a literary icon during the 1835-1860 American renaissance. Emerson died of pneumonia in 1882 at the age of 78, leaving behind a lasting legacy as a principal spokesman of the Transcendentalist movement, asserting the importance of individual experience over authority.