Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) is regarded as one of the two leading proponents of American Transcendentalism. A Unitarian preacher who had a transformative crisis after the tragic and premature death of his wife, he gave up his old life and traveled extensively abroad. He met the famous British poets Wordsworth and Coleridge and many other European artists and thinkers before returning home and settling in Concord, Massachusetts.

He was one of the founders of the Transcendental Club in 1836, which included the great Transcendental thinkers covered in this chapter. The Dial was their newsletter and some of them lived in a commune they called Brook Farm, in Massachusetts. They championed individualism and self-reliance and the belief that human intuition, not church dogma, contained the key to illumination and insight. Part social club, part support group, part “open mic” where they shared their poetry and philosophy, they were a controversial hotbed of radical thinkers.

Emerson was a writer and lecturer whose famous works include Nature and Self-Reliance, which expressed the Transcendentalist philosophy. He viewed every individual as having full and free access to the Over-Soul. We are all something like cells in the giant organism that is God/Nature. We can access this collective unconsciousness and experience total interconnectedness with our fellows and the natural world. He believed, like St. Augustine, that evil is not a force unto itself but merely arises from the absence of good. He considered poets to be the modern mystics and prophets and directly influenced and inspired America's greatest poet, Walt Whitman. His influence in philosophy and literature had a profound impact on the American culture. And it did not fade away in the nineteenth century.