Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aged unknown

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence." Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world." He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

DbPedia
Wikidata Wikipedia

Commemorated on 1 plaque

Kentucky Historical Marker #1681

Louisville's Steamboat Era. River navigation in 18th century was by flatboat and keelboat. First steamboat, NEW ORLEANS, arrived in Louisville in autumn of 1811. City soon became steamboat center with six lines operating here. Hundreds of these boats were built in area. Wharf teemed with traffic through Civil War. Eight U.S. presidents arrived on this wharf or "levee." (Reverse) Visitors at Louisville Wharf James Monroe - June 1819 Andrew Jackson - June 1819 Alexis de Tocqueville - Dec. 1831 Washington Irving - Sept. 1832 Abraham Lincoln - Sept. 1841 Charles Dickens - Apr. 1842 Walt Whitman - Feb. 1848 Ralph Waldo Emerson - June 1850 Oliver W. Holmes - Sept. 1855 Herman Melville - Jan.1858

At the Wharf, 4th St., Louisville, KY, United States where they visited (1848)