Emerson Influence

During the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was able to efficiently influence people from his poetry and essays to his lectures. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Emerson shared the same beliefs as other intellectuals in the area. He was characterized as an idealist philosopher whose new ideas changed the way people thought about and comprehended reality. Over the time of his career, Ralph Waldo Emerson formed many notions shown in his work based upon his independent learnings from reading and writing, having family history in ministry, and collaborating with colleagues. Emerson would not have become as great in his day if it was not for the time he spent alone learning. His intellectual life was shaped by a range and depth
The Emerson family were descendants of a number of noteworthy New England ministers (Schulman). Like his father, William, Ralph Waldo Emerson became a minister at the local church in Boston. Even though Emerson enjoyed preaching, he did not believe that ministry was his calling. He was often thought to leave the ministry because he could not inconscience serve communion knowing the members construed the meaning differently than he did. While most of his family members practiced ministry, his paternal aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, did not. Her relentless intellectual energy and combative individualism left a permanent stamp on him as a thinker (Brewton). She knew all the thinkers of the day, taught Ralph many aphorisms, and first introduced him to Hindu scriptures and Neoplatonism (Schulman). Mary was at the same time passionately orthodox in religion and a lover of controversy, as well as an original thinker tending to a mysticism that was a precursor to her nephew’s more radical beliefs (Brewton). It is further said that Mary anticipated the Transcendentalist sensibility because of her openness to natural religion (Schulman). Ralph eventually joined the Transcendentalist movement, where people shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition (“Ralph Waldo”). Also, Emerson’s spiritual thoughts