X-Nico

19 unusual facts about Ralph Waldo Emerson


Appointment of Church of England bishops

(This stage of the process was mocked by Ralph Waldo Emerson thus: "The King sends the Dean and Canons a congé d'élire, or leave to elect, but also sends them the name of the person whom they are to elect. They go into the Cathedral, chant and pray; and after these invocations invariably find that the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recommendation of the King" Emerson, English Traits, XIII, 1856.)

Emerson Literary Society

Six weeks before Ralph Waldo Emerson's death, a group of Hamilton students honored his life's work by founding a non-secretive society based on his American philosophy.

Freedom's Way National Heritage Area

The heritage area includes sites significant to the American Revolution, cultural sites associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and Native American sites.

Friedrich Spielhagen

As a translator, Spielhagen rendered into German George William Curtis's Howadji, Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits, a selection of American poems (1859; 2d ed. 1865), and William Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici.

Gar Heard

This feat is commonly known as "The Shot," or "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," in reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "Concord Hymn," which was written about the Battle of Lexington.

Gerald J. Rip

In his 2009 judgment in the suit Leola Purdy, Sons Ltd. v The Queen, he quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson in suggesting that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

That autumn, and continuing to the spring of 1886, Dickinson joined the University Extension Scheme to give public lectures that covered Carlyle, Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Émile Montégut

Émile Montégut translated Essais de philosophie américaine (1850) from Ralph Waldo Emerson; Revolution de 1688 (2 vols. 1853) from Thomas Macaulay's History; and also produced the Œuvres completes (10 vols. 1868-1873) of William Shakespeare.

Liverpool Institute High School for Boys

Luminaries like Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered talks and readings in the main lecture hall (now the architecturally restructured Sir Paul McCartney Auditorium of LIPA).

Pioneers of American Freedom

The first part of the book consists of a series of essays on the American liberal thinkers Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Abraham Lincoln.

Rhododendron sect. Rhodora

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his poem, Rhodora: on being asked, whence is the flower ?

Sandra Laugier

Sandra Laugier extensively worked on J. L. Austin and L. Wittgenstein; she also introduced several aspects of American philosophy to French readers (Emerson, Thoreau, but above all Stanley Cavell).

R.W. Emerson, Essais : Histoire, Destin, Expérience, Compensation (with C. Fournier), Paris, Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2005.

Swami Anand

He was acquainted with the classical and folk traditions of the Gujarati, Marathi and Sanskrit languages and was influenced by the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Max Muller, Walt Whitman, Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda.

Teaneck Public Schools

Named for author, essayist, and 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail

The play opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his old age, recalling the memories of his friend, Henry.

;Ralph Waldo Emerson : Emerson (referred to in the script as Waldo) appears, for most of the play, middle-aged.

Theophilos Kairis

Kairis would teach theosphitism, but in the context of world religions, ranging from Buddhism, many describing the philosophical thought of Kairis similar in vein as with the Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thomas Starr King

Inspired by men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher, King embarked on a program of self-study for the ministry.


Ameen Rihani

He eventually became familiar with the writings of Shakespeare, Hugo, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Whitman, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Thoreau, Emerson and Byron, to name a few.

Bessie Rayner Parkes

Bessie Rayner Parkes’ wide circle of literary and political friends included George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lord Shaftesbury, Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, John Ruskin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Democracy in America

In spending several chapters lamenting the state of the arts in America, he fails to envision the literary Renaissance that would shortly arrive in the form of such major writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.

Eduard C. Lindeman

Lindeman drew much of his intellectual constructs from three principal sources: educational philosopher John Dewey; Danish philosopher/educator/theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig; and writer/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Eugene V. Rostow

His parents were active socialists and their three sons, Eugene Victor Debs, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, were named after Eugene V. Debs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.

Frank Schulman

Schulman was the author of several theological and historical books, and specialized particularly in the study of 19th-century religious figures, especially Charles Wellbeloved, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Martineau.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Eugene England discusses Tuckerman's position as a Romantic poet and his work in relation to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "He is not merely a Romantic, nor yet exclusively an anti-Romantic; not just influenced by Emerson or simply reacting against Emerson's excesses ...

Heinz Memorial Chapel

These represent St. Luke’s and Jesus’ spiritual progeny: in charity, St. Francis of Assisi; in imagination, Leonardo da Vinci ; in understanding, Newton; in healing, Pasteur; in eloquence, Wordsworth; in leadership, Lincoln; in thought, Emerson.

Henrietta Christian Wright

One of her books of children's stories, Children's Stories in American Literature: 1861-1896, covered a period of 1660-1860 with great authors like Edgar Allan Poe, William Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Influence of Bhagavad Gita

The book has been highly praised numerous times not only by Indians but also people like Aldous Huxley, Henry David Thoreau, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse, and others.

John Denison Baldwin

Baldwin conducted correspondence with many notable thinkers of his time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, James Russell Lowell, and particularly his friend Charles Sumner.

Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando

He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson who used his philosophical framework extensively in support of his own first book Nature.

R. W. B. Lewis

The book traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue, Lewis exposes its continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

Robert C. Snyder

He advised governors and congressmen, spoke at every Kiwanis and Optimist Club within a day’s drive of Ruston and still found time daily to spend with his friends Thoreau and Tennyson, Pope and Emerson.

Robert S. Corrington

In order to effectively speak or theorize about nature, then, Corrington has picked up on “a distinction dear to Averroes, Thomas of Aquinas, Baruch Spinoza, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (among others)” between natura naturans nature naturing and natura naturata nature natured.

Rock Island Public Library

The twelve authors carved into the sandstone are the last names of Homer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virgil, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Burns, Esaias Tegner, Alighieri Dante, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and George Bancroft.

Sara Jane Lippincott

She became a prominent member of the literary society of New York along with Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley, Richard Henry Stoddard, Andrew Carnegie, Mary Mapes Dodge, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Butler, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Delia Bacon, and Bayard Taylor, among others.

Stone Building

Notable speakers at the hall included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Josiah Quincy, Jr. The building was offered to the trustees of the Cary Memorial Library for $2,000 in 1891, by Ellen Stone, granddaughter of Eli Robbins, who built it, and it was named for her.

The Gay Science

It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry-writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas and, in inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in "the dismal science".

Thomas Jefferson Building

From left to right when one faces the building, they are Demosthenes (portico north side), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott and Dante Alighieri (portico south side).

Thomas Ridgeway Gould

Gould visited Boston in 1878, where he executed a number of portrait busts, including those of Emerson (now in the Harvard University library), John Albion Andrew, Seth Wells Cheney, and Junius Brutus Booth.

Washington Goode

In the effort to save Washington Goode from execution, 400 citizens of Concord, Massachusetts-including Henry David Thoreau, two of his sisters-Sophia Thoreau and Helen D. Thoreau, his mother-Cynthia D. Thoreau as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson signed the petition now known as the "Protest of 400...against the execution of Washington Goode."