Emerson’s Literary Influences

In Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson was surrounded by creative thinkers, writers, social activists and leaders. His own library, and the wide variety of  books which he read and reread, provided rich sustenance for his ever-curious mind. 

Mary Moody Emerson, the aunt who helped raise Emerson after his father died, was an early and influential force in shaping his life and works. Self-educated, widely read, and a prolific letter writer and diarist, she was described by her nephew as “the best writer in Massachusetts” and prompted his own journal-keeping and wide-ranging reading. Emerson copied out a selection of his Aunt Mary’s letters into four substantial notebooks and frequently referred back to them for inspiration in his own writing.

Emerson returned to Plato continuously, to better understand him, and to affirm his own conviction that “ideas are real because they are the forms and laws that underlie, precede and explain appearances.” (From Robert D. Richardson’s The Mind on Fire.)

Samuel Coleridge's Aids to Reflection steered Emerson to merge thoughts and ideas from Plato and other writers of the past with more recent authors and poets, helping him to understand the power of self.

Emanuel Swedenborg,  an 18th century scientist, founded Swedenborgianism and wrote about the relationship among the natural, scientific and divine worlds.  In Emerson’s 1833 lecture The Uses of Natural History, he comments, “The whole of nature is a metaphor or image of the human mind.” Swedenborg’s teachings on the connection between the mind and nature greatly influenced Emerson.

Sampson Reed’s Observations on the Growth of the Mind illuminated Emerson's understanding of Swedenborg, and of the concept that God is in everything.

Victor Cousin, a French philosopher, sparked in Emerson a life-long interest in Asian philosophy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was an eminent German writer whose views on science and nature inspired Emerson and played into his first book, Nature.  Goethe had written “Every natural form to the smallest, a leaf, a sunbeam, a moment of time, a drop, is related to the whole, and partakes of the beauty of the whole.”  Emerson wrote “Goethe teaches courage.” 

Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer, became a cherished friend and correspondent of Emerson after they met in Scotland. Carlyle’s State of German Literature spurred the move by Emerson and others to Transcendentalism.

Emerson extensively read the works of English poet William Wordsworth and met him in England. Emerson, also a poet, is said to have known much of Wordsworth’s poetry by heart.