Showing results for "ralph" in World Literature

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was 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. 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.

Emerson's enduring reputation, however, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic writer (like Friedrich Nietzsche) and a quintessentially American thinker whose championing of the American Transcendental movement and influence on Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and others would alone secure him a prominent place in American cultural history. Emerson is often characterized as an idealist philosopher and indeed used the term himself of his philosophy, explaining it simply as a recognition that plan always precedes action. Contents:. History. Self-Reliance. Compensation.

As the country recovers from the war with France, and whispers that the pestilence has returned to England grow louder, fear is in the heart of every nobleman and commoner alike. Sir Ralph de Mandeville, ex-solider and newly appointed Justice of the Peace is sent to Langbarugh, just outside York, to investigate the murder of Coroner Sir Boderick de Whitby. More deaths quickly follow, and while these are swiftly dealt with as plague victims, Sir Ralph and his two assistants Merek and Peter soon uncover something altogether more horrifying… A greater evil is at large in the northern wapentakes.

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces listeners to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 25th May 1803, the son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. Emerson was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood. His father died before Emerson was eight, and the young boy was raised by his mother and other female members of the family. Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812 when he was nine. In October 1817 at 14, Emerson went to Harvard College.

These passages from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson on religion and spiritual philosophy reveal a metaphysical thought that is quintessentially American and universally relevant to the spiritual needs of today's world. It is seldom that an American philosopher is found among the gurus, mystics, and masters present in the spiritual milieu. Emerson combined the spiritual intuition of the East with the philosophical acumen of the West.

Willa Cather's early poem, "April Twilights," serves as a precursor to themes of love and nature that appear in her later novels. This collection also includes poems by poetesses Christina Rossetti, Sarah Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Amy Lowell, as well as a sampling of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson.