(1803-1882), an American poet and essayist, born in Boston, Mass. He graduated at Harvard in 1825, taught school for five years and in 1829 became minister of a Unitarian church in Boston. As he had given up teaching because it was uncongenial, so he gave up preaching, although it seems that he was most successful, because he could not accept various rites of the Church, as that of the Lord's Supper. In 1832 he made a trip to England, where he became acquainted with Walter Savage Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle. With Carlyle he established a firm friendship, and their correspondence was continued for years. Returning to the United States he began his career as a lecturer, and it was in this capacity that he was for a long time best known. His lectures on science, history and biography were very popular, by reason of their exhaustless fund of wit, illustration and anecdote. In 1835 he married Miss Lilian Jackson and took up his residence at Concord, Mass. His first volume, published in the following year, was Nature, in which he definitely set forth his creed; and this increased greatly the reputation which he had made by lecturing. As a member of the group known as Transcendentalists, Emerson was one of the original editors of the Dial, a transcendental magazine, founded in 1840. Despite his identification with this movement, he had little to do with the Brook Farm scheme, of which he saw the impracticability from the beginning (See BROOK FARM). Among Emerson's most important publications were Essays in 1841 and 1844; Poems in 1846; Representative Men. 1850; The Conduct of Life, 1860; May Day and Other Poems and Society and Solitude, in 1861. The Sphinx, The Humble Bee, The Threnody, written on the death of his son, Days, the Snowstorm and Each and All are some of his best-known and best-liked poems. Perhaps the most important of Emerson's messages to the world was his teaching that man may rise above circumstances and environment and may make of himself what he chooses; and it is largely through such philosophy as this that he has exerted so wide an influence. See halftone, CONCORD.