American Dream: Values and Principles Essay Example

modern American culture.

Through the examination and analysis of The Autobiography of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, The Great Gatsby the project will demonstrate how from one generation to another, from one literary period to another, these works are sacred texts because like the American dream they are rooted in the themes of self-actualization and individualism, and because they provide examples of all the possibilities the American dream offers when given the opportunity to pursue it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has contributed to America’s literature in many ways. First, Ralph Waldo Emerson contributed to American by influencing other writers; calling for a national literature; imbuing his writings with the ideal of spiritual harmony as opposed to the dominance of material gain. Emerson look to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe as the inspiration for literary thought of his day in the same way that American writers looked to Emerson for theirs.

In this sense, Emerson brought the philosophy and thoughts of Germany's greatest poet into American literature (Ronald 109). Some of the American greats who were influenced by Emerson are Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Emerson called for a New World Renaissance in literature to replace the past European Renaissance. He wanted a national literature to rise up that reflected the environs of America as well as the social and cultural concerns of America--advocating that a new voice be brought from the heart of the American experience to the collective of literary experience.

Emerson brought a note of spirituality to the new national literature because his emphasis was on harmony deriving from within, a harmony within one's self. In his writings, that harmony is reflected in his

poetry celebrating Nature's wild life that surrounded him. His ideas were opposed to the notion that the ideal was the freedom to make money. His spiritual ideas feed the fuel of later eras with the idea that inner harmony is superior to the drive for wealth.

Emerson’s praise of the individual spirit in “Self-Reliance” demonstrates the promise and optimism of the American dream by illustrating that the path toward self-reliance comes from self-trust and not from conforming to traditions and societal customs. In the essay he states: Emerson’s literary works and his transcendental philosophy of self-reliance and self-trust as a symbolic projection of the American dream in American literature. With an idealized conception of an independent American identity and the rejection of European “gentility,” Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” demonstrates the influence American literature had in defining the American identity and shaping the American dream.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet and lecturer who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. He was a prolific essayist and speaker. He gave over 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian Minister.

His father died when he was young (8 years old) and he had to support his education through doing part time jobs. In October 1817, he went to Harvard, where he served as class poet, but he didn’t stand out as a student graduating in the middle of his class. After graduation, he went to Florida, seeking warmer climates for his delicate health.

Emerson worked as

a school master and later as a pastor in Boston’s Second Church. However he gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”.

When he was just 18, Emerson married Ellen Louisa Tucker, but she tragically died just two years later – an event which shook the young Emerson. Around this time, he became more uncertain over the religious beliefs of the church he worked as a pastor ( Stephen 88). He was unsatisfied with the Communion and the method of worship. To Emerson it seemed too dry. Several years later in 1838, he was invited to Harvard Divinity School, where he gave a famous address claiming early Christianity and ‘deifed’ Christ and discounting the miracles in the Bible.

This radical approach was heavily criticized by members of the establishment.
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period.

In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson met influential British writer Thomas Carlyle, with whom he would correspond for 38 years. Carlyle and the English romantic poets would have an important effect on Emerson’s

work. Ralph Waldo Emerson came from a long line of American ministers. He enjoyed a sheltered childhood in Boston, and attended Harvard Divinity School. Although Emerson accepted a position as pastor of a Boston Church in 1829, the death of his wife in 1831 deepened his existing religious doubts. He resigned two years later, explaining to his congregation that he had started to doubt the sacraments.

He moved to Concord, then set off for Europe where he met leading writers and thinkers of the day. During a visit to a Paris botanical garden, he decided to become a “naturalist.” In 1836, he published an anonymous booklet called Nature, that questioned traditional concepts of God and nature. Influenced by Hindu texts and English Romanticism, he argued that man can rise above the material world and discover a sense of transcendent spirituality. Nature defined the philosophy that would inform his future essays, lectures and poetry ( Stephen 88). He championed individual spirit, instinct and intellect over traditional religion, education and thought.

In the 1840s, he joined the Transcendentalist movement, and founded The Dial, a magazine of Transcendentalist thought edited at first by Margaret Fuller, then by Emerson. His two volumes of essays, published in 1841 and 1844, including essays like “Self Reliance,” made him world famous. His 1847 poetry collection, May-Day and Other Pieces included “Concord Hymn,” about the battle of Concord which included the famous line “the shot heard round the world.” In Representative Men (1850), he wrote sketches of his role models including Napoleon and Shakespeare.

Emerson’s later work became less idealistic and more pragmatic (Stephen 88). In The Conduct of Life, considered by some critics to be his most mature work, he takes a compassionate, philosophic

approach to human frailty. Enerson’s writings were extremely influential with American writers including Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and many others. Emerson died in Concord in 1882, at the age of 78. He is buried in the same cemetery as Louisa May Alcott. During Emison lifetime Jackson was the president of his country.

Emerson's influence as a prose writer derives in part from his incisive observation and his vivid expression. Although he dealt with abstruse concepts, his writing nevertheless possesses clarity, directness, and careful progression from one idea to the next. Difficult concepts are elucidated through analogy and metaphor. Moreover, individual perceptions and ideas progress toward broad generalizations that sweep the reader along. Emerson's phraseology and construction frequently and engagingly suggest the spoken rather than the written word.

This impression is reinforced by his propensity for adapting existing words into his own unique creations and for employing quotable maxims (John 107). His rhetorical style builds up to peaks of language and emotion. Indeed, Emerson's appeal as a writer — his ability to affect his audience — owes much to his experience as a preacher and public speaker and to the fact that many of his essays were delivered as lectures before they were revised for publication.

Emerson's poetry presents, symbolically and in compressed form, the same major themes found in his addresses and prose writings. The rise and fall of emotional intensity in the poetry parallel the crescendos and cadences of the essays. There are considerable stylistic differences among the poems. Critics have varied widely in assessing the technical success and overall merit of Emerson's poems.

Emerson not only uplifted

mankind to oneness with, rather than subservience to, God. He also suggested a distinctly democratic view of each man as equal in worth and capacity to all other men. Human hierarchies, distinctions between the great and the humble, were irrelevant in measuring the value of the individual as Emerson wrote in Chapter VIII of Nature ("Prospects").

Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience (John 117). “Trust thyself," Emerson’s motto, became the code of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E. Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist journal,” The Dial”.

Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson’s most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson’s famous essay, “Self-Reliance," in which the write instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God and to trust his own judgment above all others.

Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address, which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.

Emerson’s philosophy is characterized by his reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works

of Plotinus, Swedenborg, and Böhme. A believer in the “divine sufficiency of the individual," Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment. In spite of their skepticism, Emerson’s beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture (Elliot 122)