Early Emerson Poems

During his life, Emerson wrote a dozen essays and delivered 1500+ public lectures spanning the United States. Emerson's writings focused mainly on subjects such as" individuality, freedom, the ability of mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between one's soul and the surrounding world.

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 met William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle.