The Divinity School address

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a Boston minister who resigned his church in 1832 because he could no longer accept its rituals. After meeting Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth in Europe, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and became America's best-known lecturer and the centre of the Transcendentalist movement.

His essay Nature and his address The American Scholar urged Americans to think for themselves, and his Essays gave the world 'Self-Reliance'. He encouraged the young Thoreau, praised the unknown Whitman, and loved the Persian poets Hafez and Saadi, some of whose verses he translated into English.