Nature

'Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball.' In this short book Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that every person can have an original relation to the universe, not through books or churches but through direct experience of nature, which serves us as commodity, beauty, language and discipline, and leads us towards the spirit that lives in all things.

Published anonymously in 1836, Nature became the founding text of Transcendentalism, the movement of New England thinkers that included Henry David Thoreau. Emerson (1803–1882), a former Unitarian minister, became the most influential American thinker of his age. Read his Essays and Thoreau's Walden, and see his life.

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.