Representative Men: Seven Lectures

What is a great man, and what use is he to the rest of us? In seven lectures, Ralph Waldo Emerson answers through six figures, each the representative of a kind of mind: Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the sceptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world and Goethe the writer. Great men, he argues, do not rule us; they show us what we ourselves are capable of.

Emerson gave the lectures in the 1840s in England and America and published them in 1850, as a democratic answer to his friend Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Read Emerson's Essays: First Series.

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.