Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, poet, and abolitionist who founded the Transcendentalist movement, shattered the authority of institutional religion in American intellectual life, and produced the most powerful statement of individualism in the English language. Nietzsche called him "the most gifted of the Americans." Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called his 1837

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