It was on this day in 1837 that Ralph Waldo Emerson(books by this author) delivered a speech entitled "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard University.
Emerson wasn't especially well known at the time. He was actually filling in for Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who had backed out of the speaking engagement at the last minute.
The speech was the first time he explained his transcendentalist philosophy in front of a large public audience. He said that scholars had become too obsessed with ideas of the past, that they were bookworms rather than thinkers. He told the audience to break from the past, to pay attention to the present, and to create their own new, unique ideas.
He said: "Life is our dictionary ... This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it ... Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds."
The speech was published that same year. It made Emerson famous, and it brought the ideas of transcendentalism to young men like Henry David Thoreau. Oliver Wendell Holmes later praised Emerson's "The American Scholar" as the "intellectual Declaration of Independence." WA
