Ralph Waldo Emersona New England preacher, essayist, lecturer, poet, and

philosopherwas one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century in the
United States. Emerson was also the first major American literary and intellectual figure to
widely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for classical
Asian and Middle Eastern works. He not only gave countless readers their first exposure to nonWestern modes of thinking, metaphysical concepts, and sacred mythologies; he also shaped the
way subsequent generations of American writers and thinkers approached the vast cultural
resources of Asia and the Middle East.
Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 in the thriving seaport town of Boston, Massachusetts. As a
boy, his first contact with the non-Western world came by way of the exotic merchandise that
bustled across the India Wharf in Boston harbor, a major nexus of the Indo-Chinese trade that
flourished in New England after the Revolutionary War. Emersons first contact with writings
from and about the non-Western world came by way of his father, William Emerson, a Unitarian
minister with a genteel interest in learning and letters. The elder Emerson was a member of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, a group that once invited Sir William Jones, the British
orientalist who founded the Asiatic Society, to correspond with them from his colonial outpost in
South Asia. By the time the Massachusetts society sent its letter, Jones had already been dead for
nine months, a testament to the practical difficulties of communicating between Boston and
Bengal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. William Emerson also edited the Monthly
Anthology, and Boston Review, a periodical that helped to bring British accounts of South Asia
to a New England readership. The Monthly Anthology featured such works as M. M. Cliffords
Asia, an Elegy and reviews of Charles Grants A Poem on the Restoration of Learning in the
East. In July 1805 the Monthly Anthology published Sir William Joness translation of
Kalidasas play Sakuntala, or the Fatal Ring, one of the first works of Sanskrit literature
printed in the United States.
In 1817, at the age of fourteen, Emerson entered Harvard College. While at Cambridge, Emerson
had little opportunity to develop a scholarly approach to the diverse literary and religious
traditions of Asia or the Middle East. The curriculum focused on Greek and Roman writers,
British logicians and philosophers, Euclidean geometry and algebra, and post-Enlightenment
defenses of revealed religion. As his journals and library borrowing records attest, however, in
his spare time, Emerson paid keen attention to the wider European Romantic interest in the
Orient or the East. These terms had an antiquarian ring for Emerson, usually denoting the
ancient lands and sacred traditions that lay east of classical Greece, such as Egypt, the Arabian
Peninsula, Persia, China, and India. In the early years of his personal journal, which he referred
to as his Wide World, Emerson began a decades-long practice of writing about Eastern life and
letters, accumulating quotations, pondering questions, and otherwise mulling over the
significance of the non-Western world. All tends to the mysterious east, Emerson copied into
his journal in 1820, quoting from a lecture by the Harvard professor Edward Everett. A half
century later, in 1872, Emerson recalled the adage in a speech that he delivered in front of the
Japanese Embassy, suggesting how formative these initial impressions were to his lifelong
interest in the East. In other journal entries, Emerson gave expression to some of his signature
ideas while ruminating about the relationship between East and West. For example, in 1822
Emerson wrote searchingly about how a transcendent experience of nature could help to recover
the spirit of Egyptian Antiquities, an early exploration of the sublime possibilities of the

natural world that he would famously celebrate in the transparent eye-ball passage in Nature in
1836.
In his extracurricular reading as a Harvard student, Emerson sampled the treatises, travelogues,
and translations of legal, religious, and poetic texts that were produced in the wake of Britains
imperial expansion into India. Some of these works, such as William Robertsons An Historical
Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India (1791) which included
an appendix on Indian law, civil policy, and religious institutions, focused on Indian antiquity.
Other texts, such as Alexander Fraser Tytlers Considerations on the Present Political State of
India (1815), took a more contemporary view of India. An aspiring poet, Emerson also
gravitated to selections of Eastern poetry and poetry that took up Eastern themes. Notable
examples include Thomas Duer Broughtons Selections from the Popular Poetry of the Hindoos
(1814), which offered Anglicized versions of Hindi-language poems along with their English
translation. Emerson read the first volume of The Asiatic Miscellany (1787), which included
works by two Persian poets, Saadi and Hafiz, whom he would embrace in his adulthood.
Emerson also read deeply in Thomas Moores Lalla Rookh (1817), a book-length poem about the
daughter of a Mughal emperor who falls in love with a poet while betrothed to another man. In
his later years Emerson fondly recalled that Moores Lalla Rookh was some of my best
travelling.
Like other Anglo-American readers of his period, Emerson relied heavily on British colonial
agents for his knowledge of India. As a consequence, Emersons writing about South Asia (as
well as China, Persia, and Arabia) often traffics in the menagerie of nineteenth-century EuroAmerican stereotypes and misconceptions. Examples can be found in Emersons Indian
Superstition, a densely allusive poem that he composed for Harvard Colleges graduation
ceremonies in 1822. In the 156-line poem, Emerson describes how Superstition, the
personification of religious tyranny in Asia, has enslaved [D]ishonored India. Not only does
Superstition drive maddened mothers to hurl their children into the Ganges River; it also
seduces people to throw themselves under the car of fiends. Emersons reference to the car of
fiends is an allusion to the juggernaut, or the massive wagon bearing a likeness of the diety
Jagannatha. Like most Westerners at this time, Emerson wrongly believed that religious
adherents crushed themselves under its wheels in an act of suicidal devotion. Emerson also
laments how the Brahmin class, who are at the top of the Hindu caste system, crush with a
daemons yelling storm any vain ambition by lower-caste Indians to rise in social status.
With its Romantic primitivism and bombastic imagery, Indian Superstition is perhaps closer to
caricature than considered literary art. Yet, for all its excess, Emersons poem is notable for
departing from a common formula of the period according to which a debased India could only
be redeemed through Western colonialism. Instead, Emerson urges Indians to resist the shackles
of the British Empire as forcefully as they should resist the mental chains of religious
superstition. He exhorts ordinary Indians to look upon the example of post-revolution America,
embodied by the laureled figure of Columbia, as an emblem of what a modern democratic nation
could achieve.
After he graduated from Harvard, Emersons enthusiasm for non-Western subjects waned,
primarily because he devoted himself to becoming a Unitarian minister. Scholars often mark
Emersons shift in interest with a letter he wrote to Mary Moody Emerson on 10 June 1822.

Mary Moody was Emersons aunt on his fathers side and a spiritual and intellectual mentor
whom he often referred to by the pseudo-Sanskrit anagram Tnamurya. In an earlier letter to her
nephew, Mary Moody shared Sir William Joness paraphrase of the Hindu Hymn to Narayana,
which concludes with the line, God only I perceive, God only I adore. Emerson was
profoundly impressed by Joness treatment of the hymn, and he later anthologized it in
Parnassus, the book of poetry he edited in 1874. In his 10 June letter to Mary Moody, Emerson
acknowledged his aunts previous inclusion of Joness piece by admitting that he was curious to
read [her] Hindu mythologies. But his interest was tempered by doubts about what he would
find there. One is apt to lament over indolence and ignorance, when we read some of those
sanguine students of the Eastern antiquities, Emerson explained. He was dubious of those who
seem to think that all the books of knowledge, and all the wisdom of Europe twice told, lie hid in
the treasures of the Bramins and the volumes of Zoroaster. Emerson decided that instead of
reading his aunts Eastern literatures, he would dream of their possible contents as if they were
the Seal of Solomon, calling their unread pages learnings El Dorado.
For the rest of the 1820s, El Dorado remained unexplored. Emerson only made sporadic
reference to Eastern subjects and literatures in his journals, often in relation to articles he read in
British periodicals, like the Edinburgh Review. In the early 1830s, however, he read two works
that changed the way he viewed ancient Eastern philosophy and religion. The first, which he read
in October 1830, was Joseph-Marie de Grandos sprawlingly titled Histoire compare des
systmes de philosophie, considrs relativement aux principles des connaissances humaines
(1804, Comparative History of Philosophical Systems, Considered in Relation to the Principles
of Human Knowledge). Grando offered a history of philosophy that focused on what he
believed to be the primary questions that had engaged serious thinkers for millennia. Drawing
evidence from non-Western works like the Indian Mahabharata and the Chinese The Invariable
Mileau, Grando convinced Emerson that Hindu, Chinese, and Persian schools of thought were
at least as valuable as their Hebrew, Greek, and Christian counterparts. The second important
work from this period was Victor Cousins Cours de lhistoire de la philosophie (1829;
translated as Course of the History of Modern Philosophy, 1852) which Emerson read in 1831.
Cousin identified four recurring systems in the development of philosophical thinking
sensationalism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism. He posited that the earliest cycle had
occurred in India with the Bhagavad Gita, which he described as the most interesting
monument of mysticism in ancient India. Following Cousins analysis of the Gita, Emerson
began to read the Hindu scripture as an argument for the fundamental identity of all things, as
well as proof that there was an underlying equilibrium of cosmic justice at work in the universe.
In 1831 Emersons wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis, an event that galvanized a
series of personal and professional changes in his life. The next year Emerson resigned his pulpit
at the Second Church of Boston, publicly citing the fact that he did not believe in the special
divinity of Jesus and thus could no longer administer the sacrament of communion. After
traveling through Europe, where he met literary luminaries such as William Wordsworth and
Thomas Carlyle, Emerson returned to his ancestral home in Concord, Massachusetts. He began a
career as a public lecturer, which lasted almost fifty years, and he married Lydia Jackson, whom
he affectionately referred to as Mine Asiaa pun on Asia Minor, the location of the ancient
kingdom of Lydia. In 1836 Emerson published Nature, the first major statement of his mature
philosophy and a groundbreaking book that catalyzed the Transcendentalist movement in New
England. Along with Emerson, the New England Transcendentalists were an eclectic group of

religious, literary, educational, and social reformers that included Margaret Fuller, Bronson
Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement grew out of Unitarianism in
the greater Boston area; was deeply influenced by British and German Romanticism, especially
as interpreted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and revolved around a form of philosophical and
spiritual idealism that valued intuition over the senses.
As Emerson moved further away from the precepts of Protestantism in the 1830s and 1840s, he
drew on Eastern religious and philosophical ideas to frame his belief in spiritual impersonality
(that is, instead of a spirituality centered on the personhood of God), as well as the notion that the
world could be illusory without being nonexistent. Emerson also shared his growing library of
Indian, Persian, and Chinese texts with his Transcendentalist friends as well as a wider public.
From March 1842 to April 1844, Emerson served as editor of the Dial, the primary literary organ
for the New England Transcendentalists. In the Dial, he created a recurring feature called
Ethnical Scriptures to demonstrate that religious texts from throughout the world were
repositories of time-tested truths concerning the nature of man and the laws for human life.
With the assistance of Thoreau, Emerson excerpted key passages in the Ethnical Scriptures
section from notable Asian and Middle Eastern works, for example, the Hindu Hitopadesa, the
Confucian Four Books, the Persian Desatir, and the Chaldean Oracles. At the same time,
Emersons reading began to expand into new traditions. In the mid 1840s Emerson read about
Islam in W. F. Thompsons translation of the Akhlak-I-Jalaly, published as The Practical
Philosophy of the Muhammedan People (1839). Thompsons translation, which aspired to end
the depreciation of the Muhammadan system among its English-language readers, gave
Emerson his first glimpse into Sufism, which Thompson described as the practical pantheism of
Asia. Emerson also read Abul Kasim Mansurs Shanameh or the Book of Kings, a compendium
of Persian poetry seven times longer than the Iliad, and Specimens of the Popular Poetry of
Persia as Found in the Adventures and Improvisations of Kurroglou, the Bandit-Minstrel of
Northern Persia (1842), a collection of oral poetry compiled by the Slavic Iranologist
Aleksander Chodzko.
With the publication of his Essays in 1841 and Essays: Second Series in 1844, Emerson emerged
as a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity. In his essays from this period Emerson did not explicitly
take up Eastern subjects or ideas; however, scholars agree that there are similarities between
Emersons Over-Soul in his 1841 essay of that name and the Hindu conception of Brahman.
Scholars also agree that there are similarities between Emersons belief described in his 1841
essay Compensation and the Hindu doctrine of karma. Moreover, in his published writings
during this period, Emerson cited maxims, referred to prominent figures, and otherwise
incorporated allusions drawn from Asian and Middle Eastern literatures with surprising
regularity. He added these lustres to his nonfiction writing for at least two reasons. First, by
treating non-Western texts with the same respect afforded cultural authorities in the Western
traditions, he could disrupt the parochial expectations of his American and European audiences.
Second, by adducing evidence from traditions outside of America and Europe, he could assert
the universality of his observations on society, fate, ethics, and philosophy.
Emersons engagement with Eastern cultural sources is also evident in his poetry from the 1840s.
For example, inspired by his reading of Persian verse, Emerson wrote Saadi in 1842, a poetic
tribute to the aphorist, panegyrist, and lyrical poet of the same name. In Emersons portrayal,
Saadi is a sympathetic man of the people who resists full assimilation into the everyday world.

He [loves] the race of men (No churl or anchorite is he immured in cave or den), and yet
he has no companion; / Come ten, or come a million, but dwells alone. He embodies the
wisdom of the gods and commands reverence, and yet he is also a lighthearted cheerer of
mens hearts who refrains from over clever subtleties. A muse boldly enjoins Saadi to forego
absorption in the distracting trials of war and trade and camp and town, and instead to
[s]eek the living among the dead, liberating men from themselves because [m]an in man is
imprisoned. In the poems conclusion, Saadi is celebrated as a masterly conjurer of worlds in
whose every syllable / Lurketh Nature veritable, so that as far as his words carry, Suns rise
and set in Saadis speech. As scholars have observed, Emersons portrayal of Saadi can be
approached as an idealized self-portrait as well as a cross-cultural encomium. Emerson often
referred to himself by the poetic penname, Sayed, an apparent gesture to his felt kinship with
Saadi.
Hamatreya, published in 1846, is another poem that crystallized from Emersons reading in
ancient Eastern literatures, in particular, a passage from the Vishnu Purana that he had copied
into his journal in 1845. Hamatreya is Emersons adaption of the name Maitreya, a figure in
the Vishnu Purana who asks his teacher Parasara to tell the story of the kings who have ruled the
world. After providing a summary of the sovereigns of history, Parasara observes that the rule of
kings is ultimately transitory. Even though they indulge feelings that the earth is mineit is my
sonsit belongs to my dynasty, they invariably perish along with their progeny while the earth
remains. In Hamatreya, Emerson takes up the similar theme of sovereign possession and
human mortality. The poem opens with a list of the first European settlers of Concord,
MassachusettsMinott, Lee, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint. In a later version of the poem,
Emerson even added the name of his own Concord ancestor Bulkeley to the list of settlers. As
these founders stride their fields, they marvel at the intimate connection they feel with the land,
holding fast to the same thoughts of ownership as Parasaras rulers: Tis mine, my childrens and
my names. But Concords settlers, like Parasaras sovereigns, ultimately die. They are able to
steer the plow over the land but unable to steer their feet / Clear of the grave, so that in New
England, as in ancient India, human pretensions to earthly ownership are ended by death. How
am I theirs, gently asks the Earth, If they cannot hold me / But I hold them?
When scholars discuss the limitations of Emersons writing about the East, they often refer to the
essay Plato; or the Philosopher, published in Representative Men in 1850. In that volume,
Emerson collected a series of biographical writings organized around the Romantic belief that a
general mind expresses itself with extraordinary intensity in certain individuals. In Plato
Emerson argues that the Greek philosopher brought together the two cardinal facts at the core
of all philosophy: Unity and Variety. According to Emerson, the tendency to dwell in the
conception of the fundamental Unity is primarily an Eastern trait, while the impulse toward
variety is a Western one. Emerson praises in Plato what he probably valued in himselfan
ability to synthesize the best aspects of unity and variety, immensity and detail, East and West.
And yet Emersons conceptualization of the East in the Plato essay poses problems that are
worth noting, particularly in the following passage:
The country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable,
immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this fate in the social institution of caste. On the other side,
the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a

discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West
delighted in boundaries.
As scholars have observed, when Emerson claims to speak about Asia, he seems to have India
in mind (that is, the country with the social institution of caste). It is a muddling of distinctions
that suggests Emerson was unconcerned about the vital differences among the cultures of Asia
and the Middle East. Emerson also eschews political or economic comparisons in favor of
idealized intellectual ones, supporting the notion that the East was more for him an abstract
idea than a place inhabited by actual people. Also, even though Emerson purports to offer a
balanced view of an East that [loves] infinity and a West that [delights] in boundaries, his
language seems to favor Europewith its activity, creativity, discipline, arts, inventions,
trade, freedomover Asia, with its immovable institutions and deaf, unimplorable, immense
fate. Emersons vague and polarized thinking in Plato closely aligns with the stereotypical
typologies about East and West that prevailed in the wider culture, pointing to the limits of
Emersons intellectual vision when trying to imagine the Eastern Other.
In 1856 Emerson composed a lyric poem originally called Song of the Soul and later published
in the Atlantic in 1857 under the title, Brahma. The poem dramatizes an idea that Emerson
closely associated with Hinduism; namely, that the material world is essentially an illusory mask
of the divine spirit that dwells in all beings. Although it stands to reason that the poem is written
from the perspective of Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, or even Brahman, the absolute or
universal soul, the speaker in the poem does not name itself. Instead, the speaker enumerates the
ways in which it eludes characterization. The opening lines of the four-stanza verse exemplify
the riddle-like quality of the poem as a whole:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

In many ways, Brahma is a distillation of Emersons reading of Hindu sacred literatures over
the previous two decades, from the Baghavad Gita to the Katha Upanishad. For example, the
red slayer is likely an allusion to Siva the Destroyer, one of the three aspects of the Godhead in
Hinduism. Siva is an agent of dissolution, but nothing is ultimately destroyed or dissolved in the
Hindu cosmos; Brahman is without end, so everything that emanates from Brahman is also
deathless. When Brahma inspired dozens of mocking parodies in the Atlanticits paradoxical
style proved to be too much for many antebellum American readers, who objected to its exotic
obscuritiesEmerson told his daughter that one did not need to adopt a Hindu perspective to
understand the poem. One could easily substitute Jehovah for Brahma, he explained, and not
lose the sense of the verse.
In 1858 Emerson published a long essay, Persian Poetry, in the Atlantic. As a way of
introducing American readers to what was most likely an unfamiliar poetic tradition, Emerson

drew parallels between Persian poetry and Homeric epics, English ballads, and the works of
William Shakespeare. He also noted that the legends of Persian mythology could sometimes be
found in the Hebrew Bible. As part of his exposition, Emerson included his own English
translations of the poets Hafiz, Saadi, Khayyam, and Enweri, by way of the German translations
of Persian poetry by Baron von Hammer-Purgstall. Emerson had no competence in any Asian or
Middle Eastern language, and he never read a non-Western text in its original language. But
Emerson had been translating von Hammers German texts in his journals since 1846. By the end
of his life, Emerson produced at least sixty-four translations, totaling more than seven hundred
lines of Persian verse, many of which can be found in Orientalist, a notebook he began to keep
in the 1850s. The Persian Poetry essay in the Atlantic also served as a prelude for the
introduction that Emerson wrote for the first American edition of Saadis Gulistan, published by
Ticknor and Fields in 1865.
In 1872 Emerson sailed for England and then Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. As he toured the
cities of Alexandria and Cairo, Emerson noted observations about the Pyramids, the Nile River,
and his woeful ignorance of the Arabic language. But at seventy years old, Emersons most
significant writings about the East were behind him. Ten years later, on 27 April 1882, Emerson
died in Concord, leaving an enduring legacy as the seminal figure of modern American
Orientalism. His lifelong excursions into the libraries of classical Asian and Middle Eastern
literatures were those of an enthusiast instead of a rigorous scholar, and he often relied on crude
Romantic stereotypes and failed to recognize the differences among the cultures and peoples of
the East. But Ralph Waldo Emerson was a pioneering figure of what is now called
multiculturalism who expanded the Eastern horizons of generations of American readers and
writers, and he persuasively demonstrated how classical Indian, Chinese, and Persian works
could be used as a means to bring the inquiring self into a fresh appreciation of its own profound
powers.