The American Scholar

"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the First Parish in Cambridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.

Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision:

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. declared this speech to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence." Building on the growing attention he was receiving from the essay Nature, this speech solidified Emerson's popularity and weight in America, a level of reverence he would hold throughout the rest of his life. Phi Beta Kappa's literary quarterly magazine, The American Scholar, was named after the speech, and when printed, sold well. This success stands in contrast with the harsh reaction to another of his speeches, "The Divinity School Address," given eleven months later.

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