Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Concord, was the central mind of American Transcendentalism — the essayist of "Self-Reliance" and "Nature" who told his country to stop imitating Europe and trust itself. His poems compress the essays' doctrine into verse: see clearly, stand alone, find the divine in the ordinary.

"Concord Hymn," sung at the 1837 dedication of a monument to the minutemen, gave America the phrase "the shot heard round the world." And when an unknown Walt Whitman sent him Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson wrote back the most famous welcome in American letters: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career."