Ralph Waldo Emerson May 25 1803 April 27 1882 who went by his middle name Waldo was an American essayist lecturer philosopher abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1500 public lectures across the United States.Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature. Following this work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837 which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.