(1803–82)
a US writer of essays and poems. He greatly influenced religion and philosophy, especially with his idea of Transcendentalism, which said that God’s nature was in every person and thing. After being a Unitarian minister (= church leader) in New England , he settled in 1834 in Concord , Massachusetts , where he worked closely with Henry David Thoreau and others. Emerson’s essay Nature (1836) explained Transcendentalism as the unity of nature.