Ralph Waldo Emerson is generally remembered as one of the most influential writers of the American Renaissance. He is the father of the philosophical movement Transcendentalism, that is, the American equivalent of the European Romanticism movement. During his career, Emerson wrote numerous essays and gave more than 1,500 lectures throughout the United States. Although his writings had a significant impact on American authors of subsequent generations, Emerson earned his living and achieved popularity as a public lecturer. In fact, oratory is Emerson's strong point, as well as the topic he most analyzes in his works. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In both his essays and his journal, Emerson recognizes that oratory was not simply a performance of a person's opinion; rather, successful discourse produces a synthesis between speaker and listener that reveals a mutual identity. According to literature professor Granville Ganter, “Emerson's sense of successful oratory is closely tied to the concept of abandonment, a word he associates with oracular genius” (270). Ganter states that Emerson believed that everyone had the qualities to be a successful orator, but that not everyone went through enough hardship to develop their abilities. In both his essay “Self-Reliance” and his speech “The American Scholars,” Emerson states that scholars and speakers must subject themselves to poverty, boredom, adversity, and loneliness in order to progress. In his address "The American Scholar," Emerson says: But he, in his private observatory, cataloging the dark and nebulous stars of the human mind, which hitherto no man has regarded as such, - observing days and months sometimes for a few facts; still correcting his old records, he must give up performance and instant fame. In the long period of his preparation he often had to betray an ignorance and inability in the popular arts, incurring the contempt of those capable who put him aside. For a long time he must stammer in his speech; they often give up the living for the dead. Worse, he has to accept: How often! — poverty and loneliness. (540) Emerson highlights the difficulties that scholars might encounter in their journey, and emphasizes the importance of succumbing to ignorance and laziness to understand the potential and limitations of the person. In fact, it is not possible to evolve without knowing to what extent we are capable of learning. Furthermore, Emerson insists that scholars and orators should be wary of immediate success because it does not necessarily denote knowledge and mastery. On the contrary, after a life of deprivation and misfortune, intellectuals acquire awareness of their own skills. For Emerson, however, knowledge is not something that men can acquire only from the external world and experience, but is an innate characteristic. According to the philosopher Philip Kitcher, Emerson was influenced by the Kantian idea of ​​“a priori knowledge” (4). In fact, Emerson incorporated Kant's philosophy into his own by linking the idea of ​​a priori knowledge to the idea that “words in themselves refer to the material object, but ideas transcend the physical word. However, until ideas are expressed in concrete language, they are a meaningless abstraction. […] Metaphor fuses the material and the ideal, unifying and giving meaning to experience” (Berlin 526). Therefore, if words express concrete objects and metaphors unite the physical and the metaphysical, the orator's task increases its value. The speaker should use metaphors to express what cannot be known otherwise making it easier to understandof reality by people. Emerson, however, argues that the orator's craft is so specific, that the public speaker should embrace other works so as not to lose touch with reality. In the American Scholar speech, Emerson explains this concept using an extended metaphor by saying: “In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Thinking Man. In the degenerate state, when he is a victim of society, he tends to become a simple thinker or, worse still, the parrot of other people's thoughts. (537). Ideas are innate, but they can only develop after coming into contact with the outside world, so the speaker has the task of making this idea flourish. For ideas to thrive, the speaker must do physical work. Yet Emerson argues that speakers instead of focusing on discovering new concepts do nothing but repeat and reformulate others. Although Emerson excessively criticized his contemporary lack of originality, he is truly fascinated by the figure of Edward Taylor. Taylor was an English clergyman, poet, and physician who emigrated from England to the United States in 1668; he was famous for his sermons which Emerson called the perfect example of near-perfect speech (Stanford). Emerson had the opportunity to hear Taylor speak on Temperance on March 13, 1837, the same year that Emerson himself gave his greatest public speech (Oliver). On this occasion, Emerson wrote in his diary that Taylor brought the dynamics of his personality and creativity into a “harmonious relationship” with his audience (22). He was amazed by Taylor's ability to improvise his speech and construct a perfect oration without using a defined method. Taylor's talent in fact lay in the bond he created with the audience. He engaged the audience to such an extent that Emerson described him as an "instinctive creature whose illustration keeps us wide awake" (25). Emerson also recognizes Taylor's ability to observe the analogies between nature and spirit. In his diary he wrote that Taylor used the material world to seek understanding in the spiritual world making it more understandable to the faithful (27). For Emerson, man can be free only when he is guided in his action by his conscience which has come to understand the spiritual world, and "the task of the preacher-orator is to bring his audience to a state of consciousness" (Ray). However, the main quality that Taylor possessed, and which Emerson recognized as a fundamental characteristic that the perfect orator should have, was the ability to use the knowledge inherited from the “thinking man” of the past and integrate it with his own understanding. he criticized his contemporaries for emulating other works without contributing to the creation of new ideas. In his American Scholar speech, in fact, he warned Harvard students of the danger that books represented for them and for their imagination. He argued that books should be a source of inspiration and that scholars and speakers should never consider them to be absolute truth. In his speech, Emerson said: The only thing in the world that is of value is the active soul. Every man has the right to this; every man contains this within himself, although, in almost all men, it is hindered and not yet born. The active soul sees the absolute truth; and tells the truth, or creates. In this action he is brilliant; not the privilege of a favorite here and there, but the wholesome condition of every man. At its core, it is progressive. The book, the college, the art school, the institution of any kind, stops with some past expression of genius. This is good, they say, ? let's stick to this. They nail me. They look back and not forward. But the genius looks forward: the eyes of man are placed in the forehead, not in the back:. (540). 215–225.