The American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), also known by his middle name Waldo, was also the founder of the transcendentalist movement in the middle of the 19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans" and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master". 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. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."
