Education By Ralph Waldo Emerson Summary

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Composition: Analysis In the selection of literary terms provided recently, they have been focusing on figurative language terms such as similes, metaphors, hyperboles, personification, etc. In the essay “Education” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, there is a lot of figurative language being used to advance his essay. In Emerson’s essay, there are varying uses of figurative language from the metaphor, to the simile, to personification. First, his use of the personification. When he states that, “Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions” (Emerson) he is using personification. He is giving Nature the feeling of liking analogies and not liking repetitions. Emerson is always mentioning nature in this essay about education. The quote means that our human nature likes things that are different but connected at the same time and not things that are repeated over and over again. This is the same for education. He may feel that students don’t like things that are repeated over and over again, but are…show more content…
He is also understating the largeness of Nature, which is everywhere, but saying “less large.” The use of personification is effective because it compares how the brain learns to an everyday thing such as eating. The use of understatement is effective because it takes something as grand as Nature and has it seem as something that is par or ordinary. It grabs the reader’s attention making him focus on the absurdity of the sentence. He is trying to say that any mechanical method will not work in learning, and that learning must be entrusted in something as large as nature, meaning that education is really
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