Emerson's Essays: The Complete First & Second Series

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's language is his greatest achievement in terms of eloquence and understanding. It is consistent with everything else in the language after Shakespeare.Richard Bloom Here are some of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous pieces, including the call to "Self-Reliance," the thorny realizations of "Circles" and "Experience," and the revolutionary accomplishment of "Nature." Emerson, who has been our nation's most persuasive advocate for individualism, also admits the forces that American society exerts against individualism. While praising what he refers to as "the great and crescive self," he dramatizes and documents its vicissitudes. His numerous essays on history, art, politics, friendship, love, and other topics are also included here.

201 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2025

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol. (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did Henry David Thoreau.

The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.

Reviews

[John A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of everyone I have come across both in waking life and in the world of literature and authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most influential and highest aspiration for me. Some essays in this volume are ones where I've quoted out entire pages as they relate to my experiences and feelings. He represents the identity I've chosen to forge and is likely my own inheritance as an American (being a profound American thinker in one of the most revolutionary periods of American history). Ralph Waldo Emerson had been the beginning of my journey for self-exploration and self-understanding.

The amount of inspiration I achieve through him exceeds even my admiration for Carl Jung and the endless works I've gone into from Jungian psychology.

If there is any worldview and life I subscribe to, it is most profoundly Emerson.