Essays

By the 1840s Ralph Waldo Emerson had become the central voice of a distinctly American way of thinking. Having left the Unitarian pulpit over a crisis of belief, he preached instead from the lecture platform and the printed page, the lay prophet of a New England movement — Transcendentalism — that held the individual soul to be in direct contact with the divine. This volume gathers the mature distillation of that vision: the complete Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844).

Here is “Self-Reliance,” the most famous thing Emerson ever wrote — “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” — with its ringing call to refuse conformity and follow the gleam of one’s own mind. Here too are “Compensation,” which insists the universe is morally exact and pays every act its due; “The Over-Soul,” which names the unity beneath all souls; “Circles,” which makes every truth provisional; and, in the Second Series, “The Poet,” “Experience,” and “Nature.” Twenty-one essays in all, restoring the short verse mottoes Emerson set at the head of each.

Emerson does not argue like a philosopher; he proceeds by luminous, oracular assertion, building paragraphs of hammer-blow sentences each meant to lodge in the memory and detonate later. More quoted than almost any other writing in American letters, these essays gave the culture its deepest article of faith — the sovereignty of the individual conscience — and shaped Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and Nietzsche in turn.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on Emerson, Transcendentalism, and his oracular style, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.