Essays — Second Series

Essays: Second Series (1844) is the companion volume to Emerson's better-known First Series of three years earlier. It contains The Poet, Experience, Character, Manners, Gifts, Nature (a different essay from the 1836 pamphlet), Politics, Nominalist and Realist, and the address New England Reformers. Several of them are among Emerson's finest sustained essays.

The Poet is the founding American statement of the poet's vocation — and the essay that Walt Whitman read and answered with Leaves of Grass. Experience is Emerson's most sustained reckoning with the limits of his own earlier optimism, written in the year after the death of his five-year-old son Waldo.