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WorkRalph Waldo Emerson

Essays: Second Series

Essays written after the death of Emerson's five-year-old son, in which his confidence meets moods, surfaces and loss.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson237 passages held

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First published
(aged 41)
Original language
English

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Overview

In January 1842 Emerson's first son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever, aged five. The essay at the center of this book, "Experience," was written out of that loss, and unlike most of his published work it was never a lecture first. Its subject is how little even grief reaches him. The death of his son, he writes, felt like the loss of a beautiful estate, and he could bring it no closer to himself than that. From this he builds an account of life as a run of moods and surfaces, each one coloring the world while it lasts, with no standpoint outside them from which to see things whole. Set beside the confident unity of Nature, eight years earlier, it reads as a revision. The book's other famous essay looks outward. "The Poet" asks for an American writer who would treat the raw material of the country — its stump politics, its fisheries, Oregon and Texas — as fit matter for verse; eleven years later Walt Whitman sent Emerson the first edition of Leaves of Grass. "Politics" treats the state as a temporary arrangement that better people will need less of, and "Nominalist and Realist" lets two opposite philosophies each have their say without choosing between them. James Munroe published the book in Boston in October 1844, and John Chapman, a London publisher who had asked Emerson for unpublished work he could copyright, brought it out in England the following month.

Key concepts

What are the lords of life in Experience?

They are the seven forces Emerson says govern how life is actually lived: Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality and Subjectiveness. He calls them threads on the loom of time. Each limits what a person can see or do, from the temperament they are born with to the moods that follow one another, and he declines to put them in any final order.

What does Emerson mean by temperament?

Temperament is the inborn make-up that sets how much of life a person can take in. Emerson calls it the iron wire on which the beads of mood are strung: moods change, but the wire decides their range. It is one of the hardest admissions of this book, since it seems to limit how far any teaching, or any self-reliance, can change someone.

Who are the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer?

They are the three kinds of person Emerson finds in every age, standing for the love of truth, the love of good and the love of beauty. The Sayer is the poet. All three are equal, he insists, and the poet is not lesser for only speaking, because words are also actions, and actions a kind of words.

What is the quarrel between nominalists and realists?

It is the old dispute over whether general ideas, like justice or mankind, are real or only names for many particular things. Emerson grants that the realists had a good deal of reason, since general ideas are what we live by. But he lets the other side speak too: we only ever meet particular persons, and each of them is partial. The essay refuses to choose.

Why does Emerson think character makes the state unnecessary?

Because the state exists to do by force what good people would do on their own. In "Politics" he argues that laws follow the character of citizens rather than lead it, so as wisdom grows, the need for government shrinks. The wise man, he writes, is the state: he needs no army, fort or navy, since he loves men too well to need compelling.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Moods, surfaces and a loss that does not reach

Can anyone see life whole, or only through whatever mood they happen to be in? After his son's death, Emerson doubts that even grief gets beneath the surface.

In "Experience" Emerson writes that his son's death felt like the loss of a beautiful estate and no more, and that grief taught him only how shallow it is. From there he describes life as a train of moods, each a coloured lens, strung on the iron wire of temperament. Objects slip through the fingers when held hardest. Against his own earlier confidence he names seven lords of life, illusion and surface among them, and concludes that we live amid surfaces. "Nominalist and Realist" adds that every person sees only a part.

  • experience
  • perception
  • human nature
  • attention
  • intuition
  • knowledge
  • truth
  • individuality
  • agency
  • moral psychology

Enter a dialogue

The poet who names the world

What does a poet do that the rest of us cannot? Emerson's answer is that the poet gives things their names, and so sets everyone free of the old ones.

Emerson's poet is the Sayer, beside the Knower and the Doer, the person who turns what all perceive into speech. Every word was once a picture, so language is fossil poetry, and the poet's task is to make it new. A poem comes not from metre but from a metre-making argument, a thought alive enough to make its own form. Poets are liberating gods because they loosen symbols that others take literally. He asks for an American poet able to sing the country's raw material, still unsung, from stump speeches to Oregon.

  • poetry
  • symbolism
  • imagination
  • art
  • aesthetics
  • beauty
  • creativity
  • genius
  • nature

Enter a dialogue

Character, manners and the state

What actually moves other people, and what does society owe to laws and parties? Emerson trusts the force of a person's character more than any institution built to replace it.

Character, for Emerson, is a reserved force that works by presence, without means, and the essays on manners and gifts apply the same measure to social life: the gentleman is a man of truth, and the only real gift is a portion of oneself. "Politics" draws the conclusion for government. Every actual state is corrupt, the less government the better, and the appearance of character makes the state unnecessary. The reformers of New England get the same treatment, each with one plan to save the world, and each partial.

  • character
  • moral character
  • manners
  • political philosophy
  • social reform
  • generosity
  • wealth
  • social class
  • social status
  • fashion
  • moral influence
  • justice
  • virtue
  • individualism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
237
distinct concepts
431
by passages held, corpus-wide
#315

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “nature”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
aestheticsnature10
naturepoetry8
charactervirtue6
aestheticsbeauty5
beautynature5
human naturenature4
beautypoetry3
characternature3
creativitypoetry3
aestheticscharacter2
aestheticshuman nature2
creativitynature2
aestheticscreativity1
beautycharacter1
creativityvirtue1
human naturepoetry1
naturevirtue1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1836 Nature

    Emerson's first book, and the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward. He signed his name to it only when it was reprinted in 1849, in a volume alongside his addresses and lectures.

     EN
  2. 1841 Essays: First Series

    Lectures reworked into essays; with the Second Series of 1844, the book on which Emerson's standing as a philosopher mainly rests.

     EN
  3. 1844 Essays: Second Series you are here EN
  4. 1849 Addresses and Lectures

    Emerson's public speeches of 1837 to 1844, given to college societies and Boston lecture audiences. The two Harvard addresses here are the best-known occasions of his early career.

     EN
  5. 1850 Representative Men

    Emerson's one book built of portraits of other minds, published after his lecture tour of England in 1847–48 — the journey that later produced English Traits (1856).

     EN
  6. 1860 The Conduct of Life

    One of Emerson's most successful books in its day, and the last collection he published for ten years.

     EN
  7. 1870 Society and Solitude

    Ten years after The Conduct of Life, and continuing its turn toward practical life. It appeared in the same year that Harvard asked Emerson to lecture on philosophy.

     EN
  8. 1875 Letters and Social Aims

    Begun to forestall an unauthorized London edition, and the last essay collection published in Emerson's lifetime. Its pieces range from essays of the early 1840s to lectures of his last working years.

     EN
  9. 1883 Lectures and Biographical Sketches

    Added to Emerson's collected works in the years just after his death; a later volume, Natural History of Intellect, followed in 1893.

     EN
  10. 1893 Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers

    The closest Emerson came to a treatise on the mind, published from his papers after his death and bound with essays from the start of his career.

     EN
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