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WorkRalph Waldo Emerson

Letters and Social Aims

Essays on poetry, quotation and the comic, put together after a house fire, from Emerson's papers, by his daughter, his son and a friend.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson286 passages held

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First published
(aged 72)
Original language
English

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Overview

A British publisher planned an unauthorized edition of Emerson's scattered writings, and this book began as his answer: an authorized collection. He was by then in his late sixties, worn down by a course of lectures on philosophy at Harvard and by work on Parnassus, an anthology of poems he was compiling, and his memory had begun to fail. The volume occupied him until July 1872, when fire nearly destroyed his house in Concord. After that the work passed to others. James Elliot Cabot, a Boston philosopher and friend who later became his literary executor, went through the papers with Emerson's daughter Ellen and his son Edward, and between them they built the book out of lecture manuscripts, drafts and essays first printed as far back as the early 1840s. "Poetry and Imagination" argues that all thinking works by analogy, the mind grasping one thing by seeing it as another, and that the poet does on purpose what everyone does without noticing. "Quotation and Originality" holds that every writer borrows, that language itself is a store of other people's coinages, and that originality lies in what a mind makes of what it takes. "Persian Poetry" introduces American readers to Hafiz and Saadi, the medieval poets of Shiraz. "Immortality" closes the book. James R. Osgood and Company of Boston published it in December 1875, with 1876 on the title page. The Harvard edition of Emerson's works, which reissued it in 2010, treats the text as the joint work of Emerson, his two children and Cabot.

Key concepts

What does Emerson mean when he says all thinking is analogizing?

He means the mind never grasps a thing in isolation but always by seeing it as something else. Emerson takes the model from botany's idea of metamorphosis, in which one bud can become leaf, petal or fruit. Thought moves the same way, passing an idea through new forms. That is why he holds that all people are so far poets, and why a fresh comparison can teach more than a proof.

What is the honest halfness at the root of the comic?

It is Emerson's definition of what makes something funny: a loud promise of performance followed by its absence, a part presenting itself as the whole. Animals and plants are never comic, because they do the whole of what they are. Only people pretend. Laughter is the intellect noticing the gap between the pretension and the deed, without pain or danger, which would make it tragic instead.

Why does Emerson say a poet must choose inspiration or silence?

Because the worth of a poem depends on the height from which it is written. Emerson describes moments in which a person is lifted to a platform from which they look past the senses to moral and spiritual truth. The rule of the muses' court is that the poet reports only from there. Verse written without that lift may be skilful, but it is only filling time.

What does Emerson mean by a person's resources?

He means the powers a person carries that no situation fully uses up. Men are made of potences, he writes: we are magnets in an iron globe, with keys to all doors, each sailing by a private chart of which no copy exists. The world answers to whoever touches it rightly, so being resourceful is less a talent than a way of meeting circumstances as openings.

Themes of the book

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

Seeing one thing as another

Where do new thoughts come from, if every word and image has been used before? Emerson answers that the mind thinks by analogy and borrows by nature, and that originality is in the use.

All thinking is analogizing, Emerson writes in "Poetry and Imagination": the mind grasps one thing by seeing it as another, and the poet only does on purpose what everyone does without noticing. He would rather have a good analogy than the vote of Kant or Plato. "Quotation and Originality" turns the same observation on authorship. All minds quote, the originals are not original, and next to the author of a good sentence stands its first quoter. The essays on Persian poetry and on inspiration ask what makes a borrowed form live again.

  • poetry
  • imagination
  • originality
  • inspiration
  • creativity
  • symbolism
  • language
  • literature
  • tradition
  • authorship
  • genius
  • perception

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Manners, laughter and a person's resources

What makes people graceful, funny or resourceful in company? Emerson treats each as a sign of how much of a person is actually present.

"Social Aims" takes foreign mockery of American manners as a lesson rather than an insult, and holds that self-command is the main elegance. "The Comic" finds the root of every joke in an honest halfness: something loudly promised and not performed, a part pretending to be the whole, which is why nature is never funny until people appear. "Resources" answers the feeling of being trapped by holding that every person has keys to all doors and sails by a private chart no one else has.

  • manners
  • comedy
  • conversation
  • character
  • culture
  • education
  • human potential
  • attention
  • courage

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Greatness and immortality

Is anything in a person built to last? Emerson approaches greatness and immortality as questions no argument can settle and no honest mind can drop.

"Greatness" describes a prize everyone is aiming at, in whose pursuit each person's success helps rather than hinders the rest. "Immortality" closes the book by admitting that faith in a life beyond death cannot be proved by syllogisms: every argument for it vanishes when someone tries to ground it. Emerson still calls himself a better believer than the arguments allow, and holds that the question is approached not through literature or theology but only through rare integrity.

  • immortality
  • greatness
  • religion
  • truth
  • virtue
  • human nature
  • time
  • unity

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Within this work

passages held
286
distinct concepts
541
by passages held, corpus-wide
#261

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: “imagination” and “poetry”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
imaginationpoetry16
naturepoetry13
creativityinspiration9
creativitynature6
inspirationpoetry5
creativitypoetry4
imaginationnature4
creativityoriginality3
originalitypoetry3
creativityimagination2
educationimagination2
inspirationnature2
creativityeducation1
creativityimmortality1
educationinspiration1
educationpoetry1
immortalitynature1
immortalitypoetry1
natureoriginality1

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

    Darker than its predecessor of 1841, and the book of "Experience" and "The Poet". It closes what is usually counted Emerson's most fertile decade, which had begun with Nature.

     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 you are here 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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