Essays, Second Series

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Pages: 103

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Read by Bob Neufeld · 6 h 35 min · 9 parts

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The Poet
59:48
Experience
60:24
Character
39:36
Manners
54:23
Gifts
10:15
Nature
44:08
Politics
36:05
Nominalist and Realist
37:28
New England Reformers
52:57

Essays, Second Series (1844) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Artistic expression and everyday conduct stand side by side in Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1844 essay collection. Its opening essay, The Poet, challenges the idea that taste can be measured by familiarity with paintings and sculpture. Emerson asks what gives an artist the power to express experiences that other people struggle to put into words, linking poetry with thought, character and the visible world.

The collection also turns toward social life. A passage on manners uses anecdotes about Mr. Fox to consider generosity, courtesy and the claims of fashionable society. Emerson takes social polish seriously while testing it against kindness and personal worth. Alongside these concerns, the contents include essays on experience, gifts, nature, politics and reformers in New England. Readers interested in nineteenth-century American prose will find arguments that move between large philosophical ideas and small incidents of human behavior.

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity.