Editor's Preface

In an early essay Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Today's readers might be tempted to say the same thing about Emerson himself. We can easily picture Henry David Thoreau sitting on the threshold of his cabin at Walden, looking out over the pond; or Walt Whitman, reclining on a hill, head resting in one hand; and even Emily Dickinson, in white, sequestered at Amherst. Emerson seems shadowy by comparison.

If we can picture him at all, he is standing behind the lectern in a church or lyceum, engaging an audience. That image says something essential about Emerson and the role he played in shaping American consciousness. Born in 1803, son of the pastor of the First Church of Boston, he also became a minister. A popular preacher and, later, a sought-after lecturer, Emerson delivered thousands of sermons and addresses. (His journal records that in one year alone he had eighty-eight speaking engagements.) He read and reread his lectures, fine-tuning them by noting which passages seemed to most interest his listeners (before ultimately revising them for publication as essays). One commentator observed:

It was the platform which determined Emerson's style. He was not a writer, but a speaker. On the platform his manner of speech was a living part of his words. The pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the searching, the balancing, the turning forward and back of the leaves of his lecture, and then the discovery the illumination, the gleam of lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of genius—all this was Emerson.

Emerson was a compelling speaker. Tall, with narrow sloping shoulders, retaining something of the look of a cleric even long after he had resigned from the clergy, his sharp, bright blue eyes engaged his listeners. What perhaps most impressed Emerson's audiences was that he himself seemed to manifest that same intense striving toward self-realization—the ideal of the complete, universal man—that he characterized in his lectures. Describing his friend and mentor, Thoreau once noted in his journal that there was "more of the divine realized in him than in any."

One reason for the difficulty in picturing Emerson is that it is the ideals put forward in his writings, not his persona, that have survived. Richard Whelan points out that more pages of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations are devoted to Emerson than to any other American. Many of these and other quotations are so familiar in fact that the author seems strangely transparent. Indeed, perhaps it is because the content and character of Emerson's thought is so basic to American consciousness and his influence so pervasive—that his individuality seems to recede from view. "The mind of Emerson," literary critic Harold Bloom put simply, "is the mind of America."

Generations of naturalists and environmentalists have been inspired by Emerson's vision of nature as both a physical manifestation of the divine spirit and a vehicle for union with the godhead. And our appreciation for nature, Emerson believes, reflects our own level of attainment. Nature is "to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. . . . We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God."

American poets and writers also have been moved by Emerson's vision, particularly his celebration of the individual and his plea to rely only on the inner self. For Whitman, Emerson's transcendentalism was a tonic: "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman confessed of his years before he wrote Leaves of Grass, "Emerson brought me to a boil." Traces of Emerson's transcendentalism can be seen in the work of poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and, more recently, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder.

The sheer optimism of Emerson's belief in human potential has also had broad cultural impact. The motivating force in the formation of the communal living experiment at Brook Farm (1841–1847) and other utopian communities, it also inspired Bronson Alcott to explore modes of alternative education in hopes of preserving into adulthood the true spirit that Emerson held to reside most purely in us as children. This notion would later affect the social philosopher Rudolf Steiner in forming his still-popular Waldorf schools.

One of Emerson's most potent influences was on the evolution of American religion and spirituality. Although the ideas expressed in his now-famous address at the Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838, were not revolutionary in purely theological terms, the compelling forcefulness of his expression of those ideas did cause a revolution of sorts. Historical Christianity, Emerson argued, had become defective, no longer offering the "doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration on the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love." By conceiving of the individual as intrinsically divine and by arguing that union with God was fundamentally an unmediated experience, Emerson had in effect left little room for the trappings, structure, and authority of organized religion. Indeed, American religion after Emerson has become increasingly secular and individual.

Emerson's eclectic interest in Asian and Middle Eastern spirituality encouraged other transcendentalist thinkers such as Thoreau, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller to sympathetically, sometimes even zealously, view these traditions as being as much their own as Christianity. The transcendentalist journal The Dial, founded by Emerson and others, would publish some of the first translations of Asian spiritual literature. American students of Hinduism and Buddhism have come to regard Emerson as a midwife of sorts, helping to give an American birth to these traditions.

Quite apart from Emerson's historic importance and influence, his writings contain some of the most memorable and beautifully articulated expressions of American thought. Perhaps it is from this vantage that Emerson's writings are best approached today.

In editing these writings into selections, I have tried to maintain something of the movement, the spiraling progression, of the original works. In addition, many of the selections stand on their own as brief meditations or inspirations. Drawn mostly from Emerson's early work, they include several essays and a key discourse, the "Divinity School Address." Though he is less frequently remembered as a poet, it is in this mode that Emerson is often most powerful and spiritually inspired, and several of Emerson's poems are here interspersed between the prose writings. Readers who make the small additional effort to accustom themselves to Emerson's poetic style will be richly rewarded. These selections do not include Emerson's later work (such as Representative Men and English Traits), in large part because those writings represent a more conservative, earthbound Emerson whose optimism and idealism about the human condition had been eroded by experiences in the all too real world, including the death of his son Waldo at age five. It is the early Emerson that remains most resonant—the power and building cadence of the last lines of "Self-Reliance" or the unbridled optimism that marks the closing paragraph of Nature:

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; and you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.

Peter Turner
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1994