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The Annotated Emerson
The #1 essayist and pure prose stylist in U.S. literature is on grand display in this lavish edition of essays, poems, and passages from Emerson's voluminous journals. The neophyte entering the Emersonian universe, as opposed to the scholar, is best served by Mikics's careful annotations and cogent commentary surrounding these selections, though even the most knowledgeable scholar would benefit.
- Publishers Weekly
In his writing, Emerson favored fire imagery, and his own fiery intellect brightens every page of The Annotated Emerson, a wonderful new collection, meticulously annotated by David Mikics...
In the lush pages of The Annotated Emerson readers will find that fire still warm, able to illuminate and sear.
- Daniel Dyer - Cleveland Plain Dealer
- Publishers Weekly
In his writing, Emerson favored fire imagery, and his own fiery intellect brightens every page of The Annotated Emerson, a wonderful new collection, meticulously annotated by David Mikics...
In the lush pages of The Annotated Emerson readers will find that fire still warm, able to illuminate and sear.
- Daniel Dyer - Cleveland Plain Dealer
576 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 2012
19 people are currently reading
188 people want to read
About the author
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3,412 books5,358 followersRalph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol. (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did Henry David Thoreau.
The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.
The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 18, 2019
For my time, this is the way to experience Ralph Waldo Emerson- via an all inclusive annotated volume. Lots of photos, and all the unusual words in the essays and poetry are explained. Historical context given. Writers who influenced Emerson are covered. Makes Emerson more palatable because his writing becomes easier to understand. Want to tackle "Nature" and "Self-Reliance" -- with this volume, you can.
June 2, 2014
This book is a geeky joy! Yes, I have a whole shelf of Emerson already. Yes, I bought this book. Yes, I am glad! Mikics includes big fat footnotes that add context to Emerson’s own text – biographical detail, perspective from news of the day, references to others that are (sometimes subtly) quoted by RWE… I am not a fan of footnotes that are just citations, but notes that explain something, that make the primary text even better – well, that’s somethin’! I am squashing together my other volumes on the shelf to make room for this one.
November 19, 2025
I bought this for a rereading of Nature after doing some research online as to what the best available edition is, since a search on the web is typically met with prints of dubious quality and can turn out to be a crap shoot. It's a good thing I did, because this is now one of the most beautifully bound, referenced, and illustrated books I own, with a wealth of bibliographical and archival information.
Want to read
January 13, 2012Harvard's response to Yale Press edition of annotated eds. of Throreau's journals, "I to Myself," and "Walden." If it's anywhere near as good as those two books -- and it sounds like it is -- then this should be a real treat for the universally recognized and little read RWE.
May 25, 2018
Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his birthday May 25
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
A tireless champion of the abolition of slavery, of equal rights for women, and of those of Native Americans, Ralph Waldo Emerson began a long American tradition of looking to the East for spiritual guidance and inspiration, shaped by his study of Vedanta, though as he noted the Transcendentalism with which he is associated is a term coined by Kant in his critiqe of Locke's skepticism; " by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself".
His philiosophy reawakened America's values and built the groundwork for what later became ecology (together with his friend and protege Henry David Thoreau, and later his encounter with a young John Muir in Yosemite), feminism (through his collaborative work with fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller ), and the Civil War itself. A case could be argued that Harvard Divinity School where he gathered his initial followers as a reformist group of Unitarian clergy was among the origins of the civil rights movement of the 1950's led by Martin Luther King and the multifaceted social revolutions of the hippie 1960's.
His influence on Friedrich Nietzsche is incalculable; his great themes of fate, power, and the failings of Christianity echo through Nietzsche's works, completing a circle which begins with the impact of Kant and Goethe on Emerson. His friendships with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and later with Nathaniel Hawthorne also inform his work; he is a very literary philosopher. His support of Walt Whitman ensured that Leaves of Grass reached a wide and enduring readership. He greatly influenced Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, which also sought to bring Oriental texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tao te Ching into the same Neoplatonist-Kantian tent with those of the West.
The Annotated Emerson edited by David Mikics provides very helpful context for understanding this foundational American philosopher. The enduring leagcy and transformational power of his ideas is beyond question; but what is most important and useful to us both now and in the future is the praxis or action of his values. Liberty must be reborn whenever our civilization is under threat of extinction, whenever tyranny attempts to replace democracy, whenever equality falls under the shadow of the lash, whenever truth, justice, and the American Way are at risk. Sometimes the world must be renewed through action.
Yet how easy it is to let our passion to confront evil be turned into anger and violence, to allow the brokenness of the world to corrupt and subvert our best intentions. Thus our enemies seek to divide us where we should be united, to steal our power by replacing love with hate, for as love makes us strong in common cause and able to resist oppression, fear and hate make us easy to control and use. Tyrants want to steal our souls. Here too Emerson may help us, for he understood that the battle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world is an outward reflection of the struggle between good and evil in the human heart, and that it must be waged daily and through our every interaction with others. Its why he began his work by rejecting the Protestant doctrine that faith means it doesn't matter what one does, and forged in its place a theology of values in action and a connectedness with the natural world and other people.
I can think of few better examples of resistence to tyranny than the image of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Paris during the celebrations following the revolution of 1848, on which he based his abolitionist political and social ideology which led to the Civil War, contemplating the trees that were cut down to form barricades, wondering "if the Revolution was worth the trees".
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
A tireless champion of the abolition of slavery, of equal rights for women, and of those of Native Americans, Ralph Waldo Emerson began a long American tradition of looking to the East for spiritual guidance and inspiration, shaped by his study of Vedanta, though as he noted the Transcendentalism with which he is associated is a term coined by Kant in his critiqe of Locke's skepticism; " by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself".
His philiosophy reawakened America's values and built the groundwork for what later became ecology (together with his friend and protege Henry David Thoreau, and later his encounter with a young John Muir in Yosemite), feminism (through his collaborative work with fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller ), and the Civil War itself. A case could be argued that Harvard Divinity School where he gathered his initial followers as a reformist group of Unitarian clergy was among the origins of the civil rights movement of the 1950's led by Martin Luther King and the multifaceted social revolutions of the hippie 1960's.
His influence on Friedrich Nietzsche is incalculable; his great themes of fate, power, and the failings of Christianity echo through Nietzsche's works, completing a circle which begins with the impact of Kant and Goethe on Emerson. His friendships with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and later with Nathaniel Hawthorne also inform his work; he is a very literary philosopher. His support of Walt Whitman ensured that Leaves of Grass reached a wide and enduring readership. He greatly influenced Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, which also sought to bring Oriental texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tao te Ching into the same Neoplatonist-Kantian tent with those of the West.
The Annotated Emerson edited by David Mikics provides very helpful context for understanding this foundational American philosopher. The enduring leagcy and transformational power of his ideas is beyond question; but what is most important and useful to us both now and in the future is the praxis or action of his values. Liberty must be reborn whenever our civilization is under threat of extinction, whenever tyranny attempts to replace democracy, whenever equality falls under the shadow of the lash, whenever truth, justice, and the American Way are at risk. Sometimes the world must be renewed through action.
Yet how easy it is to let our passion to confront evil be turned into anger and violence, to allow the brokenness of the world to corrupt and subvert our best intentions. Thus our enemies seek to divide us where we should be united, to steal our power by replacing love with hate, for as love makes us strong in common cause and able to resist oppression, fear and hate make us easy to control and use. Tyrants want to steal our souls. Here too Emerson may help us, for he understood that the battle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world is an outward reflection of the struggle between good and evil in the human heart, and that it must be waged daily and through our every interaction with others. Its why he began his work by rejecting the Protestant doctrine that faith means it doesn't matter what one does, and forged in its place a theology of values in action and a connectedness with the natural world and other people.
I can think of few better examples of resistence to tyranny than the image of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Paris during the celebrations following the revolution of 1848, on which he based his abolitionist political and social ideology which led to the Civil War, contemplating the trees that were cut down to form barricades, wondering "if the Revolution was worth the trees".
May 2, 2020
I have been reading swatches of Emerson here and there for upwards of thirty years now, and I finally committed to a more disciplined reading of his work by selecting this piece. For whatever reason, Emerson's verbose intellectualizing didn't resonate with me as much as it has previously. I'm sure it's me, though, and not Emerson, especially as the annotations tell me that Nietzsche was a big fan.
I'm sure I'm just a philistine.
I just can't shake this picture I have of an elite, well-provided-for brahmin writing for an audience he knows will fawn.
But I've felt the same way from time to time about writers such as Eliot, Pound, and Faulkner. I sometimes think that these literary giants appealed to each other and a small group of literary elite, and we're all just the intellectual 99%ers hoping that by admiring them and by studying them, we can become a part of their elite group and lord it over all the other intellectual wannabes.
So it turns out that I've failed to fetch you at first, Uncle Waldo. But I will keep encouraged. Missing you in this place, I'll search another, as I'm sure you're waiting for me somewhere, sounding your barbaric yawp of yada, yada, yada.
I'm sure I'm just a philistine.
I just can't shake this picture I have of an elite, well-provided-for brahmin writing for an audience he knows will fawn.
But I've felt the same way from time to time about writers such as Eliot, Pound, and Faulkner. I sometimes think that these literary giants appealed to each other and a small group of literary elite, and we're all just the intellectual 99%ers hoping that by admiring them and by studying them, we can become a part of their elite group and lord it over all the other intellectual wannabes.
So it turns out that I've failed to fetch you at first, Uncle Waldo. But I will keep encouraged. Missing you in this place, I'll search another, as I'm sure you're waiting for me somewhere, sounding your barbaric yawp of yada, yada, yada.
January 31, 2013
A wonderful and representative compilation of Emerson's writings in a very handsome volume, complete with a profusion of gorgeously rendered illustrations. Mikics' annotations are very useful for the Emerson novice and scholar alike. My only caveats were: 1. the apparent random placement of some of the illustrations throughout the volume, 2. a (common) misidentification of the portrait of Lidian Emerson and her son (Edward, not Waldo).
December 23, 2012
Beautiful book, a work of fine craftsmanship. Wish I owned this instead of just borrowing it from my library, it's that pretty. Thoroughly annotated but would benefit from a bit of expert exposition and commentary. Emerson, unabridged, in all his poetic glory.
May 11, 2013
a book to come back to again and again.
October 15, 2015
I didn't find the annotations as helpful as I expected.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews