Selected Journals, 1820-1842

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lawrence Rosenwald (Editor)

When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. Yet his most remarkable literary creation-his journals- remained unpublished. Begun when he was a precocious Harvard junior of 16 and continued without significant lapse for almost 60 years, Emerson's journals were his life's work. They were the starting point for virtually everything in his celebrated essays, lectures, and poems; a "Savings Bank," in which his occasional insights began to cohere and yield interest; a commonplace book, in which he gathered the choicest anecdotes, ideas, and phrases from his voracious and wide-ranging reading; and a fascinating diary in the ordinary sense of the term. It would be a hundred years after his death before these intimate records would appear in print in their entirety, and they are still, at over three million words, among the least known and least available of Emerson's writings. The journals reveal what Emerson called "the infinitude of the private man"-by turns whimsical, incisive, passionate, curious, and candid-in astonishing new ways.
With "Selected Journals 1820-1842" and its companion volume "Selected Journals 1841-1877," The Library of America presents the most ample and comprehensive nonspecialist edition of Emerson's great work ever published-one that retains the original order in which he composed his thoughts and preserves the dramatic range of his unique style in long, uninterrupted passages, but without the daunting critical apparatus of the 16-volume scholarly edition.
This volume begins with Emerson's first journal entry, on January 25, 1820, in a homemade booklet he titled "The Wide World," and follows him through his early years at Harvard College and the Divinity School, his ordination as a Unitarian minister, his marriage to Ellen Tucker and her untimely death, his fateful decision to leave the ministry, and his travels in England and on the Continent. It offers an irreplaceable perspective on the intellectual currents of the day-the emergence of Transcendentalism; the furor over Emerson's "Divinity School Address"; the founding of "The Dial"; experiments in communal living at Fruitlands and Brook Farm-and intimate sketches of Emerson's friends and contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others.
Edited by Lawrence Rosenwald-Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American Literature at Wellesley College and author of "Emerson and the Art of the Diary"-each volume includes a 16-page portfolio of images of Emerson and his contemporaries, a note on the selections, extensive notes, biographical sketches, a chronology, and an index.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Diary, Classics, Biography

992 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Ralph 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.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read that the essential Emerson is in the Journals, that he used his writings there for the bedrock ideas of his essays and lectures. I can see how that's true. In these Journals he doesn't record only daily events. He reflects and in those reflections he wrote down as part of daily routine is the philosophy he lived by and which he thought we all should live by. There are events of course. He'd record the visit of someone like Margaret Fuller, or relate an anecdote abut Bronson Alcott or Thoreau. And he loved to write about the cute things his son Waldo would say and do. But he was most interested in recording what he thought. So here, embedded in daily journal entries are ideas on such topics as natural history or the importance of solitude or the value of reading. And much more. To be sure there are landmarks in the Emerson personal narrative: he begins to doubt his faith and leaves the ministry, his beloved Ellen dies and he later exhumes her, he remarries, has his delightful son Waldo, he enjoys friendship and interesting dialogue with Thoreau and Alcott, or he meets Thomas Carlyle, takes a hike with Nathaniel Hawthorne. But the beating heart of the Journals is what he observed and recorded about human nature and the insights into every fact of the world around him and how we can best live in it. This first volume of the Selected Journals is a rewarding trip, a book whose reading increases the appetite but at the same time whose flavors encourage the reader to go slowly because there's much to taste.

[christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transcendentalism is cringe, but Emerson's greatness is undeniable.

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first volume of Emerson's journals took about 300 pages until they became a little more interesting, some point after the death of his first wife. It was tragic how he never got over Ellen, mentioning her often over the years, even when he was remarried and had children. The episode where he exhumed her corpse was a little disturbing...what was the point of digging the body up? At any rate, I use the word "interesting" loosely, as I was constantly dozing off while trying to read through the entries. There's only so much sermonizing that I can take before I start to feel a little churlish. So yes, I skimmed a bit here and there, in search of those "few golden sentences" of which Emerson wrote(below);and, while there were a few nuggets of wisdom, there wasn't much of a payoff for 800 pages.

It was neat to get his perspective on events, places, and people of the time or in the then-recent past, like his critique of Hawthorne and his travels to Europe. I have the second volume in my reading stack and I'll give it a chance, but I might be less patient the second time around.

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It is very seldom that a man is truly alone. He needs to retire as much from his solitude as he does from society into very loneliness. While I am reading & writing in my chamber I am not alone though there is nobody there. There is one means of procuring solitude which to me & I apprehend to all men is effectual, & that is to go to the window & at look at the stars. If they do not startle you & call you off from vulgar matters I know not what will. I sometimes think that the atmosphere was made transparent with this design to give mean in the heavenly bodies a perpetual admonition of God & superior destiny. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! When I spoke of this to G.A.S. he said, that he had sought in his chamber a place for prayer & could not find one till he cast his eye upon the stars.--

There are few experiences in common life more mortifying & disagreeable than “the foolish face of praise”—the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face & make the most disagreeable sensation—a sensation of rebuke & warning which no young man ought to suffer more than once.

The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought between the speaker & the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts no words would be suffered.

What is good to make me happy is not however good to make me write. Life too near paralyses Art.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages.

Dependence is the only poverty.