Essays: First Series

Emerson's first collection of essays, published in 1841, contains 'Self-Reliance', with its call to trust your own thought, its warning that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and its claim that whoever would be a man must be a nonconformist. The other essays, on history, friendship, love, heroism, the Over-Soul and circles, share the same bright, aphoristic style.

Emerson was the central figure of American Transcendentalism, and these essays influenced Thoreau, Whitman and even Nietzsche, who read them again and again. They are best read slowly, a page at a time, for sentences that stay with you; then go on to Walden.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a Boston minister who resigned his church in 1832 because he could no longer accept its rituals. After meeting Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth in Europe, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and became America's best-known lecturer and the centre of the Transcendentalist movement.

His essay Nature and his address The American Scholar urged Americans to think for themselves, and his Essays gave the world 'Self-Reliance'. He encouraged the young Thoreau, praised the unknown Whitman, and loved the Persian poets Hafez and Saadi, some of whose verses he translated into English.