Essays, Second Series

MP3 Audio CD. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a United States essayist, lecturer, and poet who headed the transcendentalist movement of the 19th century. He was a champion of individualism and a clairvoyant critic of the nullifying problems of society, and he dispersed his ideas through many printed essays and over 1,500 public lectures all around the United States.

Emerson finally relocated away from the spiritual and social convictions of his colleagues, devising and articulating the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Succeeding this book, he offered a speech with the title, The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. premeditated to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence".

Emerson penned many of his pivotal essays as lectures first and later revised them for publication. His first two sets of essays, Essays: First Series in 1841 and Essays: Second Series in 1844, signify the center of his ideal. They consist of the renowned essays, Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Along with, Nature, these essays formed the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most productive times.

Emerson authored on a lot of topics, never adopting permanent theoretical views, although progressing definite thoughts including individuality, freedom, the capability for humanity to recognize nearly everything, and the connection of the soul and the whole world. Emerson's character was highly theoretical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul". Emerson is among the many personages who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."

He endures to be one of the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his opuses has mostly inspired the thinkers, authors and poets that ensued him.