Letters and Social Aims
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~100,000 words · 485 passages
Cite this work
- APARalph Waldo Emerson. (n.d.). Letters and Social Aims. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/ralph-waldo-emerson/letters-and-social-aims
- MLARalph Waldo Emerson. "Letters and Social Aims." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/ralph-waldo-emerson/letters-and-social-aims.
- ChicagoRalph Waldo Emerson. Letters and Social Aims. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/ralph-waldo-emerson/letters-and-social-aims.
What it is about
Late essays on poetry, eloquence, persuasion and immortality.
Context and history
Published in 1875, when Emerson's memory was already failing; it was partly assembled by his daughter Ellen with James Elliot Cabot's help. Worth knowing: it is not a book he put together in full possession of his powers.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
PERSIAN POETRY . . . . . . . 211 INSPIRATION 239 GREATNESS 267 IMMORTALITY 287 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. POETRY AND IMAGINATION. THE perception of matter is made the common- sense, and for cause. This was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn the homely laws of fire and water ; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common-sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this tyrannic necessity. The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark of all the valid minds, — • of -<Esop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. The common-sense wliich does not meddle with the absolute, but takes things at their word, — things as they appear, — believes in the existence of mat ter, not because we can touch it, or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the uni verse does not jest with us, but is in earnest, — is the house of health and life. In spite of all the joys of poets and the joys of saints, the most im aginative and abstracted person never makes, with impunity, the least mistake in this particular, —
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