228). Emerson defines the office of the poet to be the work of liberation. His essay on the poet can be taken as defining a much larger social role for himself as a public intellectual, a role he had began to perform in August 1844 when he agreed to deliver an address, “Emancipation in the British West Indies,” at the Concord Court House to mark the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. Emerson had come to realize that his philosophy of self-reliance applied to all individuals, regardless of race. He returned to the lecture circuit with a new sense of his calling to influence the nature and direction of American culture, and slavery had no place in it. His lecturing increased, and soon he was traveling as far west as Ohio and as far north as Toronto. In 1846 he published Poems, his first volume of poetry. It included “Threnody,” an elegy for his son Waldo. Emerson had recovered from the boy’s death and found new purpose in his work.

With the publication of Essays, Essays: Second Series, and Poems, as well as his growing reputation as a lecturer, Emerson gained prominence as one of America’s leading men of letters. His reputation led Alexander Ireland to invite him in to lecture in England. Emerson agreed, and a series of lectures was planned from October 1847 to July 1848 that would take him throughout the industrial North, from Liverpool to Manchester, to Edinburgh, Scotland, and then on to London. Emerson’s lecture tour occurred during a time of political unrest in England. The Chartist movement was organizing the working class into a powerful political force, and many feared a social revolution. Emerson was sympathetic toward the movement. He was distressed by the poverty he witnessed in the Midland cities of Liverpool and Manchester, but he had also seen the high standard of living that these industrial centers had brought to the Midlands. He believed the working class deserved the same opportunities, but he criticized the “gross and bloody” methods of the Chartist leaders, whose demonstrations he felt were organized more to intimidate with the threat of force than to exhibit the justice of their cause. There was even greater political turmoil in France. The February Revolution of 1848 had ousted Louis Phillipe and established an interim government under the leadership of poet and statesman Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine. While in London during the following May, Emerson decided to make a trip to Paris during a break in his lecturing itinerary. He witnessed an uprising of union workers and socialists to overthrow Lamartine’s predominantly middle-class leadership and establish a more socialist democracy. Emerson was ap palled by such senseless violence and he became convinced that social reform must be accomplished by other means. How could the benefits of modern technology and a marketplace economy be made available to all members of society? Emerson set about answering this question in his lectures. In Nature he had looked for a way to translate his spiritual convictions into the language of natural science. Now he sought to translate his political convictions into the language of business and political economy.

On his return to America, Emerson threw himself into his work with renewed commitment. He decided to republish Nature in a collection that would include “The American Scholar” and his address to the Divinity School, along with some of his other early lectures. This volume Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849) presented the stages in thinking that led to the philosophy of self-reliance outlined in Essays. The following year he published Representative Men, a series of biographical sketches that Emerson believed exemplified the human potential for greatness. “Great men exist,” he reminded his readers, “that there may be greater men” (p. 295). Both of these volumes were designed to promote a culture of self-improvement that might help ameliorate class differences, but in America these differences were complicated by the existence of slavery, which presented the greatest barrier to progress in the United States. In 1850 Congress passed the compromise legislation that included the Fugitive Slave Law, which required northern states to cooperate fully in the arrest and return of those who had escaped enslavement and fled north to freedom.