What was it about Ralph Waldo Emerson and fire? On May 16, 1850, the steamer America caught fire while transporting him from Buffalo to Cleveland. The captain coaxed the vessel safely to shore, and that night, Emerson spoke in Empire Hall about England. He would lecture here eight more times.
Six years later, following an appearance in Hudson, he stepped outside to watch a cheese factory burn. Then in January 1863, a fire devastated the America Hotel in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Emerson escaped, losing only his train ticket and some toiletries.
And on July 24, 1872, a fire severely damaged his home in Concord, Mass., although his study and its priceless manuscripts survived, including the journals that "are one of the most singular and bountiful works in American literature," as Phillip Lopate notes.
In his writing, Emerson favored fire imagery, and his own fiery intellect brightens every page of "The Annotated Emerson," a wonderful new collection, meticulously annotated by David Mikics, a professor of English at the University of Houston.
Included are Emerson's best-known essays -- "Nature," "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," "Self-Reliance" -- and lesser known gems such as "Circles," "Experience" and "Fate."
Present, too, is a piece about William Shakespeare, of whom Emerson wrote "His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see." Early in 1860, Emerson praised John Brown, hanged only weeks earlier for his Harpers Ferry raid, for endeavoring "to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor."
The editor also includes some poems, among them "The Sphinx," "The Snow-Storm" and, of course, "Concord Hymn" with its famous line, "And fired the shot heard round the world." In 1837, Concord residents first sang this hymn at a Revolutionary War memorial; among the performers was Henry David Thoreau.
The ideas of Emerson, who lived from 1803 to 1882, still seem fresh, vivid -- and right. He opposed slavery; he abhorred the abuse of American Indians; he advocated for a broad, liberal education. He revered the human mind. He challenged the conventional and celebrated the revolutionary. He deplored materialism. He exhibits, in Lopate's phrase, a "questing, nondogmatic sanity."
In his aphoristic, urbane style, Emerson also crafted some of the most insightful, quotable and lovely lines written in North America:
"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language." "Each age . . . must write its own books." "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." "The first wealth is health." And in a poem: "Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind."
Emerson noted that the essayist Montaigne "has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for." Of his deceased friend Thoreau, he wrote, "No truer American existed." And friend Margaret Fuller "kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without crossing or entangling one."
Mikics includes many photographs, maps and drawings, and he mostly adheres to his stated goal of accommodating both general and scholarly readers. So he tucks in definitions of "sluggard" and "desultory." He tracks numerous cross-references to Emerson's letters and journals, and to parallels in the works of other writers.
There are long entries on the Greek poet Pindar and phrenologist George Combe. Occasionally Mikics slips in something playful, noting how sportswriters took "the shot heard round the world" to describe Bobby Thomson's 1951 pennant-clinching homer.
For decades, Emerson traveled the lecture circuit, an intellectual celebrity, but he did not always dazzle. On June 21, 1859, a Plain Dealer critic complained that he would just as soon "see a perpendicular coffin behind a lecture-desk as Emerson."
But such grousing was rare. The Boston Post gushed that Emerson "smokes, he sparkles, . . . he goes off in fiery eruptions like a volcano." And in the lush pages of "The Annotated Emerson" readers will find that fire still warm, able to illuminate and sear.
Daniel Dyer is a critic in Hudson, Ohio.