Self Reliance

Emerson employs rhetorical questions to invite his audience to think about a particular topic. These questions have obvious answers, but they allow readers to actually state the answer themselves, rather than being told directly. This device subtly invites a reader to participate in the logic of an argument. For example, after stating, “Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations,” Emerson poses the rhetorical question, “Are they my poor?”. Disavowing charity for those in need is an unpopular opinion in society, but when asking the audience if he himself is directly responsible for individual men’s poverty, he expects that the audience will have to admit that he is not—they are not his poor. In this way, readers agree with crucial elements of Emerson’s perspective as he lays out his argument. Rhetorical questions are common devices in persuasive essays.

Epigraphs are quotations, phrases, poems, or other short excerpts that precede the body of a text. They illustrate themes or major ideas in the work that they head. Emerson includes several at the beginning of “Self-Reliance.” The first is the Latin phrase, “Ne te quaesiveris extra,” which means, “Do not seek outside of yourself.” The concept of self-reliance necessarily involves looking inward rather than outward. Emerson then reproduces the “Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune,” a short poem that suggests that every man has control over his own destiny. That type of control is one of the many benefits that Emerson suggests a person derives from embracing the inner self. Finally, he includes a four-line stanza of his own creation that encourages parents to immerse their children in nature, for there they will develop essential skills that will serve them well in their lives as free thinkers and self-reliant beings. Creatures in nature do not have the same confining institutions that humans have constructed for themselves. Emerson published some editions of this poem without this third epigraph.