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Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here are all the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montai...
This major new volume offers a wide selection of works from Emerson's lectures and essays, including some that have seldom been reprinted such as "Quotation and Originality." In addition, leading Emerson critic Richard Poirier provides helpful annotations to a generous selection of poems, making this the most accessible edition of Emerson currently available.
A new, wide-ranging selection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most influential writings, this edition captures the essence of American Transcendentalism and illustrates the breadth of one of America’s greatest philosophers and poets. The writings featured here show Emerson as a protester against social conformity, a lover of nature, an activist for the rights of women and slaves, and a poet of great sensitivity. As explored in this volume, Emersonian thought is a unique blend of belief in individual freedom and in humility before the power of nature. “I become a transparent eyeball,” Emerson wrote in Nature, “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Written over a century ago, this passage is a striking example of the passion and originality of Emerson’s ideas, which continue to serve as a spiritual center and an ideological base for modern thought.
Emerson once wrote that the times we are born in are the best of times, if only we know what to do with them. His life spanned the crucial years of the nation's youth-the first tests of its shop-new Constitution; the explosive expansion into the untamed West; the great conflagration of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery; and the pains of rebirth and reconciliation that carried the United States to the eve of emerging as a world power. In the midst of this swirl of upheaval and change, Emerson turned his attention inward to the citizen, the individual, who must find his or her own inmost truth and bring that one fact of being to perfect expression in the world-must learn to believe ...
Emerson has maintained his place as one of the seminal figures in American history and literature. He was the acknowledged leader of the Transcendentalist movement. These essays discuss Emerson's life as well as women's rights, slavery and religion.
'Standing on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes,' Emerson wrote in Nature, his statement of the principles of transcendentalism. 'I become a transparent eyeball.' Nature, published in 1836 when Emerson was thirty-three, is collected here with his book of observations on the English people; a famous sermon against administering communion in church; a sketch of his step-grandfather; the eulogy he delivered at the funeral of his Concord friend and neighbor Henry David Thoreau; twenty-three poems; and addresses, lectures, and essays on such subjects as slavery, self-reliance, and organized Christianity's obsession with th...
Based largely on Emerson's unpublished manuscripts, journals, and letters.
Drawing primarily from previously unpublished manuscripts in the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, recent editions of Emerson's correspondence, journals and notebooks, sermons, and early lectures have provided authoritative texts that inspire readers to consider Emerson's place in American culture afresh. The two-volume Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, presents the texts of forty-eight complete and unpublished lectures delivered during the crucial middle years of Emerson's career. They offer his thoughts on New England and “Old World” history and culture, poetic theory, education, the history and uses of ...
"With the appearance of the tenth and final volume of Collected Works, a project fifty years in the making reaches completion: the publication of critically edited texts of all Emerson's works published in his lifetime and under his supervision."--From the vol. 10 dust-jacket front flap.