Emerson
The Ultimate Collection
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was also a champion of individualism.
The transcendentalists believe in the inherent goodness of both people and nature. They further believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—corrupt the purity of the individual.
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series – represent the core of his thinking, and include well-known essays such as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet, and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
The collection:
• Nature
• The American Scholar
• The Conduct of Life
• English Traits
Essays - First Series
• History
• Self-Reliance
• Compensation
• Spiritual Laws
• Love
• Friendship
• Prudence
• Heroism
• The Over-Soul
• Circles
• Intellect
• Art
Essays - Second Series
• The Poet
• Experience
• Character
• Manners
• Gifts
• Nature
• Politics
• Nonimalist and Realist
• New England Reformers
Representative Men
• Plato; or, the Philosopher
• Plato; New Readings
• Swedenborg; or, the Mystic
• Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
• Shakspeare; or, the Poet
• Napoleon; or, the Man of the World
• Goethe; or, the Writer
Poems
• May-Day and Other Pieces
• Elements and Mottoes
• Quatrains and Translations
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even those not well acquainted with the work of Emerson, New England essayist and procreative spark of the Transcendentalist movement, will find much to savor in this exhaustive, sensitive compilation. The poems chart the growth of a uniquely American sensibility, from the impressionable boy who toyed romantically with verse to the eloquent man who witnessed with ``joyful eye'' the ``genius of the whole.'' In his autobiographical laments, particularly ``Threnody,'' one sees how painfully the deaths of Emerson's first wife and first-born son affected him. Of great interest also are his gentlemanly versions of Dante. But the crowning moment of the collection comes when Emerson steeps himself in the poetry of Persian mystics. (His translations illustrate more the intense resonance he felt with the rapturous manner of the poet Hafiz, and less his mastery of poetic form.) While the voices of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and others are periodically visible, the profound influence of the exotic saturates his every word. This welcome collection offers up poetic reiterations of Emerson's more popular essays, lyricizes Transcendentalism's celebration of the sublime in the human, and serves to re-open the case for Emerson as a poet. An introduction would have served readers well.
