Emerson's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saundra Morris, Joel Porte

Overview

This new volume is the most comprehensive collection of Emerson’s writings available in a paperback edition.

The selections include Emerson’s major sermons, lectures, essays, addresses, and poems, as well as excerpts from his journals, notebooks, and correspondence.

"Contexts" addresses the topics of American Transcendentalism, philosophy, and Emerson's contemporary reception.

"Criticism" includes thirteen twentieth-century essays by O. W. Firkins, Stephen E. Whicher, Perry Miller, Joel Porte, Hyatt H. Waggoner, Julie Ellison, Michael T. Gilmore, Barbara Packer, Stanley Cavell, Cornel West, Len Gougeon, Richard Poirier, and Saundra Morris.

A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index are included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393967920
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/21/2001
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	816
Sales rank:	952,985
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Saundra Morris is Associate Professor of English and Senior Fellow, Social Justice College at Bucknell University, where she has taught since 1995. She is a Stanley J. Karhl Fellow of Literary Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing; Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time; and The Romance of America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. He is editor, with Saundra Morris, of The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	A Note on the Texts	xiv
	Abbreviations	xvi
	The Texts of Emerson's Prose and Poetry
	Sermons
	I. [Pray Without Ceasing], 1 Thessalonians 5:17, July 25, 1826	3
	XXXIX. [Summer], Psalms 74:16-17, June 13, 1829	9
	XC. [Trust Yourself], Matthew 16:26, October 3, 1830	13
	CLXII. [The Lord's Supper], Romans 14:17, September 9, 1832	17
	Nature	27
	Selected Early Addresses and Lectures
	The American Scholar	56
	An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838	69
	The Method of Nature	81
	The Transcendentalist	93
	From Essays: First Series
	History	105
	Self-Reliance	120
	Compensation	137
	Spiritual Laws	150
	The Over-Soul	163
	Circles	174
	From Essays: Second Series
	The Poet	183
	Experience	198
	Politics	213
	New England Reformers	221
	From Representative Men
	Montaigne, or the Skeptic	234
	Shakspeare, or the Poet	247
	From The Conduct of Life
	Fate	261
	Power	279
	Illusions	289
	From Letters and Social Aims
	From Poetry and Imagination	297
	Quotation and Originality	319
	From The Dial
	The Editors to the Reader	331
	Thoughts on Modern Literature	333
	Miscellanies on His Contemporaries and His Times
	From An Address... on... the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies	348
	Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law	359
	From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli	372
	Thoreau	398
	Abraham Lincoln	411
	From Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England	415
	Selected Poetry
	From Poems	429
	The Sphinx	429
	Each and All	432
	The Problem	433
	The Visit	435
	Uriel	436
	Hamatreya	438
	The Rhodora	439
	The Humble-Bee	440
	The Snow-Storm	442
	Fable	443
	Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing	443
	Give All to Love	446
	Thine Eyes Still Shined	447
	Eros	447
	The Apology	448
	Merlin, I	448
	Merlin, II	450
	Bacchus	452
	Blight	454
	Threnody	455
	Concord Hymn	462
	From May-Day and Other Pieces	463
	From May-Day	463
	Brahma	464
	Nemesis	465
	Boston Hymn	465
	Voluntaries	468
	Days	471
	The Chartist's Complaint	472
	The Titmouse	472
	Sea-Shore	475
	Two Rivers	476
	Waldeinsamkeit	477
	Terminus	478
	From Elements	479
	Art	479
	Worship	480
	From Quatrains	481
	Memory	481
	From Translations	481
	Song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan	481
	Others	482
	Grace	482
	Cupido	483
	["Let Me Go Where E'er I Will"]	483
	["Ever the Rock of Ages Melts"]	483
	From Journals and Notebooks	484
	From Correspondence
	To William Emerson, Concord, November 10, 1814	531
	To Mary Moody Emerson, Cambridge, September 23, 1826	534
	To William Emerson, Charleston, January 6 and 9, 1827	534
	To Mary Moody Emerson, St. Augustine, March 15? 1827	534
	To the Second Church and Society in Boston, Cambridge, January 30, 1829	535
	To the Proprietors of the Second Church, Boston, September 11, 1832	536
	To the Second Church and Society, Boston, December 22, 1832	536
	To Edward Bliss Emerson, Boston, December 22, 1833	538
	To Edward Bliss Emerson, Newton, May 31, 1834	539
	To Lydia Jackson, Concord, January 24, 1835	540
	To Lydia Jackson, Concord, February 1, 1835	540
	To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, September 17, 1836	541
	To William Emerson, Concord, October 31, 1836	541
	To Martin Van Buren, Concord, April 23, 1838	542
	For Henry David Thoreau, Concord, May 2, 1838	544
	To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, May 10, 1838	545
	To Amos Bronson Alcott, Concord, June 28, 1838	545
	To Henry Ware Jr., Concord, July 28, 1838	546
	To Henry Ware Jr., Concord, October 8, 1838	547
	To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, October 17, 1838	548
	To James Freeman Clarke, Concord, December 7, 1838	548
	To Margaret Fuller, Concord, August 4, 1840	549
	To Margaret Fuller, Concord, October 24, 1840	549
	To Margaret Fuller, Concord, March 14, 1841	550
	To Mary Moody Emerson, Concord, September 21, 1841	551
	To Mary Moody Emerson, Concord, January 28, 1842	551
	To Margaret Fuller, Concord, January 28, 1842	552
	To Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Concord, January 28, 1842	552
	To Caroline Sturgis, Concord, February 4, 1842	552
	To Lidian Emerson, Providence, February 10, 1842	553
	To Lidian Emerson, Castleton, Staten Island, March 1, 1842	553
	To Margaret Fuller, Concord, June 7, 1843	554
	To Charles Anderson Dana, Concord, October 18, 1843	554
	To Margaret Fuller, Concord, December 17, 1843	555
	To Christopher Pearse Cranch, Concord, June 7, 1844	555
	To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, December 31, 1844	556
	To William J. Rotch, Concord, November 17, 1845	557
	To the Corporation of Harvard University, Concord, June 25, 1846	557
	To William Henry Furness, Concord, August 6, 1847	558
	To Henry David Thoreau, Manchester, December 2, 1847	559
	To Lidian Emerson, London, March 8 and 10, 1848	559
	To William Emerson, Concord, February 10, 1850	560
	To Paulina W. Davis, Concord, September 18, 1850	561
	To Wendell Phillips, Concord, February 19, 1853	561
	To Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Concord, July 22, 1853	562
	To Walt Whitman, Concord, July 21, 1855	563
	To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, May 6, 1856	563
	To Henry David Thoreau, Concord, May 11, 1858	564
	To William Henry Seward, Buffalo, January 12, 1863	564
	To Emma Lazarus, Concord, February 24, 1868	565
	To Emma Lazarus, Concord, April 14, 1868	565
	To Emma Lazarus, Concord, July 9, 1869	566
	To Emma Lazarus, Concord, August 23, 1869	567
	To Emma Lazarus, Concord, August 19, 1870	567
	To Lidian Emerson, the Wyoming, October 31 and November 2, 1872	568
	To Emma Lazarus, Concord, July 22, 1876	568
	To George Stewart Jr., Concord, January 22, 1877	569
	Contexts
	Transcendentalism
	From On Germany	573
	Prospectus to The Recluse	575
	From Coleridge's Literary Character	577
	Genius	580
	Reviews and Impressions
	Caricatures	584
	Ballad of the Abolition Blunder-buss	586
	An Illustrated Criticism	588
	From Nature--A Prose Poem	590
	The New School in Literature and Religion	597
	[Emerson's Essays]	599
	Mr. Emerson's Lecture	601
	Emerson's Essays	602
	From The Old Manse	606
	From A Fable for Critics	607
	From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers	609
	From North America	610
	From Journals	612
	To R. W. E.	614
	Emerson	615
	From Emerson	628
	Emerson	633
	Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord	639
	Ralph Waldo Emerson	643
	From Model Americans	648
	On Emerson	650
	Emerson	654
	Criticism
	Has Emerson a Future?	657
	Emerson's Tragic Sense	663
	New England's Transcendentalism: Native or Imported?	668
	The Problem of Emerson	679
	From The Achievement of the Poems: "Artful Thunder"	697
	"Quotation and Originality"	704
	Emerson and the Persistence of the Commodity	712
	Ralph Waldo Emerson	725
	From The Philosopher in American Life	738
	From The Emersonian Prehistory of American Pragmatism	742
	From Virtue's Hero	758
	From Poetry and Pragmatism	767
	The Heart Has Its Jubilees	771
	Through a Thousand Voices: Emerson's Poetry and "The Sphinx"	777
	Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Chronology	791
	Selected Bibliography	794
	Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems	799

Editorial Reviews

Printed on the familiar onionskin that reduces the 800 pages to a manageable size, the volume assembled by Morris (Bucknell U.) and Porte (Cornell U.) is a comprehensive resource for students and scholars alike, containing a generous selection of Emerson's sermons, lectures, essays, addresses, and poems as well as excerpts from his journals, notebooks, and correspondence. The second half of the book provides contextual background in the form of writings by his contemporaries, including Madame de Sta<:e>l, William Wordsworth, and Sampson Reed and 14 critical interpretations by 20th-century writers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews