No other series of classic texts achieves the editorial standard of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the work to life for students. Careful editing, first-rate translation, thorough explanatory annotations, chronologies, and selected bibliographies make each text accessible to students while encouraging in-depth study. Each volume in the series is printed on acid-free paper, and every text remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice of excellence for scholarship for students at more than 2,500 colleges and universities worldwide.

At last. a comprehensive collection of Ralph Waldo Emersons writings available in a paperback student edition. This Norton Critical Edition includes a generous selection from Emerson's sermons, lectures, essays, addresses, and poems as well as essential excerpts from his journals, notebooks, and correspondence In addition, this is the first Emerson anthology to include a substantial portion of Emerson's contributions to Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

"Contexts" sheds light on the cultural climate within which American Transcendentalism developed, reproducing writings by Madame de Stael. William Wordsworth. Frederic Henry Hedge, and Sampson Reed. Emerson's contemporary reception and a variety of responses to him are represented both by caricatures and by literary impressions from. among others, Henry David Thoreau. Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller. George Santayana. D. H. Lawrence. and A.R. Ammons.

Fourteen critical interpretations, selected from the many hundreds published in the twentieth century, also appear. 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. Robert D. Richardson. Jr., and Saundra Morris offer their assessments of this major American thinker and writer.

A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index to the poems are also provided.

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Texts

Abbreviations

The Texts of Emerson's Prose and Poetry

 Sermons

Ⅰ. [Pray Without Ceasing], 1 Thessalonians 5:17, July 25, 1826

ⅩⅩⅩⅠⅩ. [Summer], Psalms 74:16-17, June 13, 1829

ⅩC. [Trust Yourself], Matthew 16:26, October 3, 1830

CLⅫ. [The Lord's Supper], Romans 14:17, September 9, 1832

 Nature

  Selected Early Addresses and Lectures

The American Scholar

An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838

The Method of Nature

The Transcendentalist

  From Essays: First Series

History

Self-Reliance

Compensation

Spiritual Laws

The Over-Soul

Circles

  From Essays: Second Series

The Poet

Experience

Politics

 New England Reformers

  From Representative Men

 Montaigne, or the Skeptic

 Shakspeare, or the Poet

From The Conduct of Life

 Fate

 Power

 Illusions

 From Letters and Social Aims

From Poetry and hnagination

Quotation and Originality

 From The Dial

The Editors to the Reader

Thoughts on Modern Literature

 Miscellanies on His Contemporaries and His Times

From An Address . . . on . . . the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies

Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law

From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

Thoreau

Abraham Lincoln

From Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England

 Selected Poetry

FROM POEMS

 The Sphinx

 Each and All

 The Problem

 The Visit

 Uriel

 Hamatreya

 The Rhodora

 The Humble-Bee

 The Snow-Storm

 Fable

 Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing

 Give All to Love

 Thine Eyes Still Shined

 Eros

 The Apology

 Merlin, Ⅰ

 Merlin, Ⅱ

 Bacchus

 Blight

 Threnody

 Concord Hymn

FROM MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES

 From May-Day

 Brahma

 Nemesis

 Boston Hymn

 Voluntaries

 Days

 The Chartist's Complaint

 The Titmouse

 Sea-Shore

 Two Rivers

 Waldeinsamkeit

 Terminus

FROM ELEMENTS

 Art

 Worship

FROM QUATRAINS

 Memory

FROM TRANSLATIONS

 Song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan

OTHERS

 Grace

Cupido

["Let Me Go Where E'er I Will"]

["Ever the Rock of Ages Melts"]

From Journals and Notebooks

From Correspondence

 To William Emerson, Concord, November 10, 1814

 To Mary Moody Emerson, Cambridge, September 23, 1826

 To William Emerson, Charleston, January 6 and 9, 1827

 To Mary Moody Emerson, St. Augustine, March 15? 1827

 To the Second Church and Society in Boston, Cambridge, January 30, 1829

 To the Proprietors of the Second Church, Boston, September 11, 1832

 To the Second Church and Society, Boston, December 22, 1832

 To Edward Bliss Emerson, Boston, December 22, 1833

 To Edward Bliss Emerson, Newton, May 31, 1834

 To Lydia Jackson, Concord, January 54, 1835

 To Lydia Jackson, Concord, February 1, 1835

 To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, September 17, 1836

 To William Emerson, Concord, October 31, 1836

 To Martin Van Buren, Concord, April 23, 1838

 For Henry David Thoreau, Concord, May 2, 1838

 To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, May 10, 1838

 To Amos Bronson Alcott, Concord, June 28, 1838

 To Henry Ware Jr., Concord, July 28, 1838

 To Henry Ware Jr., Concord, October 8, 1838

 To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, October 17, 1838

 To James Freeman Clarke, Concord, December 7, 1838

 To Margaret Fuller, Concord, August 4, 1840

 To Margaret Fuller, Concord, October 24, 1840

 To Margaret Fuller, Concord, March 14, 1841

 To Mary Moody Emerson, Concord, September 21, 1841

 To Mary Moody Emerson, Concord, January 28, 1842

 To Margaret Fuller, Concord, January 28, 1842

 To Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Concord, January 28, 1842

 To Caroline Sturgis, Concord, February 4, 1842

 To Lidian Emerson, Providence, February 10, 1842

 To Lidian Emerson, Castleton, Staten Island, March 1, 1842

 To Margaret Fuller, Concord, June 7, 1843

 To Charles Anderson Dana, Concord, October 18, 1843

 To Margaret Fuller, Concord, December 17, 1843

 To Christopher Pearse Cranch, Concord, June 7, 1844

 To Thomas Carlyle, Concord, December 31, 1844

 To William J. Rotch, Concord, November 17, 1845

 To the Corporation of Harvard University, Concord, June 25, 1846

 To William Henry Furness, Concord, August 6, 1847

 To Henry David Thoreau, Manchester, December 2, 1847

 To Lidian Emerson, London, March 8 and 10, 1848

 To William Emerson, Concord, February 10, 1850

 To Paulina W. Davis, Concord, September 18, 1850

 To Wendell Phillips, Concord, February 19, 1853

 TO Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Concord, July 22, 1853

 To Walt Whitman, Concord, July 21, 1855

 TO Thomas Carlyle, Concord, May 6, 1856

 To Henry David Thoreau, Concord, May 11, 1858

 To William Henry Seward, Buffalo, January 12, 1863

 To Emma Lazarus, Concord, February 24, 1868

 To Emma Lazarus, Concord, April 14, 1868

 To Emma Lazarus, Concord, July 9, 1869

 To Emma Lazarus, Concord, August 23, 1869

 TO Emma Lazarus, Concord, August 19, 1870

 To Lidian Emerson, the Wyoming, October 31 and November 2, 1872

 To Emma Lazarus, Concord, July 22, 1876

 To George Stewart Jr., Concord, January 22, 1877

Contexts

 Transcendentalism

Madame de Stael · From On Germany

William Wordsworth · Prospectus to The Recluse

Frederic Henry Hedge · From Coleridge's Literary Character

Sampson Reed · Genius

Reviews and Impressions

Christopher Pearse Craneh · Caricatures

L. M. Sargent · From The Ballad of the Abolition Blunder-buss

Anonymous · An Illustrated Criticism

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody · From Nature--A Prose Poem

Andrews Norton · The New School in Literature and Religion

Anonymous · [Emerson's Essays]

Walter Whitman · Mr. Emerson's Lecture

Margaret Fuller · Emerson's Essays

Nathaniel Hawthorne · From The Old Manse

James Russell Lowell · From A Fable for Critics

Henry David Thoreau · From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Anthony Trollope · From North America

Louisa May Alcott · From Journals

Emma Lazarus · To R. W. E.

Henry James · Emerson

Jose Marti · From Emerson

George Santayana · Emerson

Willianr James · Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord

John Dewey · Ralph Waldo Emerson

D. H. Lawrence · From Model Americans

Robert Frost · On Emerson

A. R. Ammons · Emerson

Criticism

O. W. Firkins · Has Emerson a Future?

Stephen E. Whither · Emerson's Tragic Sense

Perry Miller · New England's Transcendentalism: Native or Imported?

Joel Porte · The Problem of Emerson

Hyatt H. Waggoner · From The Achievement of the Poems: "Artful Thunder"

Julie Ellison · "Quotation and Originality"

Michael T. Gilmore · Emerson and the Persistence of the Commodity

Barbara Packer · Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stanley Cavell · From The Philosopher in American Life

Cornel West · From The Emersonian Prehistory of American Pragmatism

Len Gougeon · From Virtue's Hero

Richard Poirier · From Poetry and Pragmatism

Robert D. Richardson Jr. · The Heart Has Its Jubilees

Saundra Morris · Through a Thousand Voices: Emerson's Poetry and "The Sphinx"

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography

Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems