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American Literature: The Romantic Period: Emerson

A research topic guide on the romantic period of American literature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 18882) was a poet, essayist, and leader of the American transcendentalist movement. He was known for his essays titled “Self-Reliance" and "The American Scholar". 

Research & Reference

Emerson: The Ideal in America

A generation after Americans had freed themselves politically and economically from Britain, it would be up to Ralph Waldo Emerson to carry the Revolution to individual men and women by exhorting them to a freedom of the spirit as well. Through a detailed recounting of Emerson’s life, this program traces his vision of the ideal in America from its genesis to its flowering as the principles of Transcendentalism. Readings from Emerson’s journals, addresses, and published works—including Nature and “Self-Reliance”—are interwoven throughout. Commentary is provided by Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire; Richard Geldard, author of God in Concord; and others. Bonus material includes short bios of key Transcendentalists, profiles of women who influenced Emerson and Transcendentalism, the role of oratory in American life and the rise of the Lyceum lecture circuit, an overview of idealism in Western philosophy, and Eastern influences on Transcendentalism. Produced by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Institute. (54 minutes)

Source: Films on Demand

Author's Works & Perspectives

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations

Gathering both published and unpublished work, this Library of America edition makes available for the first time to general readers the full range of Emerson's poetry, including many poems left in manuscript at his death that have hitherto been available only in drastically edited versions or specialized scholarly texts. Displacing all previous editions in its comprehensiveness and textual authority, this volume reveals the ecstatic, mystical, and private meditative sides of one of the greatest of all American writers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures

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 Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other "representative men," and his astute observations on the habits, lives, and prospects of the English and American people. This volume includes Emerson's well-knownNature; Addresses, and Lectures(1849), hisEssays- First Series(1841) andEssays- Second Series(1844), plusRepresentative Men(1850),English Traits(1856), and his later book of essays,The Conduct of Life(1860). These are the works that established Emerson's colossal reputation in America and found him admirers abroad as diverse as Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Proust.The reasons for Emerson's influence and durability will be obvious to any reader who follows the exhilarating, exploratory movements of his mind in this uniquely full gathering of his work. Not merely another selection of his essays, this volume includes all his major books in their rich entirety. No other volume conveys so comprehensively the exhilaration and exploratory energy of perhaps America's greatest writer. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Published here for the first time are seven of Emerson's topical notebooks, which served as a source for his lectures, essays, and books of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s.  Concerned primarily with nature, art, philosophy, American culture, and his comtemporaries, the notebooks presented in this first of a three-volume editions afford fascinating insight into Emerson's creative practices.  They will offer new perspectives for future readings of his completed works. The editors provide faithful transcriptions of the notebooks using the highest standards of textual practice.  Their detailed annotations describe and comment on erased or revised passages, translate Greek and Latin quotations, and identify books and articles referred to in the texts of the notebooks.  References to similar passages in Emerson's journals, lectures, and published works are also provided in the annotations. Publication of these notebooks will inable scholars to trace ideas that have gone unnoticed previously.  The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 1, offers valuable insight into the art and philosophy of one of America's foremost thinkers.  These volumes will be an important addition to any personal or institutional library of nine-teenth-century American literature.

The Annotated Emerson

A brilliant essayist and a master of the aphorism (?Our moods do not believe in each other?; ?Money often costs too much?), Emerson has inspired countless writers. He challenged Americans to shut their ears against Europe's ?courtly muses? and to forge a new, distinctly American cultural identity. But he remains one of America's least understood writers. And, by his own admission, he spawned neither school nor follower (he valued independent thought too much). Now, in this annotated selection of Emerson's writings, David Mikics instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of Emerson's essential works and the remarkable thinker who produced them. Full of color illustrations and rich in archival photographs, this volume offers much for the specialist and general reader. In his running commentaries on Emerson's essays, addresses, and poems, Mikics illuminates contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. He quotes extensively from Emerson's Journal to shed light on particular passages or lines and examines Emerson the essayist, poet, itinerant lecturer, and political activist. Finally, in his Foreword, Phillip Lopate makes the case for Emerson as a spectacular truth teller?a model of intellectual labor and anti-dogmatic sanity. Anyone who values Emerson will want to own this edition. Those wishing to discover, or to reacquaint themselves with, Emerson's writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than The Annotated Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings--from Persian poets to George Sand--and to his many friendships and personal encounters--from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston--evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

David S. Reynolds, Professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York, discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher and lecturer who, in his day, commanded crowds like a modern rock star.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrYVvFo7mKs