Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Editions) [Paperback]

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Author), Saundra Morris (Editor), Joel Porte (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393967921 | ISBN-13: 978-0393967920 | Publication Date: March 21, 2001 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393967921
• ISBN-13: 978-0393967920
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

There are few people as quoted and quotable as Ralph Waldo Emerson, founder of the transcendental movement and author of classic essays as Self-Reliance, Nature, and The American Scholar. Emerson began his career as a Unitarian minister and later put those oratory skills to move us toward a better society. More remains written on him than by him.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How to make a good anthology bad, August 6, 2004

By 

Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback)

Despite its editors' best efforts, this is a very good Emerson anthology. All the most important texts are there, on Norton's customary thin onionskin paper, in a surprisingly compact volume, typeset nicely. The selection includes not just Nature and a handful of the best known of Emerson's First and Second Series of essays (though it would've been nice to include more of these central texts), but interesting early sermons and some of Emerson's late-career essays from Representative Men and The Conduct of Life. And there's also a scattering of wonderful lesser-known published pieces, addresses, letters, and unpublished journal material, clearly selected with an eye to fitting Emerson into his literary, historical, and political context. Some interesting critical work also fits in the back pages, pre-eminently Cornel West's extremely intelligent essay and an early piece of Stanley Cavell's (though readers might also be interested in Cavell's more recent collection of essays on Emerson), which you won't find in any other similar volume. (The self-inclusions by the volume's editors are best ignored.)

But the editors have done their best to render the volume unusable by peppering it densely with useless footnotes. They have chosen to use their footnotes as insults to the reader's intelligence rather than aids to his scholarship, intruding frequently and fussily to define slightly obscure words, to refer to other similar phrasings elsewhere in Emerson, to correct the author on the basis of twentieth-century science (!), or simply to harrumph and remind the reader of their presence. Of course, the occasional helpful note is scattered among this dross, illuminating a classical allusion or pointing to a contemporary (19th-century) context, so one is hard pressed simply to ignore them all.

This is a travesty of "student-centered" editing, and comes close to rendering the volume unreadable; fortunately, it doesn't quite succeed. Still, readers might prefer to look at the Library of America's Emerson volume, which lacks the uneven but sometimes excellent critical material but offers a more complete selection of texts than this one in a similarly elegant single volume, and is blessedly free of footnotes (though, in fact, it has helpful endnotes if you go looking for them). We can always find a dictionary if we need one...

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One anthology among the many - but nonetheless Emerson, February 20, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback)

Whether 'Modern Literary ' or 'Bantam' or 'Norton' or even the 'Collected Works' one comes to the essential thing which is the writing of Emerson himself.
There is almost always the selection from 'Nature' and 'The Harvard Divinity School Address' and selections of other 'Essays' and some of the poetry including the anthology pieces like 'Concord Hymn' and perhaps some of the diary writing.
Emerson is along with Thoreau is the great American prose-poet, the one whose prose reads like poetry, and whose poetry often seems to run on like prose. He is the master- metaphor- maker of a new American day and hero. Emerson stands for a certain kind of American hope and integrity, and a cosmic freedom embracing all the universe. If he goes East it is also part of his going West, and surrounding the world with circles. Through his translucent 'eyeball' he sees America for what it is, and dreams its heroes' greatness.
Emerson uplifts and inspires and teaches- among others Thoreau and Whitman.
He is the American thinker who can contend with the best Europe has to offer.
In some sense all of American philosophy, including 'pragmatism' will come out of his work.
Whatever anthology he is read in, he opens mankind to a new conception of itself, and its distant destiny.

9 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Emerson 5, Critics 0, January 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback)

This volume is an excellent compendium of Emerson's work. It contains material not available in the Library of America editions. Beware of the critical essays, though, particularly the contemporary ones. It's hard to tell from Cornel West's essay whether or not he's actually read Emerson, but if he has, he didn't like him much. So why write an essay appraising Emerson? It's the silly, empty-headed kind of academic noodling that makes academia irrelevant to modern life.

This begs the larger question: Why would anyone read ABOUT Emerson, when they could READ Emerson? Ignore the critics, commentators and wannabe's. READ EMERSON.