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Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Editions)

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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 And there's also a scattering of wonderful lesser-known published pieces, addresses, letters, and unpublished journal material, clearly selected with an eye to fitting Emerson into his literary, historical, and political context.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...

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.

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.