Emerson: Poems: Edited by Peter Washington (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400043166 ISBN 13: 9781400043163

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2004

Synopsis

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well.

Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of one’s own experience. From the embattled farmers who “fired the shot heard round the world” in the stirring “Concord Hymn,” to the flower in “The Rhodora,” whose existence demonstrates “that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being,” Emerson celebrates the existence of the sublime in the human and in nature.

Combining intensity of feeling with his famous idealism, Emerson’s poems reveal a moving, more intimate side of the man revered as the Sage of Concord.

About this title

About the Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803­—1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer, whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister, continuing a long line of ministers in his family. He traveled widely and lectured, and became well known for his publications Essays and Nature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400043166
• ISBN 13: 9781400043163
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Washington Peter