Emerson's Prose and Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

He's here on every page!The best of RWE comes out in these pages and there is the always-valuable Norton comments to augment both Emerson's text as well as the commentators or reviewers. A Best Buy!

Needed for school and it's a great book with everything about Emerson you would need. Highly recommend

Excellent

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 And there's also a scattering of wonderful lesser-known published pieces, addresses, letters, and unpublished journal material, clearly selected with an eye to fitting Emerson into his literary, historical, and political context.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

A great pillar of the essential American culture and spirit, Emerson is also so close to us Indians, like one of our own ancient Rishis, born this time a little far! Like most things American, fads and fashions claim him and reject him, but he continues to sway the minds and hearts of serious students of human thought through his lectures and addresses, essays and poems and other writings.I own several volumes of his writngs, gathered over the years, and read with regular devotion. For when you open his volume, you are right in holy presence! His writng has a strange power to move you- no matter what the immediate subject is. This Norton Critical Edition is the most magnificent single volume collection of Emerson's writngs, and writings on and about him! No editor can fully satisfy serious Emerson readers in a single volume, but the selections here are fully representative of the genius of Emerson all through. Many essays are famous and familiar, but there are many which are not found in common anthologies. There is a generous selection of poetry- which may surprise some who mainly think of Emerson as an essayist. But he himself said he was a poet in all his theory, politics and ethics(p.428). Robert Frost bears eloquent testimony to this fact, later in the volume: ..."Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet....Emerson's name has gone (around the world) as a poetic philosopher or philosophical poet, my favorite kind of both." (p.650) This edition also cantains a very generous selction of his journal entries and correspendence.But I feel what makes this volume so magnificent are the two last sections containing two hundred pages of articles on the historical context of Transcendentalism, the reviews and impressions of leading contemporaries and subsequent criticism. It is so thrilling to be able to read, at one place, the impressions of such leading figures as Walt Whitman. Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne,J.R.Lowell., Thoreau,Anthony Trollope, Louisa May Alcott,Henry James, George Santayana, John Dewey, Robert Frost,The section on criticism contains some serious discussions on vital issues and enormously aids our understanding. Of course, it is going to take a while to go through the whole volume of 800 pages of close, rather small print! But few enterprises can be more rewarding or even as pleasurable. Make no mistake- this is a magnificent volume, the best one-volume selection of Emerson's writings.It indeed sets our hearts on flame.

Read...read.....read.....read.....scientific and reliable having no high price.well printed.Its reading is traveling with Emerson himself.