Alfred R. Ferguson - Böcker

In 1849 Ralph Waldo Emerson collected in one volume all of his published work he thought worthy of preservation that had not been contained in the two series of Essays (1841, 1844) and the Poems (1847). Included were the essay Nature (1836); four orations, “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” and two others; and five lectures which had appeared in The Dial.As the first volume of a projected new Collected Works, this edition of Nature, Addresses, and Lectures now provides for the first time a definitive text based on collation of all editions in which Emerson might have had a hand, together with a wholly new introduction and extensive notes. The recently published Journals and Lectures from this period help bring to this volume a fresh perspective on the first and formative stage of Emerson’s career as a public figure and man of letters.Introduction and Notes by Robert E. Spiller; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson

Some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s finest and most famous essays, such as “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation,” and “The Over-Soul,” appeared in his Essays of 1841, published when he was thirty-seven years old. Preceded by the slim volume Nature, it was his first full-length book.The present edition provides for the first time an authoritative text of the Essays, together with an introduction, notes, and supplementary material of great value for the study of Emerson’s creative processes. A list of hundreds of parallel passages in his earlier journals and lectures makes it possible to examine in detail how he drew upon those manuscripts (now published), especially the voluminous journals, as grist for the twelve essays. His subsequent alterations of the essays, particularly in the revised edition of 1847, give evidence of the evolution of his thought and style at this stage of his career. While the text incorporates his revisions, so as to represent his final intention, the earlier versions are given at the end of the book.Introduction and Notes by Joseph SlaterText Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second collection of essays appeared in 1844, when he was forty-one. It includes eight essays—“The Poet,” “Experience,” “Character,” “Manners,” “Gifts,” “Nature,” “Politics,” and “Nominalist and Realist”—and one address, the much misunderstood “New England Reformers.” Essays: Second Series has a lightness of tone and an irony absent from the earlier writings, but it is no less memorable: “a sermon to me,” Carlyle wrote, “a real word.”The present edition, drawing on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last forty years, incorporates all the textual changes Emerson made or demonstrably intended to make after 1844. It records variant wordings and recounts the development of the text before and after publication. A list of parallel passages makes it possible to trace Emerson’s extensive use of material from his journals, notebooks, and lectures. Endnotes provide information about people, events, and now-obscure terms. A brief historical introduction places the book in the context of the years during which it was written, the time of Brook Farm, The Dial, and the death of Emerson’s five year-old son.Historical Introduction and Notes by Joseph SlaterText Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson CarrTextual Introduction and Apparatus by Jean Ferguson Carr

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, “was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own.” His celebrated essays—the twelve published in Essays: First Series (1841) and eight in Essays: Second Series (1844)—are here presented for the first time in an authoritative one-volume edition, which incorporates all the changes and corrections Emerson made after their initial publication.The text is reproduced from the second and third volumes of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical edition which draws on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last half century. Alfred R. Ferguson was founding editor of the edition, followed by Joseph Slater (until 1996).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas. Cancelled passages are reproduced, misreadings are corrected, and hitherto unpublished manuscripts are now printed. The text comes as close to a literal transcription as is feasible. A full apparatus of annotation, identification of quotations, and textual notes is supplied. Reproduced in this volume are twelve facsimile manuscript pages, many with Emerson’s marginal drawings.The first volume includes some of the “Wide Worlds,” journals begun while Emerson was at Harvard, and four contemporary notebooks, mostly unpublished. In these storehouses of quotation, juvenile verse, themes, and stories are the first versions of Emerson’s “Valedictory Poem,” Bowdoin Prize Essays, and first published work. Together they give a faithful picture of Emerson’s apprenticeship as an artist and reveal the extent of his hidden and frustrated ambition—to become a writer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas.The second volume prints the exact texts of nine journals and three notebooks. It reveals the shape of some of Emerson’s enduring interests, in embryo “essays” on the moral sense, moral beauty, taste, greatness and fame, friendship, compensation, and the unity of God and the universe. Restored from oblivion are suppressed passages on the Negro and revelations of acute melancholy and rebelliousness. These records of his developing thought are also the history of his early obscurity, when the fame he sought was still painfully remote.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life from 1826 to 1832 has a classic dramatic structure, beginning with his approbation to preach in October 1826, continuing with his courtship, his brief marriage to Ellen Tucker, and his misery after her death, and concluding with his departure from the ministry.The journals and notebooks of these years are far fewer than those in the preceding six years. Emerson noted down many ideas for sermons in his journals, but as time went on he wrote the sermons independently. Occasionally he wrote openly about family matters, but except for the passionate response to Ellen and her death the journals tell little about the impact upon him of other people and outside events. The pattern is consistent with the earlier journals: Emerson used them mainly to record his thought, to develop and express his ideas. His religious and intellectual interests were undergoing significant changes in orientation or emphasis. He was less concerned with the existence of God than with the nature and influence of Christ. He continued to reassert the truth of Christianity, but in his growing unorthodoxy he came to show less and less sympathy with the church, with forms and ritual, with convention. And he began to wonder whether it is not the worst part of the man that is the minister.During these years, Emerson read more in Madame de Staël, Wordsworth, Gérando, and Coleridge, less in Milton, the Augustans, Dugald Stewart, and Scott. In style, he moved from a rambling, bookish rhetoric to the tautness and the cadences that mark his later Essays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s decision to quit the ministry, arrived at painfully during the summer and fall of 1832, was accompanied by illness so severe that he was forced to give up any immediate thought of a new career. Instead, in December, he embarked on a tour of Europe that was to take him to Italy, France, Scotland, and England. Within a year after his return in the fall in 1833, his health largely restored, he went to live in the town of Concord, his home from then on.The record of Emerson’s ten months in Europe which makes up a large part of this book is unusually detailed and personal, actually a diary recording what Emerson saw and did as well as what he thought. He describes cities, scenes, and buildings that he found striking in one way or another and he gives impressions of the people he met. During his travels he made the acquaintance of Landor, of Lafayette, and of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, all of whom stimulated him. In Paris he was so much stirred by a visit to the Jardin des Plantes that he determined “to become a naturalist.”On his return to America, still without a profession, he reverted in his journals to the more impersonal form they had taken in his days as a minister, focusing on his inner experiences rather than on external events. Notes start dotting the pages once again, this time not so much for future sermons—although for years he did a certain amount of occasional preaching as for the addresses of the public lecturer he would soon become.Through the thirty-four months covered by this volume, the journals continue to he the advancing record of Emerson’s mind, demonstrating a growing maturity and firmness of style by compression and aphorism.

The pages of these five journals covering the years 1843 to 1847 are filled with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle to formulate the true attitude of the scholar to the vexing question of public involvement. Pulled between his belief that a disinterested independence was a requisite for the writer and the public demands heaped upon him as a leading intellectual figure, he notes to himself that he “pounds…tediously” on the “exemption of the writer from all secular works.”Although Emerson concluded his editorship of The Dial in 1844, he was continually beset by calls for public service, most of which drew their impetus from the reformist syndrome of the 1840s. In response to such issues as the Temperance Movement, the utopian communities, and Henry Thoreau’s experiment in self-reliance at Walden Pond, Emerson exercised sympathetic skepticism and held a growing conviction that the society of the day was not the lost cause many of his contemporaries believed it to be.These journals record Emerson’s optimistic attitudes and show how later they existed side-by-side with concerns that, under the impulse of abolition, Texas, and the Mexican War, led him to some bitter conclusions about the state of the nation. Thoreau’s refusal to pay his poll tax in demonstration against slavery and the war particularly horrified him, and he confides in his journal that Thoreau’s action diverted attention from the possibility of real reform.The moral ambivalence and cynicism of the day strengthened Emerson’s belief that the self-reliant individual was the only answer. These individuals—men like Garrison, Phillips, and Carlyle—were, in Emerson’s estimation, destined to set the standards by which society would be judged. Encouraged by the prospective publication of his first volume of poetry in 1846, Emerson also spent much of this period composing verse. Among the poems in these journals are “Uriel,” “Merlin,” “Ode to Beauty,” and a section from “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love.”In anticipation of his second visit to Europe, Emerson began preparing a lecture series on “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.” In these lectures he would take to the Old World his observations on the complexities of the times.