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The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics) Paperback – September 12, 2000
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Commentary by Henry James, Robert Frost, Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry David Thoreau
The definitive collection of Emerson’s major speeches, essays, and poetry, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson chronicles the life’s work of a true “American Scholar.” As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphasized independent thought, and prized “the splendid labyrinth of one’s own perceptions.” More than any writer of his time, he forged a style distinct from his European predecessors and embodied and defined what it meant to be an American. Matthew Arnold called Emerson’s essays “the most important work done in prose.”
INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE
- Print length880 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherModern Library
- Publication dateSeptember 12, 2000
- Dimensions5.18 x 1.76 x 8.01 inches
- ISBN-100679783229
- ISBN-13978-0679783220
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--Walt Whitman
From the Inside Flap
As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphasized independent thought, and prized "the splendid labyrinth of one's own perceptions." More than any writer of his time, he forged a style distinct from his European predecessors and embodied and defined what it meant to be an American. Matthew Arnold called Emerson's essays "the most important work done in prose."
From the Back Cover
As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphasized independent thought, and prized "the splendid labyrinth of one's own perceptions." More than any writer of his time, he forged a style distinct from his European predecessors and embodied and defined what it meant to be an American. Matthew Arnold called Emerson's essays "the most important work done in prose."
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The distinction and particular value of anything, or any person, inevitably must alter according to the time and place from which we take our view. In any new discussion of Emerson, these two weights are upon us. By time, of course, I mean our entrance into the twenty-first century; it is almost two hundred years since Emerson's birth in Boston. By place, I mean his delivery from the town of Concord, and his corporeal existence anywhere. Now he is only within the wider, immeasurable world of our thoughts. He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.
This has some advantage for us, for he is now the Emerson of our choice: he is the man of his own time--his own history--or he is one of the mentors of ours. Each of these possibilities has its attractions, for the man alive was unbelievably sweet and, for all his devotion to reason, wondrously spontaneous. Yet as time's passage has broken him free of all mortal events, we begin to know him more clearly for the labors of his life: the life of his mind. Surely he was looking for something that would abide beyond the Tuesday or the Saturday, beyond even his first powerful or cautionary or lovely effect. "The office of the scholar," he wrote in "The American Scholar," "is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances." The lofty fun of it is that his "appearances" were all merely material and temporal--brick walls, garden walls, ripening pears--while his facts were all of a shifty vapor and an unauthored goodwill: the luminosity of the pears, the musics of birds and the wind, the affirmative staring-out light of the night stars. And his belief that a man's inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of his life to a moral purpose.
The story of his life, as we can best follow it from its appearances, is as follows. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803; his father, William Emerson, died in 1811. The family--his mother, two sisters, and five brothers--were poor, devout, and intellectually ambitious. Death's fast or slow lightning was a too-frequent presence. Both girls and one boy died in childhood; Emerson's brothers William, Edward, and Charles survived only into early manhood. The only remaining brother was Robert, who was a man of childish mind. As the poet Walt Whitman for most of his life took responsibility for his child-minded brother, Eddie, so did Emerson keep watch over this truculent survivor.
Emerson graduated from Harvard College, then divinity school, and in 1829 he began preaching at the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. In that year he married the beautiful but frail Ellen Tucker. Her health never improved, and in 1832 she died. Emerson was then twenty-nine years old.
I think it is fair to say that from this point on, the greater energies of his life found their sustenance in the richness and steadfastness of his inner life. Soon after his wife's death he left the pulpit. He had come to believe that the taking of the sacrament was no more, nor was meant to be more, than an act of spiritual remembrance. This disclosure he made to his congregation, who perhaps were grateful for his forthrightness but in all honesty did not wish to keep such a preacher. Soon after, Emerson booked passage to Europe. He traveled slowly across the Continent and, finally, to England. He was deeply touched by the magnificence of the past, so apparant in the cities, in their art and architecture. He also made it his business to explore the present. The list of those he met and talked with is amazing: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Walter Savage Lander, John Stuart Mill among them. His meeting with Thomas Carlyle began a lifelong friendship, their letters going back and forth across the Atlantic until Emerson's death.
Emerson returned from Europe and established a manner of living that he would scarcely alter for the rest of his life. He married again, a young woman named Lydia Jackson. In his journals, which he had begun in college and never abandoned, he tore down wall after wall in his search for a style and for ideas that would reach forth and touch both poles: his certainty and his fluidity. He bought a house in the town of Concord, an easy distance from Boston yet a place with its own extraordinary style and whose citizens were farmers, tradesmen, teachers, and the liveliest of utopians. Here, as husband and father, as writer and lecturer, Emerson would live for years his seemingly quiet, seemingly peaceful life.
The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the ingrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament. This is the crux of Emerson, who does not advance straight ahead but wanders to all sides of an issue; who delivers suggestions with a kindly gesture; who opens doors and tells us to look at things for ourselves. The one thing he is adamant about is that we should look--we must look--for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the cow.
This policy, if such it might be called, he established at the start. The first book he published was called Nature; in it he refers, with equal serenity, to "Nature" and to "nature." We understand clearly that by the first he means "this web of God"--everything that is not the mind uttering such words--yet he sets our lives down among the small-lettered noun as well, as though to burden us equally with the sublime and the common. It is as if the combination, and the understanding of the combination--the necessary honoring of both--were the issue of utmost importance. Nature is a text that is entirely about divinity, and first purposes, a book of manners, almost, but for the inner man. It does not demean by diction or implication the life that we are most apt to call "real," but it presupposes the heart's spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives. That this might take place in as many ways as there are persons alive did not at all disturb Emerson, and that its occurrence was the beginning of paradise here among the temporal fields was one of his few unassailable certainties.
In 1836, at the issue of this initial volume, and in the first years following, he was a man scarcely known to the world. Descended from seven generations of preachers, in conventional terms a failed churchman himself, he held no more important post than his membership in the Concord volunteer Fire Association. If he tried to be at home among the stars, so too he strove to be comfortable in his own living room. Mentor to Thoreau and neighbor to Hawthorne, the idiosyncratic Bronson Alcott, the passionate Margaret Fuller, the talkative Ellery Channing, and the excitable Jones Very, he adorned his society with friendliness and participation. His house was often full of friends, and talk. Julian Hawthorne, then a young boy, remembers him sitting in the parlor, "legs crossed and--such was their flexibility--with one foot hitched behind the other ankle. Leaning forward, elbow on one knee, he faced his guests and held converse . . ." There was an evening when his daughter Ellen called him away to talk to the butcher about mutton. It is reported that he rose mildly to do as he was bid. And there is another story, as he reports it himself in his journal, on a June day: "Now for near five years I have been indulged by the gracious Heaven in my long holiday in this goodly house of mine, entertaining and entertained by so many worthy and gifted friends, and all this time poor Nancy Barron, the mad-woman, has been screaming herself hoarse at the Poorhouse across the brook and I still hear her whenever I open my window."
Continued...
Product details
- Publisher : Modern Library; 1st edition (September 12, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 880 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679783229
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679783220
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.18 x 1.76 x 8.01 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #32,881 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #36 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #75 in Essays (Books)
- #1,154 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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.
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One of the golden nuggets in this Emerson anthology is the famous essay on "Self-Reliance." Modern readers might imagine that this essay would be about economics, but not so: the heart of it is this ---
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself, for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
To put it in other words, "Know thyself" (Socrates would agree) and "Be thyself." Aping celebrities and adopting ideologies are no part of self-reliance; in fact, Emerson explicitly deplores men who have become slaves of an ideology. "If I know your sect I anticipate your argument." In fact, "whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist." Conformity makes men not just false in a few small things, but false in everything.
This is most excellent advice, and should be followed while reading Emerson --- or anyone else. You will find yourself disagreeing with him from time to time, and Emerson himself would surely approve and applaud.
The physical book reviewed here is extremely well-edited and well-made. The introduction by Mary Oliver is excellent and helpful. Unless you become a true Emerson devotee, this volume is likely to be all you need.
The books contains his most essential, influential essays. Each contain classical Emerson thought, unique, hard to pin down, literary... Emerson was known for "trumping the logicians" and appealing to the soul of man. Indeed he does.
I have not read this book in its totality, but of the works I have, I have read thoroughly, as thoroughly as I have read perhaps anything, and I must say there is something undeniable about Emerson's reasoning. It is not logical in the dry fashion of philosophy, yet it is poetically, "humanly" appealing.
All I can say is read Emerson. He was and is one of America's most influencital writers. Some like him, some hate him, some appreciate though not totally agree with things he sets for (like myself). This particular book presents a good overview of his most renowned works, is affordable, and has a nice introduction. Highly recommended.
I have been stumbling my way through this book for a year or two now. I supposed that sometime soon I will read the words on the final pages.. though I dare say I will never feel as if I have finished it.
I would recommend reading an essay or two of his online for free before committing to this near 900 page emotional and spiritual adventure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. The 19th century Transcendental philosopher.
In my spiritual family tree, Emerson occupies the great great+ grandfather slot (right there above Dyer and Maslow). :)
I truly love the man. You can feel his energy emanating from his powerful essays and if you haven't read his work yet, I highly recommend it. I'd suggest you start with "Self-Reliance" and then maybe "Nature," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Heroism," and "Circles."
If you're like me, his eloquence, eminent quotability and passion for each of us to experience the transcendent joy that results from connecting to our Highest Self will often leave you in awe.
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I haven't read many books from philosophers or writers from 18th century. But I have read Seneca's Letters (all time favourite letters), Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. I guess this is going to be provide a new perspective of life when I finish reading it :)
A champion of human core values and he lived what he preached. Influenced by Indian philisophy, one will not find the dryness of Indian spirituality here, but writings gardened with metaphors, which we Indians are not yet accustomed to, as our people were not in the habit of decorating the truth. A giant of transcendentalism and a greater writer also. Highly recommended!
"When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title."
"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."