Emerson: Poems: Edited by Peter Washington [Hardcover]

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.FromPOEMS (1847)
The Rhodora
The Humble-Bee
Fable
Astræa
Etienne de la Boe´ce
Suum Cuique
Compensation
Forbearance
Berrying
Thine Eyes Still Shined
Eros
Loss and Gain
Hamatreya
The Snow-Storm
Painting and Sculpture
Holidays
From the Persian of Hafiz
Ghaselle
Xenophanes
The Day’s Ration
Blight
Musketaquid
Hymn (‘By the rude bridge that arched the flood’)
The Sphinx
Each and All
The Problem
To Rhea
The Visit
Uriel
The World-Soul

FromMAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES (1867)
Brahma
Nemesis
Fate
Freedom
Ode Sung in the Town Hall
Boston Hymn
Love and Thought
Lover’s Petition
Una
Letters
Rubies
Merlin’s Song
The Test
Nature I
Nature II
The Romany Girl
My Garden
The Titmouse
Days
Sea-Shore
Two Rivers
Waldeinsamkeit
Terminus