DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

A collection of newly commissioned essays provides a critical introduction to pastor and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A new, wide-ranging selection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most influential writings, this edition captures the essence of American Transcendentalism and illustrates the breadth of one of America’s greatest philosophers and poets. The writings featured here show Emerson as a protester against social conformity, a lover of nature, an activist for the rights of women and slaves, and a poet of great sensitivity. As explored in this volume, Emersonian thought is a unique blend of belief in individual freedom and in humility before the power of nature. “I become a transparent eyeball,” Emerson wrote in Nature, “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Written over a century ago, this passage is a striking example of the passion and originality of Emerson’s ideas, which continue to serve as a spiritual center and an ideological base for modern thought.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine" (English), course: American Literature, language: English, abstract: This Bachelor thesis addressed the themes of nature and transcendence in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and Mary Oliver’s poems in a comparative manner. Transcendentalism is best known as a literary genre in the American literature. It was a whole new system, which was built upon various literal, religious, and philosophical studies, such as Idealism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was born in 1803, is the first person to define Transcendentalism. With his essay ‘The Transcendentalist’ Emerson (1841) presented transcendentalism as a philosophical movement, which, then in years, developed into a spiritual, as well as a religious movement that evoked a social reform in society. The transcendentalists adopted a metaphysical view on the phenomena of nature, wherefore we find a collection of works written on the theme of ‘nature’ at that time. Mary Oliver, on the contrary, who was born on September 1935, is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1984). She wrote over twenty books, including her poems, essays and two books about poetry. Oliver writes a lot about nature and often uses religious or spiritual vocabulary in her works, such as God, soul, prayer, etc. The scholars mostly focus on the notions of ecoethics, feminism and mindfulness in her poetry. Still, it is hard to put Oliver’s lyric into a certain framework. What is Emerson’s transcendental philosophy concerned with? What do Mary Oliver’s poems depict about the soul and God? Does it have any relevance with the Emersonian idea of transcendence? How is nature described in Emerson’s essays? Does the phenomenon of nature in Mary Oliver’s poems have any similarities with Emerson’s idea of nature? What do Spirit, Soul and God refer to in Emerson’s works? What is the role of man in existence in Emerson’s essay as opposed to Mary Oliver’s speakers? To sum up, my goal with this thesis is to observe the notions of nature and transcendence in both authors’ selected works, in order to find out, whether there are any correlations or differences between their ideas. The questions mentioned above will be answered in detail in the following chapters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson will undoubtedly be forever remembered as a quintessentially American author; his prose works rank among the most excellent from any century of American literature. Unfortunately, due ironically to the excellence and originality of his transcendental philosophy, his poetry is often forgotten. This volume of his collected poems seeks to rectify that. This is Volume 1 of the Great American Poets Series.