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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations

Edited by Harold Bloom and Paul Kane

“A surprise awaits those who think of Emerson only as an essayist… For a personal close-up of a public man, here are evidences of eros, mourning and celebration.”— Christian Century

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News He “lived and breathed literature”—Library of America remembers Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
November 5, 2019

News John Matteson on the “alternately repelling and attracting” electricity between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 21, 2017

News Emerson, Agassiz, and the mind of God
July 25, 2017

Emerson’s incomparable brilliance as a prose writer has often overshadowed his remarkable gifts as a poet. The Library of America’s Collected Poems and Translations gathers both published and unpublished work to make available for the first time to general readers the full range of Emerson’s poetry, including many poems left in manuscript at his death that have hitherto been available only in drastically edited versions or specialized scholarly texts. Displacing all previous editions in its comprehensiveness and textual authority, this volume reveals the ecstatic, mystical, and private meditative sides of one of the greatest of all American writers.

All the poetry Emerson published during his lifetime is included in this single volume. His collections, Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876), as well as other pieces written for magazines, fuse close observations of the New England landscape with far-reaching spiritual explorations. His familiarity with botany and geology, Greek philosophy, Persian poetry, and anti-slavery politics gives his writing an intellectual breadth, and a challenging, continuing modernity unique among American poets of his time.

More than half the volume is devoted to a generous selection of poetry from Emerson’s journals and notebooks, ranging from his childhood to his final years as a writer. This work—printed here as Emerson wrote it, without the revisions imposed by earlier editors—is a revelation: a bounty of formal experimentation and speculative thought that displays, as in a painter’s sketchbook, the creative process at work. Emerson here often shows a different poetic personality, freer and more unconventional in both form and subject matter. Of special note are the laments over the death at age nineteen of his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, after only five months of marriage—moving expressions of grief that rebut the notion that Emerson was emotionally cold, or primarily a public poet.

Also included are Emerson’s little-known poetic translations, chiefly from the Persian poets Hafiz and Saadi, whose fusion of sensuality and mysticism so profoundly influenced his poetic thinking. With them is the complete La Vita Nuova (The New Life), Dante’s meditation on love that Emerson translated into English for the first time.

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and the author of more than forty books of literary criticism. Paul Kane is a professor of English at Vassar College.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations is kept in print by gifts made in honor of Daniel Aron to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Poems (1847)

May-Day and other pieces (1867)
May-Day
The Adirondacs
Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces
Nature and Life
Elements
Quatrains
Translations (Michelangelo, Hafiz, Omar Chiam, Ibn Jemin, others)

From Selected Poems (1876)
The Harp
April
Wealth
Maiden Speech of the Aeolian Harp
Cupido
The Nun’s Aspiration
Hymn Sung at the Second Church, Boston
Boston

Other Published Poems and Translations
Uncollected poems
Translations of poems by Lucretius, Hafiz, Ibn Jemin, Nisami, Ferideddin Attar, others

Manuscript Poems and Translations
Manuscript poems are presented in their approximate order of composition; some poems cannot be dated.
Translations include works by Hafiz, Saadi, Jean Chardin, Goethe, and Michelangelo.
Dante’s Vita Nuova (complete)

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ISBN: 978-0-94045028-8 637 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 70 Library of America Series

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