Essays - First Series - The Original Classic Edition

This book is the complete essays and lectures of ralph waldo emerson. It contains everything you could want from emerson, save his journals. His writing is beauty in its truest form. What he speaks is what you have forever felt to be true. When he warns against self-distrust in self-reliance you feel that he is not only speaking to you, but speaking for you. Reading this book is not only seeing what he has written, but is a demonstration of what he has written. When he writes in self-reliance of the reoccuring situation where people have to take their truth from another, the medium becomes the message. Emersons work as presented in this volume has been under rated by philisophical circles for years. Here you will see that not only is he a great essayist, but that (while unconventional) he is a great philosopher.

Emerson is to the literary world in America as Lincoln was to the political world in the 1860s. His stature as a thinker, writer and public figure to admire brought American literature to new heights.

Emerson, more the academic and intellectual, wrote with the elegance and intelligence of the gods. He was much superior to Thoreau in style and breadth of subject matter, he was more well-rounded and able to connect with his peers, both personally and as an author. And through this intimate friendship and association shared by Emerson and Thoreau, and any literary and intellectual comparison made between these two men, only serves to enhance and expand the others significance and genius. For me there was an integration and balance, a synergy, almost a partnership, in how they contributed to American literature and the intellectual community.

This collection is a beautiful addition to my library. It contains Emersons major essays e.g. Nature, Beauty, Compensation, Self-Reliance, and The Poet and his public addresses e.g. The American Scholar, (a big favorite of mine.)

This is a quality collection at a reasonable price. I was actually concerned that the quality might suffer because I thought the price so low. But it was not compromised. Both Emerson and this collection should be in your library. Highly recommended.