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Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his essays, but he was also a poet, and this volume gathers his verse. It includes the 'Concord Hymn', written for the…
Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his essays, but he was also a poet, and this volume gathers his verse. It includes the 'Concord Hymn', written for the monument to the first battle of the American Revolution, with its 'shot heard round the world'; 'The Rhodora', about a wild flower blooming unseen in the woods; 'Days', 'Brahma' and 'Each and All'; the long, grieving 'Threnody' for his young son Waldo; and poems inspired by the Persian poets he admired, among them 'Saadi' and versions from Hafiz.
Context and significance
Emerson (1803–1882) wrote compressed, thoughtful verse in which nature reveals spiritual laws, and he was one of the first Americans to read and praise the poetry of Persia. This is the 'Household Edition' of his poems. His ideas are set out in prose in Nature and his Essays: First Series, and the Persian master he loved is in the Poems from the Divan of Hafiz.
About the author
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a Boston minister who resigned his church in 1832 because he could no longer accept its rituals. After meeting Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth in Europe, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and became America's best-known lecturer and the centre of the Transcendentalist movement.
His essay Nature and his address The American Scholar urged Americans to think for themselves, and his Essays gave the world 'Self-Reliance'. He encouraged the young Thoreau, praised the unknown Whitman, and loved the Persian poets Hafez and Saadi, some of whose verses he translated into English.