"Every great man is a unique". R.W Emerson told us that Self-confidence is always about independence : "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Drawing primarily from previously unpublished manuscripts in the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, recent editions of Emerson's correspondence, journals and notebooks, sermons, and early lectures have provided authoritative texts that inspire readers to consider Emerson's place in American culture afresh. The two-volume Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, presents the texts of forty-eight complete and unpublished lectures delivered during the crucial middle years of Emerson's career. They offer his thoughts on New England and “Old World” history and culture, poetic theory, education, the history and uses of intellect—as well as his ideas on race relations and women's rights, subjects that sparked many debates. These final volumes contain some of Emerson's most timelessly relevant work and are sure to engage and inform any reader interested in discovering one of our country's greatest intellectuals. The following sections, although appearing only in the volume designated, contain information that pertains to both volumes and are available on the University of Georgia Press website. Volume 1: 1843–1854 contains: Preface Works Frequently Cited Historical and Textual Introduction Volume 2: 1855–1871 contains: Manuscript Sources of Emerson's Later Lectures in the Houghton Library of Harvard University Index to Works by Emerson General Index

Contains Emerson's published poetry, plus selections of his unpublished poetry from journals and notebooks, and some of his translations of poetry from other languages, notably Dante's La vita nuova.

No one who has felt the life-changing pull of Emerson's enormous planetary mind has ever doubted his power or his greatness, though we are often puzzled to know whether he is primarily a poet, an essayist or a philosopher. Richard Geldard is not puzzled at all by this; he has written a book that plainly shows Emerson to be essentially a teacher, the Socrates of Concord, a man with a message that we need to hear today. Previous generations "beheld God and nature face to face," Emerson says, and adds provocatively that we moderns seem able only to see those things through the eyes of the earlier generations. "Why," he asks-and the question is intended to shatter our complacency-"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" Emerson's life was devoted to showing how one may still attain an original, that is to say, an authentic, relation to the universe, and Geldard's book aims to focus and distill the famously dispersed Emerson and put his central teachings into the modern reader's hand. Previous edition titled The Esoteric Emerson: the Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Click here to read an interview with the author, Richard Geldard

Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly) of the Transcendental group. A literary mover and shaker, Emerson directed his unpopular early radicalism toward social institutions (the Church, education, literary conventions); by his death in 1882, however, his reputation was already solidifying as a national icon. Somewhere between the iconic sage and the speculative idealist lies an Emerson that students don’t often encounter, a flesh-and-blood figure whose writings testify to his continuing exploration of the individual’s place in an increasingly conformist and crowded world. In its selections and its apparatus, this Broadview edition bridges the gap between Emerson and students by stressing his real-world engagements. The collection contains a range of prose and poetry addressing some of Emerson’s major concerns—nature and the self, imagination and the poet, religion and social reform—as he explores the enduring question “How shall I live?” Historical appendices include primary materials on Transcendentalism; the contemporary debate about the nature of biblical miracles; other authors’ responses to Emerson as a writer and thinker; and the development of his complex reputation as a representative American. Copy-texts in this edition are the first published versions of each text, restored here as Emerson’s initial audience would have read them.