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Essays and poems explore the contemporary relevance of Emerson's work and thought.
New Morning brings together philosophers, poets, and literary critics to celebrate and engage the ideas of the great American writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's legacy influences many areas; he was a champion of democracy and civil rights, a naturalist, an idealist, an artist, a writer, and a philosopher. Rather than focusing on Emerson in his historical context, this volume brings to light the ways in which Emerson's voice and work still speak powerfully to the concerns of the present moment. In short essays and poems, some of America's most influential scholars and poets-including John J. McDermott, Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, Robert C. Pollock, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Buell-underscore the relevance of Emerson's thought to contemporary issues as varied as the environment, race, politics, spirituality, aesthetics, and education.
"Like a series of gateways, these essays and poems seek the conditions of possibility for a new Emerson, one who provokes and witnesses a world as radically uncertain, displaced, and mercurial as our own, and as riddled with inescapable yet insoluble questions about teaching and ignorance, doubt and faith, reason, beauty, and the fate of nature. If each age must write its own Emerson, then this collection offers all of us the place to start." — Laura Dassow Walls, author of Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth
Forever Young: A Preface
Michael Brodrick
Acknowledgments
Dancing with Emerson
Deborah Digges
1. Emerson: An Introduction
Mary Oliver
2. The Single Vision
Robert C. Pollock
Windfall
William Heyen
3. Spires of Influence
John J. McDermott
4. Teaching for Lustres: An Essay on the Emersonian Teacher
Arthur S. Lothstein
The Continental College of Beauty
Mark Strand
5. Emerson at The Gates
David LaRocca
6. Taking Emerson Personally
John Lysaker
Local Knowledge
Paul Hoover
7. Face to Face with Emerson
David Marr
8. Emerson’s Natures: Origins of and Possibilities for American Environmental Thought
Douglas R. Anderson
Shudder
Dorene Evans
9. Emerson and the Reinvention of Democracy: A Lesson for the Twenty-first Century
Len Gougeon
10. Individualism, Natural Law, Human Rights: Emerson on "The Scholar" vis-à-vis Emerson on Reform
Lawrence Buell
For the Children
Gary Snyder
11. After Emerson: Of General Knowledge and the Common Good
Ann Lauterbach
Letter to Lucia
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contributors
Index