Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Transcendentalism and Its Times
- 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Family
- 3 The Radical Emerson?
- 4 Emerson as Lecturer
- 5 Emerson and Nature
- 6 Essays: First Series (1941)
- 7 Transcendental Friendship
- 8 Tears for Emerson
- 9 The Remembering Wine
- 10 Post-Colonial Emerson and the Erasure of Europe
- 11 ''Metre-Making'' Arguments
- 12 The Conduct of Life
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
8 - Tears for Emerson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Transcendentalism and Its Times
- 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Family
- 3 The Radical Emerson?
- 4 Emerson as Lecturer
- 5 Emerson and Nature
- 6 Essays: First Series (1941)
- 7 Transcendental Friendship
- 8 Tears for Emerson
- 9 The Remembering Wine
- 10 Post-Colonial Emerson and the Erasure of Europe
- 11 ''Metre-Making'' Arguments
- 12 The Conduct of Life
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I wonder if I am the only reader of Emerson who weeps over the death of his son in 1842. I have never heard anyone else confess to this reaction, although the story of how Emerson's “Experience” refers to Waldo Emerson's death is told briefly by Emerson himself, in the willfully perverse third paragraph of the essay. Then it is narrated repeatedly by twentieth-century scholars and critics, who treasure this moment as the most dramatic autobiographical reference in Emerson's published prose: 'In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, - neither better nor worse.'
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson , pp. 140 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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