At his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was counted among the greatest poets in nineteenth-century America. This variorum edition of all the poems Emerson chose for publication during his lifetime offers readers the opportunity to situate Emerson s poetic achievement alongside his celebrated essays and to consider their interrelationship.

Decades before Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson took their places in the firmament of American poets, Emerson was securely enthroned. Though his reputation as essayist now eclipses his reputation as poet, Emerson self-identified as a writer of verse and worked out his transcendental philosophy in this genre, establishing his belief in the authority of individual experience and in the essential metaphoric nature of language. Albert J. von Frank s historical introduction traces the development of Emerson the poet, considering how life events, as well as his reading of German philosophy and Sufi poetry, influenced his thought and expression. Alongside accounts of the critical reception of his poems are public and private writings that reveal Emerson s own estimation of his poetic project and achievement.

The textual introduction and apparatus make transparent the theoretical and practical concerns that inform these critical texts. Also included are a chronological lists of variants and texts constituting the historical collation, notes clarifying obscure allusions, and headnotes identifying sources and context.

While William Dean Howells is today best remembered as Mark Twain's staunchest defender, Howells was, at his peak, the unrivaled man of letters in America: he had no contemporary equal. The achievements of both Twain and Henry James have since surpassed those of Howells in the literary hierarchy, but the work of Howells still remains an important part of American letters. In The Early Prose Writings of William Dean Howells, 1852-1861, Thomas Wortham provides a chronological assortment of Howells' first prose compositions, beginning with apprentice pieces published before the writer's eighteenth birthday. Born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, Howells also lived in Hamilton, Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus, where Howells' father, a printer and newspaper publisher, would move the family and set up shop. Howells started writing as a newspaperman, and this volume assembles pieces by Howells which appeared in the Ashtabula Sentinel, the Kingsville Academy Casket, and the Ohio Farmer, as well as the complete text of "The Independent Candidate"--his first attempt in print of an extended work of fiction--serialized in the Ashtabula Sentinel in 1854-55. Also included here is Howels' novela, Geoffrey: A Study of American Life, a thoughtful psychological study, which was never published, as well as Howells' letters to the New York World, in which he recorded his impressions and experiences relating to Ohio's early response to the declaration of the War Between the States. Dr. Wortham furnishes extensive source annotations to document quotations and references as well as framing each selection by Howells with background and explanatory glosses. As he points out, "Howells' literary life is not wanting in sufficient documentation," but his apprentice work--"that long foreground which has in his instance been too largely represented by a handful of mediocre poems, has been lost in old files of newspapers, journals, and manuscripts." Thanks to Dr. Wortham's careful scholarship, American literature now has a much more detailed and accurate picture of the young Howells and his early works.