The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume IX. Poems: A Variorum Edition ed. by Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham (review)

For those working with poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, this new addition to Harvard’s standard The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published as Volume IX: Poems: A Variorum Edition, is a long-awaited godsend. For those not so familiar with the poems, this volume is a revelation. It contains every poem published by Emerson in any form during his lifetime, and it omits the fragments and drafts included by his son, Edward Waldo Emerson, in the posthumous Riverside and Centenary editions, previously considered standard.

The Collected Works, in process for more than forty years, has presented many challenges for its cadre of editors. For the poems, the biggest editorial challenge was not so much non-authorial changes—though these there were—as the plethora of drafts and versions of each poem. Albert von Frank, who with Thomas Wortham established the text of each poem, describes in the Textual Introduction the difficulties and their resolution. In his 1946 dissertation, Carl F. Strauch began an unfinished 40-year effort toward a variorum edition, not practical before Sir Walter Greg in 1950 published his clarifying concept of “copy-text,” the principle that has ruled modern scholarly editions by “enforcing the distinction between the private compositional history of a poem and the history of its presentation to a public” (cxxi). Quoting Joseph M. Thomas, von Frank says Strauch was “instrumental in the Emerson family’s decision to make available to scholars the original manuscripts of both the journals and the verse-books,” thus making possible the ordering of that “private compositional history.” As a result, The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (University of Missouri Press, 1986), under the general editorship of Ralph H. Orth with a team that included von Frank, “simply presented and clearly organized the pre-copy-text forms of nearly all the poems.” That work opened a way to this long-awaited volume.

In his Preface to The Poetry Notebooks (vii), Orth singles out von Frank as “the authority of last resort because of his unmatched knowledge of Emerson’s published and unpublished poetry.” We are fortunate that he brought that knowledge and what Orth called his “unflagging energy” to this edition; his sensitive readings of the poems do not over-interpret or dictate, but rather suggest avenues for interpretation or factors to be considered. In the process, he freely credits the earlier editors, Strauch and the younger Emerson, as well as Thomas and other relevant scholars. Most valuably, von Frank’s long history on other Emerson projects such as the sermons and journals and his long editorship of the journal ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance give him a sureness of insight, a depth of knowledge and understanding we can trust.

The very readable Historical Introduction is full of helpful and sometimes amusing details, including much about the development of Emerson as a poet and the reception of his poetry. Because he did not follow sectarian orthodoxy, his poems at first were incomprehensible to some readers and critics. In reviews of the 1847 volume, “mysticism” or “mystical” aspects of the poetry were problematic for readers, but for the 1867 volume reviewers were more “appreciative.” Von Frank postulates that America was becoming more comfortable with the “antinomianism” of Emerson’s poetry (lxxvi). Emerson’s brother William once suggested he get a musical friend to “trim your metres”; later, of course, Emerson in “The Poet” would say good poetry does not consist of meters but “a metre-making argument” (lxiv). His poetic theory receives thorough treatment. So does the interesting commercial context. Although New York was aggressive with distribution by rail and canal barge, Emerson declined to publish there because he could earn more by making...