TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the introductions and conclusions of the essays of 1836, 1837, and 1838 and note the poetical setting into which the essays are cast. With these in mind read the foregoing comments on Emerson’s poetry (pp. 213–215).
Compare the Emerson and Lowell essays on Shakespeare.
Compare any corresponding sections in Emerson’s “Representative Men” and Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero Worship.”
Read Emerson’s “English Traits” and Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home” for a comparison in the points of view of the two Americans.
Read any two or three essays for the nature element in them, the kind of things alluded to, and the kind of significances derived from them.
Read any one or two essays for Emerson’s allusions to science and to the sciences, the kinds of allusions made, and the kind of significances derived from them.
Follow the footnote on page 214 for a comparison of Emerson’s treatments of the same theme in prose and verse. Read also his poem “Threnody” and the corresponding passage in the Journal for the winter of 1842.
Read the essay on Goethe and see whether in Emerson’s judgment of Goethe as a German national character he agrees with or dissents from the judgment of the twentieth century. Compare with Santayana’s estimate of Goethe in “Three Philosophical Poets.”
A sense of the ecclesiastical and theological unrest in Emerson’s day can be secured through the reading of Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks,” Charles Kingsley’s “Yeast,” Anthony Trollope’s “Barchester Towers”; or in poetry, in the poems of doubt of Arnold and Clough and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”