FIRST DANISH EDITION OF "REPRESENTATIVE MEN"

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO.

Menneskehedens Repræsentanter. Syv Forelæsninger. Paa Dansk udgivet af E.M.Thorson. (Representative Men. Seven Lectures. Issued in Danish by E.M. Thorsen.)

Kjøbenhavn (Copenhagen), 1857. 8vo. Cont. hcalf. Some brownspotting. Engr. portrait. 199 pp.

Rare first Danish edition of one of the main works of the famous American philosopher, one of America's most influential and important authors, lecturers, thinkers and philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts and died in 1882. He is regarded as one of the founders of American transcendentalism and the intellectual centre of the American Renaissance. He is considered a thinker of bold originality, and his essays and lectures offer models of clarity, style, and thought, which made him a formidable presence in 19th century American life.

"For an abstract thinker he was strangely in love with the concrete facts of life. From the pages of his teeming notebooks he took the materials for his lectures, arranging and rearranging it [...]. When the lectures had served their purpose he rearranged the material in essays and published them." (Encycl. Br.). His important work "Representative Men", originally published in Boston in 1850, is the second of these collections. In it he deals with "The Uses of Great Men", and thereby treats the highly important question at the time: The differences between the genious and the "ordinary" man. He firmly believed that "There is one mind common to all individual men, and that "in every work of genious we recognize our own rejected thoughts." The work was published in Danish in the late Golden Age of this country, and might very well have influenced intellectual life at the time immediately after Kierkegaard.
Emerson was a close friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, and he often took walks with them in Concord. It was Emerson who encouraged Thoreau's talent and early career, and the land on which Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond belonged to Emerson. He was a great supporter of abolitionism, and his anti-slavery statements caused him many problems. In 1856 he said: "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom."

Order-nr.: 7161