Lecture Resources

Lecture 2b:  Emerson: `The Poet'  

Emerson, “The Poet” (1844)

 Text: Norton Anthology, 1144-1159

 The relation of the poet to humanity

 “The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man…. All men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. “ (1145) 

 Jove                =  Father          =  Knower        =  love of truth           

 Pluto                =  Spirit             =  Doer            =  love of good          

 Neptune          =  Son              =  Sayer            =  love of beauty         =  Poet

 “Nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known.”  (1146)

 “the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, who names things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence”  (1151) 

 “Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not.”  (1145)

 “Words and deeds are quite different modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”  (1146) 

“it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that … it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. “  (1146)

 “Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.”  (1147) 

 “let us, with new hope observe how nature … has ensured the poet’s fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed.”  (1147-8)

 “all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration”  (1148)

 “It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural … which he worships”  (1149)

 “The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine.  The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.”  (1153)

 Emerson’s idealism

 “nature has a higher end in the production of new individuals … the passage of the soul into higher forms.”  (1152)

 “Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody.”  (1152)

 Symbols in nature and poetry

 “Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.”  (1148)

 “The universe is the externalisation of the soul … Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial.”  (1148)

 “the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity”  (1149)

 “We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death all are emblems”  (1150)

 “he does not stop at … facts, but employs them as signs.”  (1151)

 “poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally.”  (1152)

 “The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men…. this is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.”  (11540

 Language

 “Every word was once a poem.  Every new relation is a new word.”  (1149-50)

 “The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it.”  (1150)

 “The poet … puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object.”  (1150)

 “language is the archives of history … a sort of tomb of the muses.”  (1151)

 “when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs,—a … deathless progeny … the songs thus flying immortal from their mortal parent”  (1151) 

 “we participate the invention of nature …. By what is called Imagination … a very high sort of seeing, which  … (comes) by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others…. A new energy … by abandonment to the nature of things”  (1152)

 “new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.”  (1153)

 “I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.”  (1155)

 “the quality of the imagination is to flow, not to freeze…. Here is the difference between the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false.  For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive…. Religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid”  (1155, 1156)

 The prophetic element in the essay

 “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.”  (1156)

 “”our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our ..…. are yet unsung.  Yet America is a poem to our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”  (1157)

 “What a little of all we know is said!”  (1158)

 Suggestions for a Project

      1.                   The relation of Emerson’s thought to his Puritan forebears. 

2.                   The relation of Emerson to British Romanticism.