Emerson’s “The Poet”

“The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!”

If I handed you an essay called “The Poet,” you’d likely expect an analysis of, say, the poet’s meter or imagery and symbolism. But if the essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet,” you won’t find any of this. Rather, you’ll read that “it is not meters but meter-making argument that makes a poem.” And “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol.”

To what extent, these quotes lead me to ask, is Emerson’s “The Poet” actually about the poet?

Well, to some extent. Here, for instance, is how Emerson sees the poet’s relation to language. The poet is, for a start, “the Namer or Language-maker. . . . The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, . . . a sort of tomb of the muses. . . . The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”

Look at the leap Emerson makes in these lines: from the poet as “language-maker,” to every word born as a “brilliant picture,” to the famous “Language is fossil poetry.”

Then, in a passage that itself sounds poetic, Emerson exalts the poet’s gifts: “The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.”

Elsewhere, more prosaically, Emerson offers a sort of definition of the poet: “The poet is . . . the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man.” So the poet represents all of us by finding language for what the rest of us only dream of.

However, often in the essay, Emerson seems to contradict the poet’s uniqueness and to claim each of us to be poets. Take these luscious lines:

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. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. (boldface mine)

And similarly:

See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle . . . on an old rag of bunting . . . make the blood tingle under the rudest or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!

But Emerson goes even further. Beyond every person’s transforming natural phenomena into poetry, nature itself is exalted as a poet: “The pairing of birds is an idyl . . . ; a tempest is a rough ode . . . ; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped and stored, is an epic song.”

As striking as this passage is, something even more remarkable happens in the essay’s final two paragraphs. Suddenly Emerson is apostrophizing the poet—who has evidently returned to being a person:

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say “It is in me, and shall out.” Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own . . .

What’s with that “thee” and “thine”? They seem, with their biblical echoes, to be Emerson’s way of announcing the poet’s mission as transcendent; and they continue through the essay’s long closing paragraph:

“O poet! . . . Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. . . . And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee. . . .” Until in the essay’s final lines Emerson waxes ecstatic: “Thou shalt have the whole land for thy part and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation . . . ; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own. . . . Thou true land-lord! Sea-lord! Air-lord!”

Then comes the final rhapsodic sentence:

Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love—there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

Whew! I don’t know whether to say “Amen!” or “What brought this on?”.

I can say, in summary, that there’s a wonderful wildness in this essay. Emerson swings from the poet as writer of poems, to every man as a poet, to nature as poet, then finally to this ecstatic apostrophe to (presumably) the poet as person again—though elevated to almost divine status. Which recalls for me a statement earlier in the essay:

“Poets are thus liberating gods.”

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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