The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Poet

This essay was really enlightening for me.  We know Emerson more as a philosopher, than a poet or a critic, but he was the voice for poetry during his lifetime - the inspiration, mentor and friend of Walt Whitman and this long treatise on poetry delves deeply in to the perspective he has for this form of writing.  He writes, “With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration.”

Then he goes on to look at poetry in his own analytic way and suggests that “Every word was once a poem.”  This is fascinating because he sees the power in each word and how that power can shape a picture or image for the reader, “The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it."

I have been working to review poetry for Lake Superior magazine's next issue and this has caused me to not just read poetry, but to think about it.  I found myself thinking about the concept of "to turn a phrase" and thinking instead that poetry phrases the turns in our perception.

In the following paragraph Emerson goes further in this analysis and I am going to take the liberty to underline phrases that really spoke to me.  “The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.  For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.  The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.  Language is fossil poetry.”

In this reflection the poet is put in the unenviable position of needing to let their own lives move to the background and let life as it surrounds them take over the pen. “So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low, that the common influences should delight him.  His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.  That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-embedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste.”

Finally we begin to see that poetry in its purest form and within the essay Emerson bemoans how few poets are really writing the highest level of poem.  “Art is the path of the creator to his work.”  The creator is not a god, but the poet. “He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him.  The poet pours out verses in every solitude.  Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful.  That charms him.  He would say nothing else, but such things.  In our way of talking, we say, ‘That is yours, this is mine..."

and then we come to the crux of this dialogue.  The product of the poet, the essence of the poem is moving and inspiring, but in fact comes from beyond the writer - "but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is a strange and beautiful thing to him as to you…”