ESSAYS
_Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson
THE POET
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
ESSAY I _The Poet
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons
knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination
for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are
beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures,
you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is
local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce
fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts
is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of
color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a
proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the
minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of
the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of
forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put
into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the
germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the
intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the
material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a
pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a
cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the
solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented
with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from
the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the
highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double
meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much
more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of
sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor
even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire,
made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or
three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth,
that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures,
floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the
consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of
Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect
of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is
representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man,
and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. The
young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are
more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also
receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of
loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at
the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and
by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will
draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand
in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in
labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is
only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate
expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an
interpreter; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who
have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot
report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man
who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars,
earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar
service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in
our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect.
Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists.
Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist,
that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in
our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive
at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the
reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom
these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and
handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of
experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the
largest power to receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which
reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether
they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically,
Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and
the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the
Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love
of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is
that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or
analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent
in him, and his own patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is
a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted,
or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made
some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in
his own right. 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, overlooking the fact,
that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world
to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose
province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But
Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's
victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or
the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes
primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though
primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as
sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who
bring building materials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are
so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the
air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write
them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and
substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men
of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and
these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.
For 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.
Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy.
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces
that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows
and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and
privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of
ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not
speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in
metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other
day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind,
whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms,
and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently
praise. But when the question arose, whether he was not only a
lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to ...
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