THE POET by RALPH WALDO EMERSON
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century and was seen as a champion of individualism. He was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of William and Ruth (Haskins) Emerson; his father was a clergyman, as many of his male ancestors had been. He attended the Boston Latin School, followed by Harvard University (from which he graduated in 1821) and the Harvard School of Divinity. He was licensed as a minister in 1826 and ordained to the Unitarian church in 1829. Emerson married Ellen Tucker in 1829. When she died of tuberculosis in 1831, he was grief-stricken. Her death, added to his own recent crisis of faith, caused him to resign from the clergy.
In 1832 Emerson traveled to Europe, where he met with literary figures Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. When he returned home in 1833, he began to lecture on topics of spiritual experience and ethical living. He moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834 and married Lydia Jackson in 1835. Emerson’s early preaching had often touched on the personal nature of spirituality. He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller; Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman later. Emerson was significant as well for English and European intellectuals and philosophers, including George Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the American philosophers William James and John Dewey. Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.
Emerson's first book, Nature, was published anonymously in 1836 and this brief book contained all of his philosophical thoughts. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837. Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844—represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern region of the United States. The movement was a reaction to, or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality. Emerson became known as the central figure of his literary and philosophical group, now known as the American Transcendentalists. These writers shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition. In this school of thought, God was not remote and unknowable; believers understood God and themselves by looking into their own souls and by feeling their own connection to nature. Emerson played an active role in the meetings of the Transcendental Club. He believed that all of creation is one, that men and women are inherently good, that intuition is the source of truth, and that individual perception illuminates and structures the world. "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind," Emerson professed, and this view led him to criticize the traditions, beliefs, and practices of the past that restricted the intellectual and moral development of persons in the present. God dwells within, according to Emerson, and thus each person should, he said early and late, establish an "Original relation to the universe." He worked as the editor of the journal The Dial, which was recognised as the official voice of American Transcendentalism.
Emerson was one of the proponents of American Romanticism. Romanticism in America flowered somewhat later than in Europe. The American independence from British rule in 1776, that opened the path to examining national identity, the development of a distinctly American literary tradition in the light of Romantically reconceived visions of the self and nature. The major American Romantics included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. While some of these writers were influenced by European Romantics and philosophers, nearly all of them were inspired by a nationalistic concern to develop an indigenous cultural tradition and a distinctly American literature. They sought to redeem the ideas of spirit, nature, and the richness of the human self within a specifically American context. It was Emerson who laid the foundations of American Romanticism. Utilizing the ideas of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, he developed organicist ideas of nature, language, and imagination, and called for American writers to depart from the strict genres and formal hierarchies of European literary tradition and to forge their own modes of expression.
THE POET
The essay "The Poet" by Ralph Waldo Emerson was written between 1841 and 1843 and published in his Essays: Second Series in 1844. In this essay, Emerson speaks about what a true poet is and how a true poet is able to express the thoughts and puts the words, what many people cannot do. Themes concerning nature, the religious sentiment, and the transcendentalist attitude of withdrawal from the currently degraded state of politics, are brought together in the essay."The Poet" contains Emerson's thoughts on what makes a poet offering a profound look at the poem and its role in society. Emerson also expresses the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices. The essay played an instrumental role in the 1855 appearance of the first edition of Walt Whitman's collection of poems, Leaves of Grass.
The first section of the essay outlines the character of the poet as an interpreter and a visionary. Emerson begins the essay by noting that works of art are judged by umpires with their pre-knowledge of some rules and particulars, which is a ''proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs''. Unlike the intellectual, who sees no dependence between the material world and the world of thoughts and ideas, or the theologian, who relies exclusively on historical evidence for truth, the poet acknowledges an interdependence between the spiritual and the material worlds. Emerson then states that we are "children of the fire," and the energy and brilliance of this fire is similar to the spirit in each of us. Emerson calls the poet the ‘Man of Beauty’ as the poet acknowledges interdependence between the material and spiritual world.
Following the introductory paragraph, Emerson says that a poet represents humanity and that he could be called as ''the complete man''. Isolated from society, the poet has a spiritual affinity with nature. We need interpreters of what nature expresses, Emerson comments, because too many of us have distanced ourselves from nature's life-affirming spirit and could not even articulate the conversation that we had with nature. The best interpreter of nature is the poet and who sees what most of us only dream about. The poet , ''in whom all the powers are in balance'' must act as a conduit, exposing nature's hidden secrets to us.
Emerson considers the poet to one of three "children" of the universe, he constructs a system of threes: cause, operation, and effect or Christianity's Father, Spirit, and Son, and the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These triads stand for the love of truth, the love of good, and the love of beauty, respectively, with the poet representing the last element in each set. That is, the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. Emerson creates an argument formally known as a syllogism: If, as he maintains, "Beauty is the creator of the universe"; and if the poet is "the man of Beauty"; then the poet is the creator of the universe.
Emerson says that poetry is not something that was found some time back, but for ages ago, poets did exist and a poem could bring out the time that the poet existed and it is the strength of poetry. He also says here that it is not the style that matter, but the content and message to be conveyed that matters, rest everything will follow. The poet announces that which no man foretold and he is the true and only doctor. All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of the poet is the principal event in chronology. Man keeps on watching for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth until he has made it his own.
The second section of the essay deals with the mode of communication of the poet. It is the poet whose province is language; nature offers its vast variety to him as a “picture-language.” He uses the things in nature as types, as symbols; hence, objects in nature acquire a second value, and nature “is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part”. Emerson helps us to make sense of this by reminding us that the “Universe is the externization of the soul,” and that its symbolic value lies in its pointing beyond itself, toward the supernatural. Emerson considers science as something sensual and superficial.
According to him, it is not only the poets, the men of leisure and cultivation, who live with nature. But also hunters, farmers, grooms and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. He continues that it does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem and every new relation is a new word. 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. The poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. Emerson expands the notion of the poet-as-visionary and asserts that the poet, using the gift of imagination, can liberate humanity by enabling others to experience transcendental visions. He says that, by using the imagination ideas, a poet could bring elements of reality in the poem. Emerson views genius as the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind just as Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself.
In the next section, the poet releases the energizing power of our imaginations and could find our inspiration through the poet words. A poet could unlock the selfish thoughts within us and make us realize that we live in a world where we are concerned about our thoughts and needs only, turning to be very selfish. From this idea Emerson moves to the frequent association of poets with overindulgence, especially with alcohol or narcotics, which is to be understood, he says, ''to add extraordinary powers to their normal powers''. To support this point of his, Emerson quotes Milton that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is, not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine.
Emerson now returns to the importance of the poet to humanity, and this time he stresses that the poet is not only an interpreter of nature: He is akin to "liberating gods." In other words, the intellect is freed from its bondage to the restrictive bodily sphere of practical interests and survival. Emerson refers to poets as “liberating gods . . . They are free, and they make free”. They liberate us from the tyranny and fragmentation of conventional perception, from “the jailyard of individual relations,” and enable us to see ourselves and the world in a more comprehensive and far-reaching light. Every thought is a prison, says Emerson, and the poet liberates by yielding a new thought. We prize this liberation because “we are miserably dying”. And a poet ''unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene''.
In discussing this liberating aspect of poetry, Emerson invokes the name of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic and philosopher who is mentioned in many of his essays. Swedenborg is an example of the visionary who sees what others do not, and whose strange and original images allow us to view our world in a new light. At first glance, Emerson seems to be contradicting his own proclamations concerning this new American vision when he admiringly discusses Swedenborg. However, Swedenborg represents an ideal that Emerson hopes Americans will achieve for themselves.
In the final section of the essay, Emerson reflects on the need for an American poetic genius to express the particular beauty of the continent and its peoples. As with his essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson concludes by calling for poetic universality to comprehend what is peculiarly American. There exists, as yet, no poet of genius in America: “our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians . . . the northern trade, the southern planting . . . are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters”. Emerson’s words proved prophetic in Whitman’s “I sing America.” The poet is he for whom “the ideal shall be real”. Emerson is true to the Romantic inversion of the categories of the bourgeois world: that world is insular, incomplete, and denuded of all relation, all context in which it would find its true meaning. To redeem such relation is the poet’s task. Emerson reflects the need of a true American poet, like how Shakespeare was to the British and Dante to the Italians. This essay was written before Robert Frost or Walt Whitman started writing, as they are considered as answers to Emerson’s seeking. Emerson's essay conclude: '' 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''.
In "The Poet," Emerson pictures the imaginative seer as liberating us from ordinary life, which is characterized as miserable and prison like. The poet, says Emerson, “proposes Beauty as his main end,”. Like many Romantics, Emerson laments that the current age is reduced to a mechanical understanding of the world. Man at present, says Emerson, “works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom”. While Emerson appeals for a modern and exclusively American literature, Emerson himself bases his arguments on views of English writers and Romantics like William Wordsworth. Emerson thereby contradicts himself as he cannot come out of his English and European influences. Moreover, Emerson's 'poet' throughout the essay is addressed as 'he' and, on the other hand, 'nature' for Emerson is strictly feminine. In short, Ralph Waldo Emerson in this essay tries to define a poet and laments the distancing of urbans from nature. Emerson in the essay self implicatively speaks of poetry being a poet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. New Delhi: Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature and Selected Essays. New Delhi: Penguin, 2003.
Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: from Plato to the Present. New Delhi: Blackwell, 2006. Print. pp 455- 463.
Habib, M. A. R. Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present: An Introduction. Singapore: Blackwell, 2011. Print.
''Ralph Waldo Emerson''. Leitch, Vincent B. ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Ctiticism. New York: Norton, 2001. Print. pp 717-739.
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