Distinctive qualities of Emerson’s poetry
Emerson was an
inspired poet who writes from inner conviction and not according to rules and
regulations. His philosophy of life, based essentially on the authenticity of
intuition and – genuine emotion, is, in sense, a poetic view of life. His views
on the nature and function of poets and poetry have been forcefully expressed
in the essay on The Poet. His poetry is to be assessed in terms of his general
philosophical outlook. As a theorist of aesthetic experience, he always
emphasized the supremacy of poetic inspiration over more technical skill. A
poet, according to him, is not a mere craftsman, but a seer and a visionary,
“It is not metres,” he says in his essay on The Poet, “but a metre-making
argument that makes a poem.” And is not, “America a
poem in our eyes that may not wait long for metres.”
“It is in me,
and shall out” This statement embodies the fundamental tenet of Emerson’s
theory of poetic communication. It is only thought “Expression is all we need,
not knowledge, but power to express.” Emerson further elaborates his concept of
expression as an activity that seeks consummation only through complete freedom
of thought and emotion. True expression cannot permit authority or dogma to sap
its vitality. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks
somewhat wildly, or “with the flow of the mind,” not with the intellect used as
an organ, “but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to
take its direction from its celestial life.”
According to
Emerson, the poets are liberating gods. They are free and they make us free. An
imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us
through its figurative language. Then afterward we arrive at the special sense
of the author. “I think nothing is of any value in books excepting the
transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is influenced and carried away by
his thought to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public and has
only this one dream which holds him like an insanity, let him read his paper
and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism.
Emerson’s theory
of poetic diction carries over-tones from Wordsworth’s theory of ‘lingua
communist’. Like Wordsworth he believes that the language of poetry should be
simple, unvarnished and shorn of all artificialities. It should be spontaneous
and never strained or bent to a specific purpose. It is the same belief in the
potency and vigour of the simple word that explains the irresistible charm of
Whitman’s poetry. In fact, it has now been established that Whitman in working
out his own theory of poetic language, was greatly influenced by his Master,
Emerson.
Emerson was a
rebel, like Shelley, against tradition and orthodoxy and this note of revolt is
there, in his poetry also. As is clear from his essay on “The Poet”, he had a
high conception of poetry and regarded the poet as ‘pivotal man’ who must think
in his own original way and reject all that is hackneyed in thought or in word
and phrase, in language, diction and versification and imagery. He believed
that poetry comes into being as the result of inspiration. In that moment the
poet sees the very essence of things. The poet makes the unseen visible by
means of language. But he is not the conscious creator. “His vision shows him
the symbols and the thought takes it own form in language that is rhythmical.
Because of this, there is a certain indwelling beauty in poetry……poetry is
spiritual and forms a link between the visible and invisible world.”
Emerson valued
the poet because the poet uses his imagination to discern the meanings of
sensuous facts. The poet sees and expresses the beauty in Nature; he recognizes
the spiritual meaning of natural phenomena. He takes old symbols and gives them
new uses, thereby making nature the sign of God. The poet’s insight is “a very
high sort of seeing,” a way of transcending conventional modes in order to
attend directly to the forms of things. “The poets are thus liberating gods,
they are free, and they make us free.”
In some of his
poems, Emerson achieves epigrammatic terseness and near perfection of diction.
According to Paul Elmer More, “his noblest work in verse must be sought in
those quatrains which need no context for their comprehension and might be
called “spiritual ejaculations.” Such quatrains are “exceptional” not in
Emerson alone; they are exceptional in literature. One would have to search far
to find anything in English equal to them. They have the clarity and radiance
of the best poets. They may look easy, but as a matter of fact the ethical
epigram is an extremely difficult genre, and to attain this union of gravity
and simplicity requires the nicest art. Sometimes, as in Days, Emerson achieves
“a haunting beauty” rare in poetry.
Emerson was a
poet among philosophers, and a philosopher among poets. We have already noted
above the expression of Hindi philosophy in his poetry. In the poem Merlin he
tells us that the poet who turns his lyre to Nature’s music will rediscover for
himself essential truth. “Poetry to Emerson was not merely a suggestive art
through which the poet could teach direct lessons of wisdom; it was a function
of his own being as an individual seeking truth. The poet is the student the
receiver of wisdom; not the teacher. Poetry is moral, but it is no didactic.”
The inspiration
for Emerson’s poetry and for his poetic theory came directly from Plato and
from the seventeenth century British “metaphysical” poets, George Herbert, John
Donne, and their fellows. From for him was inherent in substance, because the
laws of art must be equivalent at every point with the laws of Nature. The
poets who san in that great age of scientific inquiry, following the disturbing
discoveries of Galileo and Newton , were forced to open their minds to the evidence of Nature, even
where they seemed to be in conflict with the supposed rules of an arbitrary
God. The nineteenth century was facing a similar intellectual crisis. Once,
again, the spirit of scientific inquiry was destroying old dogmas and re-asking
the old questions. It was the very confusion of thinking in his age that
attracted Emerson, as that of an earlier age had attracted Donne, to an
attitude of scepticism.
Emerson’s
favourite image of the Aeolian harp, the lyre that plays when its strings are
caught by the breeze, aptly describes his view of the primary role of the poet.
“Poetry was all written before time was,” he tells us in his essay on The Poet,
“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.” The poet has his special function in the order of nature; he is,
“the sayer, the namer, and he represents beauty.” He is important to his age
because. “The experience of each new age requires a new confession and the
world seems always waiting for its poet.”
“In stating so
clearly his case for an organic view of art,” Emerson was describing not only
his own method but the instinctive approach of most really great American
writers. Only when the artist takes upon himself the responsibility for
rediscovering a central vision can he hope to deal with a new experience. The
earlier American writers had hoped to borrow their forms and methods from Old World authors, but Emerson
told them, “It is not metres but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—the
thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of
genesis the thought is prior to the form.” Only by a totally fresh evaluation
of his own experience, he might have added, could the American artist hope to
find the form which is inherent in what he discovers.
Next to
organicism, his most important contribution to American poetry was his use of
the symbol. For him Nature was itself a symbol of the spirit, and particular
natural facts were symbols of particular spiritual facts; finally, words were
symbols of natural facts. The poet who discovers the right symbol has revealed
his share of truth. He is an intellectual and pictorial music, not heard but
seen. His own poems at their best are rugged in metre, but their argument is
conveyed in sustained symbols. The modern “metaphysical” poetry was Emerson’s
invention for America . One of the oldest of the methods of art, it required a
reaffirmation before it could be used for the new experience freely by Thoreau,
Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot and others.
But Emerson
lacked the gift of sustained construction and development and is at his best
only in his shorter pieces. According to W. C. Brownwell, “the major
shortcomings of Emerson’s poetry, are the absence of art, lack of communication
with the world; its esoteric and elusive, nature.” His poetry is meant to
please himself, it has “experimental, tentative, adventurous air.” Woodberry
maintains that Emerson was, “fundamentally a poet with an imperfect faculty of
expression.” He is rather deficient in sentiment, “Neither passion for pathos,
nor indeed any depth of feeling properly to be called human, fell in with
Emerson’s scheme of things.” His idealism was, in essence, intellectual. One
may almost say that he shrinks from feeling. “His poetry lacks Donne’s wit, Milton ’s loftiness
of style and vocabulary. The ardour and lyricism of the great Romantic poets,
too, is not there, nor is there the restraint of the classicists and their
formal perfection. Emerson’s real greatness appears in the Essays, and not in
his poems.”
Emerson seldom
wrote? Perfect poem because of his failure to abandon the arbitrary laws of
metre and rhyme that he rejected in theory and that he could not himself
master. But in their singleness of vision and in their symbolism, his best
poems are designed on a grander scale than anything before Whitman.
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