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The Poet - Emerson Poetry
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> 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.

Summary:

In his essay "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson explores the nature of
poetry, the creative process, and the role of the poet in society.
Emerson sees poets as individuals with the unique ability to perceive
and communicate the underlying beauty, truth, and interconnectedness of
the world. According to him, the poet's role is to be a "liberating god"
who can elevate and inspire others through the power of their words and
imagination.

Emerson believes that true poets possess a deep intuition and
understanding of the natural world, enabling them to articulate
universal truths and emotions. Their work transcends ordinary language,
giving expression to the "inexpressible" and revealing the hidden
connections between all things. For Emerson, poetry is a unifying force
that can bridge the gap between the material and the spiritual, the
individual and the collective, and the mundane and the divine.

In "The Poet," Emerson emphasizes the importance of originality and
authenticity in creative expression. He argues that great poets must be
able to break free from tradition and convention, tapping into their
inner vision to create works that genuinely resonate with others. By
doing so, they can elevate the collective consciousness, awaken a sense
of wonder, and ultimately transform the world through the power of their
art.

Overall, Emerson's essay offers a profound and insightful exploration of
the nature of poetry, the creative process, and the role of the poet in
society, highlighting the power of art to illuminate the human
experience and inspire change.

----------------------------

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](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/swedenborg-the-mystic/),
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 confess that he is
plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our
low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the
torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the
herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius
is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and
statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks
and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of
conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the
children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses
is primary.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, —
a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or
an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a
new thing. 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. The poet has a
new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us
how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For,
the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world
seems always waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was young, how
much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a
youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, and gone rambling
none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell
whether that which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing
but that all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How
gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We
sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars.
Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or
was much farther than that. Rome, — what was Rome? Plutarch and
[Shakespeare](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/shakespeare-the-poet/)
were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is
much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very
roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these
stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the
oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all
night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every
one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how
much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is
profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A
mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into
our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of
its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.
Mankind, in good earnest, have availed so far in understanding
themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak
announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase
will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world
for that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the
principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still
watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth,
until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem,
which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be
broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I
live, — opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from the heaven of
truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to
life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to
know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men
and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools
and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an
animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope,
but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man,
who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps
and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is
bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving
that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that
I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a
little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing,
all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I
tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of
exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of
any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how
nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his
office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things,
which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers
all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a
second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old
value, as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close
enough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every
image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of
being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in
every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and
there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of
character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of
health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty should be
sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful rests on the
foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise
Spenser teaches: —

> "So every spirit, as it is most pure,
> And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
> So it the fairer body doth procure
> To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
> With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
> For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
> For soul is form, and doth the body make."

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in
a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before
the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and
Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is,
that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and
therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and
chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these
are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said
Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the
splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with
the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, science
always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step
with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of
our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power,
if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding
faculty in the observer is not yet active.

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them
with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance
of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every
man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of
nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the
celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who
loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and
cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms,
and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of
life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the
coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not
superficial qualities. When you talk with him, he holds these at as
slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions,
but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be
there present. No imitation, or playing of these things, would content
him; he loves the earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood,
and iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can
see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the
supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse,
but sincere rites.

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of every
class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are
not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs.
In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See
the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the
political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and
Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the
hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the
power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a
lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how,
on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of
the earth, shall 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!

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of
the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a
temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments
of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not
carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in
events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when
nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes every thing fit for use. The
vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded
from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the
obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The
piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is
an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small
and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by
which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting
in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in
which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found
suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord
Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary, when he
was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich
enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge
of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few
actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are
far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We
can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need
that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new
relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred
purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such
only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe,
defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness
to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that
makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the
Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature,
to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily of the most
disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the
railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by
these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading;
but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the
beehive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast
into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her
own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many
mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so
surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The
spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no
mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.
A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the
complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not
that he does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw
such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place
for the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the
great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every
circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of
America, are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is
he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and
absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through
which it is named, — yet they cannot originally use them. We are
symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools, words and
things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the
symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do
not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual
perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and
puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. He
perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability
of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of
Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world
to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.
For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to
things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is
multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling
it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life,
uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the
flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment,
gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into
the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher
fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the
form. This is true science. 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
strewn 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.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker,
naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their
essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby
rejoicing the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/),
which delights in detachment or boundary. 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. As the
limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of
animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in
their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic
origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one
step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not
art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a
tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or
change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave
another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the
metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me
thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether
wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her
kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so
she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one
of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or
next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had
not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the
accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man; and
having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of
losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that
the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed.
So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she
detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless,
sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of
the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with
wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which
carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of
men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus
flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous
flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to
devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short
leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out
of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet
ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a
higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely,
*ascension*, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, in
my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which
stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell
directly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections
he could tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn,
and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came,
and, for many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and,
lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful
youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons
who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood,
and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but *alter idem*, in a
manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which
things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint
their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration
of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their
essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher
organic forms, is their change into melodies. 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. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith,
that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which
they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not
be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the
resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is
an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without
falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored,
is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why
should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our
spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a
very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/)
being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things
through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of
things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they
will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own
nature, — him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the
poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine *aura* which
breathes through forms, and accompanying that.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond
the energy of his possessed and conscious
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/),
he is capable of a new energy (as of an
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/)
doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside
his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public
power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human
doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through
him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is
thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible
as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately,
then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the
mind;" not with the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/),
used as an organ, but with the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/)
released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its
celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not
with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As
the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's
neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must
we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if
in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened
for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and
highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea,
opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species
of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they
can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this
end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing,
theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or
science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer
*quasi*-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the
ravishment of the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/)
by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal
tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him
to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that
jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great
number of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters,
poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a
life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true
nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was
an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser
places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation
and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a
trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator,
comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision
comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is
not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit
excitement and fury. Milton says, 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. It is with this as it is
with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all
manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the
plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the
animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the
poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, 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-imbedded stone, on which the dull March
sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of
simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with
fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine
and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely
waste of the pinewoods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other
men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The
use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for
all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run
about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave
or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables,
oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have
really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or
nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does
not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of
algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is
felt in every definition; as, when Aristotle defines *space* to be an
immovable vessel, in which things are contained; — or, when Plato
defines a *line* to be a flowing point; or, *figure* to be a bound of
solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when
Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can
build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When
Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies
by certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful
reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls
the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are
animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root,
which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman, following him,
writes, —

> "So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
> Springs in his top;"

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks
extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/);
when Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse,' compares good blood in mean
condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt
this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and
burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw,
in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars
fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; when Aesop
reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the
masquerade of birds and beasts; — we take the cheerful hint of the
immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as when
the gypsies say, "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die."

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for
the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the world."
They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much
more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than
afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think
nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and
extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to
that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only
this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper,
and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the
value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa,
Cardan, Kepler,
[Swedenborg](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/swedenborg-the-mystic/),
Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his
cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism,
and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and
that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in
conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball,
in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study,
when an emotion communicates to the
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/)
the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations,
times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large
figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the
drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion,
in our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of
the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in
a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state
of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably
dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is
wonderful. What if you come near to it, — you are as remote, when you
are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison;
every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor,
who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and
behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and
admits us to a new scene.

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it
must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/).
Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that
truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his
exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take
care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the
ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The
poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning;
neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects
exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet
and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a
true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols
are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as
ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for
homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and
individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to
be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand
to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same
realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the
symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller
polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good
to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held
lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms
which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you
say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.
Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, —
universal signs, instead of these village symbols, — and we shall both
be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious
error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last,
nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

[Swedenborg](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/swedenborg-the-mystic/),
of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of
nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things
stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually
plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral
nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his
angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in
their hands. The noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and
thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The
men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like
dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each other, they appeared as
men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their cabin, they
complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that
they might see.

There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer, an
object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of men,
may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different
aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as
conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children, who were
at some distance, like dead horses: and many the like misappearances.
And instantly the mind inquires, whether these fishes under the bridge,
yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are immutably
fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance to
themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all
eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if
any poet has witnessed the transformation, he doubtless found it in
harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as
considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw
us with love and terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm
nature, and can declare it.

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient
plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor
dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the
day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and
nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new
religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that
he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into
universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye,
which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the
barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same
gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age;
then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus,
methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest
on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of
Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and
their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and
our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest
men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,
Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes;
its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long
for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in
my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea
of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five
centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than poets, though
there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the
poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too
literary, and Homer too literal and historical.

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old
largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the
poet concerning his art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods, are
ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself
for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The
painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator,
all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and
abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put
themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before
some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the
people; and the others, in such scenes as each has found exciting to his
[intellect](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/intellect/);
and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a
beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem
him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, "By God, it
is in me, and must go forth of me." 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;' but the poet knows well that it is not
his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain
hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal
ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power
exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these
things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops of
all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that
these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the
necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in
the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that
thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand
there, baulked 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; a power
transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the
conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps,
or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as
exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer
exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his
mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world.
This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion
of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if
wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer,
[Shakespeare](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/shakespeare-the-poet/),
and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits
of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street,
ready to render an image of every created thing.

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in
castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but
equal. 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. For the time of towns is tolled
from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are
counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy
on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life,
and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy
gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee;
others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie
close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the
Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and
this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season.
This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his
well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they
shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to
rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before
the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to
thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer
rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou
shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath
and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers
thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only
tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! 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
shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a
condition inopportune or ignoble.



------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and
public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and
best-loved 19th-century figures.
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himself the courage of other persons."
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