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.