Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Poet

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Poet remains one of the most influential works in American
Critical Theory. It is an essay so finely wrought and intricately layered that it borders at times on unapproachable, not because of the difficulty of its theory (though this is a serious work of high academia), but because of its vast spread. Arguments are dislocated across the work, conclusions are divorced from their premises by pages. Yet the work never strays to the ecstatic fervor of Nature and is salvaged by the prose which flows smoothly even as it flitters from point to point, reaching a conclusion eventually in a unique system constructed, as ever with the Emersonian project, from the reassembled remnants of Continental theory with a uniquely democratic, …show more content…
Emerson does not believe himself a poet so much as a Sydney-an commentator, begging for the rise of an American literature and, by extension, an American theory of criticism. Although we have already discussed The Poet as if it were poetry, we will grant Emerson his wish to be a commentator and investigate the poet as an abstract figure. Until this point in the history of criticism, the poet has been described at best as the receiver of a gift from God, the gods, or the muses - a person possessed by a creative force. The body is not a great sagacity9, says Emerson, into which fire is brought or carried as if in a pan. The human is a child of fire, “made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, when we least know about …show more content…
We have now drawn a sketch of the agents of Emerson’s system. The Greeks held the poet as mouthpiece of the gods, the early Christians as creators of allegory in the name of Christ. With the rise of rationalism the poet was attributed an urge to mimic the empirical experience of life. With Dryden and later the rise of romanticism, the poem was given estate as sovereign object. Emerson completes this evolution. The poet creates the poem of necessity to himself. He creates it because he experiences the world phenomenally and feels an inescapable urge to produce a thing that expresses this desire. He is acting of his own accord and yet is immediately aware that what he is doing is creation. He is not mime, but god. At the very boundaries of the expression that failed to soothe him in the build-up he breaks through and draws new boundaries within the universe, boundaries limited only by his own ability to represent the phenomena of experience. He is acting with self-interest and simultaneously creating something timeless and lasting out of necessity. Thus, the poem enters the world and is immediately its own object, constructed of objects in the world (text) but simultaneously animated with the spirit of the poet. But it is, of course, not the poet. He has left his deathless offspring to the world in another fit of necessary