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The Poet

from Essays: Second Series (1844)

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.

The Poet - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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, 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.

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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,

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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

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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

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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 Shakspeare 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

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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: —

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"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.

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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!

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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,

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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

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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, 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:

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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!

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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 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.

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It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his

possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an 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, used as an organ, but with the 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 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

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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

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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; 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

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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, 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 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

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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. 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

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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, 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.

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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

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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; 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

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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, Shakspeare, 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,

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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.

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