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.
ESSAY : The Poet
1. 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…
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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…
6. 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.
7. 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… (Here
he describes lesser poets… mere singers… form without contenet… but he is not
speaking of those. –KK)
8. 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…
9...
10. 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… "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…
11. 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.
12. … 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.
13. 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!
14. … Thought makes every thing fit for use… 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.
15. 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… 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.
16. 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 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.
17. 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…
18…
19…
20. 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.
21. 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…
22. 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… 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…
23. 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. (I kept
this last line in just for Kenneth).
24. 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… I think nothing is of any value
in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary…
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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
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.
28…
29…
30. 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… 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…
31. 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.
32. 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; 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…
33. Doubt not, O poet, but persist…
34. 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.
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