First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

Art Is the Path

Nature 71 Though we often think of Emerson as an essayist, his strongest and most lasting self-identification was as a poet. He told Lydia Jackson when he was courting her that poetry was his vocation, noting wryly that his singing was very husky and “is for the most part in prose.” By “poet” he meant “versemaker ,” and something more. He often used the word to take in what we now mean by “writer,” and his essay “The Poet” is arguably the best single piece ever written about expressionism in literature, the idea that expression, including selfexpression , is a basic human need, and is the fundamental function of literature. When he advises young Woodbury to “let the noun do the work,” or tells young Henry Thoreau to keep a journal, or tells Elizabeth Peabody precisely how to keep a journal, we see Emerson at his practical best. This is the less well-known, the workshop side of the man. “The Poet” gives us the other, more theoretical, better-known side. He is only one paragraph into the essay when he proposes a sweeping theory of literature—of art, really. “The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete Art Is the Path 72 Nature 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.” This is a vehemently anti-elitist view of the artist. The artist , the poet, is not a special or a different kind of person; rather, he or she has developed more completely than most people the poetic impulse all people share. And because we all share this impulse, the poet is assured that communication is at least possible. The poet may be “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.” Perhaps “expressing” would be a better choice of words, for Emerson points out that the essential thing about poetry is the process not the product. Thus he insists that the poet is “the sayer, the namer,” and pointedly not the maker. Of course he is interested in the end product, the completed poem, but he is comparatively more concerned with how it is all brought about, with the process of poetry. This is because, as he now says, “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.” The poems were all there before the poet appeared. So Emerson can say “America is a poem in our eyes,” and he can argue that the world is a poem, and everything in nature is a poem, if only we can see it, catch it, and write it down. “Nature’s first green is gold,” writes Robert Frost, 72 Art Is the Path Nature 73 Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower, But only so an hour. The poem is there, in nature, right in front of the poet’s eyes. His or her job is first of all to notice and second, to get it down. “For it is not metres,” Emerson goes on, “but a metremaking argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has a new architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing.” Watching a snowstorm one day, Emerson made notes in his journal: Announced by all the trumpets of the winds Arrived the snow and driving o’er the field, seems nowhere to alight. The whited air hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven and veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end. The traveler stopped and sled the courier’s feet delayed all friends shut out the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace enclosed in a tumultuous privacy of storm. Come see the Northwind’s masonry out of an unseen quarry evermore furnished with projected...