2 - Emerson and the Language of Nature

Summary

References to the “language of nature” or the “rhetoric of things,” or to uses of language in which words aspire to become one with things, occur frequently in Emerson's essays and journals and may be taken as a sign of what Richard Poirier sees as Emerson's total obsession with language, an obsession whose consequences for literature far outweigh its significance for linguistics. Emerson's importance as a theorist of language, in fact, lies not so much in the originality or profundity of his thinking as in the expressive power of some of his formulations of ideas about language. Thus, when he says that language is “fossil poetry,” or when he addresses the corruption of language in terms of a situation in which “a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults,” it is as if he is responding to his own sense that what the health of language requires is literature, which is to say the creation of “new imagery” (SW, 199), or what Pound calls “making it new.” Literature, and language too, we might say, are most threatened by the assumption that they already exist, or by the failure to exercise them creatively, and this is especially the case for a writer who demands, as Emerson does, “a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition” (SW, 186).

A logical starting-point for a discussion of Emerson and language, in any case, is certainly the romantic assumption about the unity of language and the world, even though in his writing this very assumption is often regarded with skepticism.