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Emerson as Poet of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

If It may be said of Emerson's Writings that

      In his every syllable
      Lurketh Nature veritable,

Thoreau should be given much, perhaps most, of the credit. For Emerson owed as much to Thoreau in respect to the material world as Thoreau owed to him in respect to the world of spirit. Remove the details of material nature from Emerson's essays, and you will rob them of much of their charm and power, since the author would be in perpetual danger of soaring aloft, balloon-fashion, among his “Circles” in worlds unrealised. Remove them from his Poems, where the sensuous, the concrete, is vitally necessary, and the poetry itself is gone with them. By a most happy conjunction of events, the very man who perhaps of all his countrymen had most to give Emerson, was his fellow-townsman, his friend, his companion in countless walks to the pine-groves, a valued assistant in editing the Dial, the guardian of his hearth while he sojourned abroad, and a sympathetic interpreter and critic of his inner life. Their friendship was not, of course, a free union of personalities, though we must make allowance for the stiffnesses of the Puritan tradition and bear in mind that, if Emerson would as soon think of embracing a tree as putting his arm around Henry, the forbidding Henry could be a charming Piper of Hamelin to the Emerson children, could sing his favorite “Tom Bowling” under the shelter of a rock during a shower in the presence of R. W. E. himself, and, when the mood was right, could dance with something like abandon.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 1922 , pp. 599 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1922

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References

1 He thought of calling his chief collection of essays, that of 1841, Forest Essays.

2 See the gracious memorial written by one of these children, Dr. Edward Emerson: Henry Thoreau, as Remembered by a Young Friend, Boston, 1917.

3 Violet, rose, rhodora, laurel, lily, water-lily, cowslip, gentian, aster, flag, pickerel-weed, bilberry, daffodil, succory, columbine, agrimony, clover, catchfly, adder's tongue, blackberry, orchis, linnaea, hyson, wall-flower, rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, blue vetch, trillium, hawkweed, sassafras, milkweed, Indian pipe, sundew, pulse, wild grape, lespedeza, tulip, lilac, azalea, mallow, whip-scirpus, polygonum, hypnum, hydnum, harebell, barberry, anemony, wild tea, wild pea, coreopsis, liatris, peppermint, sweet fern, mint, panax, elder, sarsaparilla, vanilla, hellebore, checkerberry, polygala, benzoin, mouse-ear, wintergreen, goldenrod, bulrush. (A few of these may duplicate each other; it is not always clear what species Emerson meant.)