THE POET
There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy...For we are...but
children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at least two or three removes, when we know least about it... The young (wo)man reveres (wo)men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more h(er)imself than (s)he is. They receive of the soul as (s)he also receives, but they more...For all (wo)men live by truth and stand in need of expression... The (wo)man is only half h(er)imself, the other half is h(er) expression... There is no (wo)man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait to render him(er) a peculiar service...
Every touch should thrill.
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;...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... The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. (S)He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre...
Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore
the poet... is emporer in his(er) own right... The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so (s)he writes primarily what will and must be spoken...
For poetry was all written before time was... The (wo)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.The sign and credentials of the poet are that
(s)he announces that which no man foretold. (S)He is the true and only doctor; (S)he knows and tells; (S)he is the only teller of news, for (s)he was present and privy to the appearance which (s)he describes. (S)He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal... The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but The poet has a new thought; (s)he has a whole new experience to unfold; (s)he will tell us how it was with him, and all (wo)men will be richer in his(er) fortune.
in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet...We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not.
Of course
the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. (Wo)Mankind in good earnest have availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his(er) 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. (Wo)Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother(sister) who can hold him(er) steady to a truth until (s)he has made it (her)his own... This day shall be better than my birthday: then i became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real... 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.
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...
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary... We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety... The Universe is the externization of the soul... Thought makes everything fit for use.
The vocabulary of an omniscient (wo)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 connection of thought... The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts?Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word...the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole; -re-attaching even artificial things and violation of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts... (S)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 (s)he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. (S)he knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown 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 (s)he speaks (s)he rides on them as the horses of thought.The poet 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... Language is fossil poetry... But the poet names the thing because (s)he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other... 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 baptize her but baptizes herself; and this through the metamorphosis again.
...and lo! 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... 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 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(er) they will suffer...
The poet knows that (s)he speaks adequately then only when (s)he speaks somewhat wildly, or "with the flower of the mind;" not 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... 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, coffea, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration. All (wo)men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers...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 forth not to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body... So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him(er). His(er) cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and (s)he should be tipsy with water...
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York... thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pine woods... Poets are thus liberating gods... -we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence and its versatile habit and escapes, as when
the gypsies say of themselves, "it is vain to hang them, they cannot die."The poets are thus liberating gods...If a (wo)man is inflamed and carried away by his(er) thought, to that degree that (s)he forgets the authors and the public and
heeds only this one dream which holds him(er) like an insanity, let me read his(er) paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism... That is also 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... 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 behaviour, has yielded us a new thought. (S)He unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene. 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 (wo)men. But the quality of the
imagination is to flow, and not to freeze... Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to ones sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. ..Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one...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...- universal signs, instead of these village symbols, - and we shall both be gainers.
(S)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...I look in vain for the poet that i describe. .. If we fill 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. ..We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannus 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 pictures (s)he so much admires...Art is the path of the creator to his(er) work...
The poet pours out verses in every solitude... Once having tasted this immortal ichor, (s)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...O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the swordblade 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. .. Others shall be thy gentle(wo)men 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...
and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love... 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 posess 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 twighlight, 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 shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.Copywrited, 1876
Ralph Waldo Emerson
~indigenous american, patriot, minister of Jesus Christo.
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So all you fascist white power born again Christians like George W. Bush can take your King James bibles and use em as shitpaper. Then burn em. Along with your American Flags and your fucking yellow ribbons.
Not Copywrited, 2006
Joel Robert Miller
~indigenous american, poet.
