RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE EVER-EVOLVING ART OF ...

transformed and wears her experiences like a robe indistinguishable from her being, and
this inspires others—like Emerson at the end of the essay—to demand self-reliance for
themselves. The only way history can be written “broader and deeper” is through the
addition of new readers, who can expand the web of textual relations simply by joining
and can deepen the idea itself by becoming supporting evidence.
However, Emerson’s conception of the functionality of language begins to evolve
from complete transparency towards something slightly opaque but vastly more
capacious by the time he begins drafting his Essays: Second Series. And although
Emerson will still continue to detail the mechanics of his intertextual subjectivity in the
other chapters of First Series, once he begins to rely on a different understanding of the
ways in which language works his ideas about reading and self-reliance also evolve and
progress. In “Spiritual Laws”, for example, Emerson begins to attribute qualities of his
ideal reader to the figure of “the poet”, and this is symptomatic of his developing
understanding that the ideal reader is also a writer in that she takes previous stagnant
ideas and makes vivifies them through her privileged relationship with language.
Language is no longer transparent, but is rather broken and in need of fixing. Curiously,
the process of fixing language has the same transformative powers for the subject as the
strictly textual relationship does as it is detailed in “History”, for
If the poet write a true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of Caesar; then
the self-same strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift,
mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the
waves of its love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned solid and precious in the
world, —marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it casts on these gauds
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