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

of men, —these are all his, and by the power of these he rouses the nations.
(Emerson SL 162)
There is something unique about the act of writing that elevates the poet to the post of an
emperor, who then has the ability to awaken the sleeping giants. Indeed, it is the ability
to repair misused diction and rotting metaphors, and “to sweep and scour will instantly
appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people
will get mops and brooms…and that is now the flower and head of all living nature”
(Emerson SL 162). Emerson’s poet, as it will be made clear in the essay of that name,
only assumes this post after having demonstrated active reading, though what he means
by that idea has become more capacious than before. As such, Emerson’s secret to self-
reliance remains the same, but it is informed in novel ways by Emerson’s growing theory
of language and identity. He even foreshadows this development in the very last line of
“History” where he maintains that, “The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled
farmer’s boy, stand nearer the light by which nature is to be read than the dissector or the
antiquary” (Emerson HST 120). What the idiot, Indian, and the child possess that the
academic reader—who privileges analysis to the detriment of synthesis—does not is a
clearer sense of vision that exhumes the secrets of nature by revealing the network of
connections it shares with the whole chain of organic and inorganic beings. It is this
process of seeing—of inspired vision as the ideal mode of reading—that characterizes
Emerson’s “poet” above all else, and this has interesting implications for the
development of self-reliance in the subject.
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