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

CHAPTER TWO
THE CENTUPLE MEANINGS OF EVERY SENSUOUS FACT:
“THE POET”, LINGUISTIC INFINITUDE, AND READING THE EXTERNAL
WORLD
During my first years in the Sierra I was ever
calling on everybody within reach to admire them,
but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson
came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all
men he would best interpret the sayings of these
noble mountains and trees.
—John Muir, “Emerson in Yosemite Valley”
Though its title suggests otherwise, “The Poet” is primarily concerned with active
reading as opposed to just creative writing. Throughout the essay Emerson claims that
both the reader and the writer are necessary for the creation of a literary work, and this
parallel is a clear invitation to the reader to supplement a text with her own biographical
information. Yet the terms of this parallel, which Emerson detailed as primarily
concerning reader and text in “History”, have evolved to be more capacious by the time
Emerson comes to write Essays: Second Series. With “The Poet” Emerson explicitly
acknowledges a multiplicity of relations—far greater, in fact, than what he maintained in
“History”— held between subject and object, and the most beautiful subjectivity is
informed by the most possible relations and meanings. Indeed, “the highest minds of the
world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or
the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact” (Emerson TP
184). Yet Emerson develops this possibility even further in the essay by purposively
abstracting the poet to a process of seeing rather than a description of a concrete
individual. As a result, Emerson’s theory of reading in this essay has evolved from a
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