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

site of negotiation. Indeed, the more the subject reads, the better she can encompass and
exemplify the whole of nature, serving as a particular that can explain nature using the
details of her own newly expanded experience.
Emerson wastes little time before offering his own definition of his ideal creative
writer, and it is clear that this writer has access to a special kind of perception. Emerson
says, “The poet is the person … without impediment, who sees and handles that which
others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in
virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart” (Emerson TP 184). With the
emphasis on “seeing” and traversing “the whole scale of experience,” Emerson makes it
explicitly clear that poet’s offices are experiential and lie outside the actual composition
of verses. Emerson believes that “if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is
because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active” (Emerson TP 187),
but the poet has such active faculties that few sensory stimuli goes unobserved. Like
Emerson’s self-reliant reader of history, the poet exhumes the forgotten connections
between even the most remote natural phenomena and some corresponding feature
capable of assimilating it into her own consciousness. For Emerson, “This insight, which
expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does
not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path,
or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others” (Emerson TP
191).
Imagination”, here, is used with a specialized, Coleridgean denotation, and
Emerson likely characterizes his poet’s faculties as imbued with primary imagination as
opposed to secondary. According to Coleridge, the primary imagination is “the living
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