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

However, this relies on the assumption that language is not transparent, as a word
properly read can be refracted through infinite natural phenomena. However, this also
suggests that a word is affected by time in a way Emerson did not acknowledge in
“History”. This is especially problematic,
For poetry was written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized
that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal
warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or
a verse, and substitute a meaning of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
(Emerson TP 185)
No poet ever “writes” a poem, and this is largely because our language is unable to
represent “those primal warblings” that make up the ideal poem. Emerson’s suggestion
that this poetry is already “written” in a language other than our own maintains that any
subsequent attempt to “write” poetry can only amount to a palimpsest: an illegible mess
of marks that results from attempting to write on top of an already written text. And it is
in this linguistic tangle that humans inevitably take their liberties with what they see and
hear, substituting their own inadequate symbols in an attempt to encapsulate a full sense
of that ethereal and ideal realm of sight and sound.
Substituting a “meaning of our own” for a word in the ideal, primordial language
in which poetry is written is problematic for two reasons. First, the meaning we can offer
is necessarily limited by the breadth of the reader’s personal experiences, which, when
compared to the complete compendium of understanding, cannot help but be found
lacking. Second, and relatedly, our interpretation of “that region when the air is music” is
26