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

compares his ideal creative reader to a “liberating god” throughout the essay. Further, the
secret of self-reliance remains much the same, but it is susceptible to the same kind of
semantic broadening and increasing opacity that affects the entirety of Emerson’s idea of
language. To cultivate self-reliance the reader still needs to find a way to make her
“supposed deficiencies redundant”, but this deficiency is now focused on the gaps
endemic between original image and word. By exemplifying the ways in which a symbol
can be appropriated in a variety of contexts, the poet’s expression can also provide
alternatives for the most important symbol of all: the subject. These gaps indelibly
inform subjectivity, too, for Emerson has narrowed—and simultaneously broadened—the
way in which he discusses identity, though it is still in a fundamentally textual way. That
is, Emerson characterizes his ideal reader as a “symbol”, or, more appropriately, as a kind
of word. In a literal sense this is much less capacious than the entire text he discussed in
“History”, but his “fallen” view of language that he utilizes in “The Poet” imbues each
word with manifold meaning, far greater than the single, transparent denotation he
assumed in his earlier essays. And though the reader still holds the same intertextual
relations with other texts, “The Poet” suggests that the reader is not just one text at one
time but is rather a “quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold” symbol
(Emerson TP 183).
It is through the poet’s expression—which reveals and explicates the depths of
human subjectivity—that a reader who can interpret nature in this same way will find that
her “chains are to be broken”. At a fundamental level, the poet’s expression is the
demonstration that the meaning of every symbol is manifold, so it does not necessarily
need to take the form of spoken language. Emerson explains briefly that “[t]hings admit
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