Poems and essays - Tapa blanda

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: prone to assume that the difficulty is with Emerson and not with them, and they give up discouraged. To prevent this untimely discouragement, and to present Emerson's poetry in such order and with such brief illustration as shall tide the beginner over any early obstacles, and bring him to his own, is the main object of the following selections. Emerson's prose is the best elucidator of his verse, for more truly may it be said of the lover of Emerson than Emerson said of the lover of Milton : " He reads one sense in his prose and in his metrical compositions." 1 Whatever the obstacles that the form of his verse may present at first, they will disappear with the reader's growing familiarity 'with the poet's leading thoughts. Emerson had no affectation of ruggedness and obscurity; whatever ruggedness there was, was a part of his mind, as inseparable from his thought as his skin from his body. At the worst, its importance as an obstacle has been greatly exaggerated. Many of Emerson's poems are charged with a patriotism so electrifying, transfigured by an imagination and diction so splendid yet simple, and uttered withal in a tone so prophetic and so authoritative, that their meaning and their beauty must possess you; and in all of Emerson's verse there is such challenge to the keenest intellect and profound- est moral sentiment, that often, just because you cannot tell exactly all it means, it haunts your memory with quite as much fascination as the music of more melodious verse, to any meaning of which you are indifferent. Emerson's aim was not merely to delight but to invigorate his reader;2 to see the naked truth himself, and to find the perfect universal expression for it, and, by publishing it, to be free of it, in order that he and his reader, too, might find deeper truth. "...