poet, if a poet arises who can bring it, is to give mankind an infinite onion, a complex symbolic work of such perfection and density that it can be infintely opened like layer so crystal into a fine inwards lens.
Emerson was poet in that his foundational passion was writing, his ambition no less than to “write the Bible of my age” as a replacement for the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, a vision he chose at 21 and held to the end. In this he read Montaign, Plutarch, Plotinus, Goethe, De Steer, and Wordsworth religiously, claiming that without such a daily reading he would have “no daily substance” – nor could he conceive a good man who was not a great reader. He only read books which reported first hand experience – theology and commentaries were straight wrong. Likewise, he read only what “prophesized his own life,” and fed his own writings.
Emerson called poetry “the gai science,” after the troubadors. The poet is the grace of transitions. Let life be utterly chaotic – it only seems so by jars of jerky transitions. Smooth all these transitions into the smooth grace of inevitable symmetry, and the world will be symphony, come what may.
The poet is water, for water desires water, and feeds all life. And so the goddess of poetry is Sophia, Wisdom herself, who is not quite logical philosophy, but merely the idol of logical philosophers.
He reads not to be inspired, but to save time and take up worthy works that send him further in his own direction.
The love of the poet is to use his mind expressively. Mind is symbol, and always a symbol haloed in voice. Whenever we think any idea, somewhere in our conscious or subconscious is the shape of the projector of it; we see