To have gone farther than
Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and to become a
mystic or a seer.
Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary
journal recently did, that Emerson is not a poet. He is one kind of
a poet. He has written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the
hum of a wild bee in the air,--chords of wild aeolian music.
Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry. It
suggests the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and
blood. Mr. William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him.
He is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid
that wanders among the bards, and strikes the harp with even more
than bardic stress.
Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a
burden of the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp
tones, nor lines so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze
from the highest heaven of thought. In certain respects he has gone
beyond any other. He has gone beyond the symbol to the thing
signified. He has emptied poetic forms of their meaning and made
poetry of that. He would fain cut the world up into stars to shine
in the intellectual firmament. He is more and he is less than the
best.
He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak
and maple. He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes
and conditions. He is great in one direction, up; no dancing
leaves, but rapt needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and
careering, never an avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow,
scattering his cones, and with night and obscurity amid his
branches.
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