4. The Poet of the New World

       Boston, 1841–New York, 1855

      Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.¹

      These lines are taken from a text simply titled The Poet, drawn from one of the lectures Emerson delivered in December 1841 and January 1842 under the generic title The Times. As Emerson thoroughly modified his text for publication in 1844 in the second series of the Essays, it does not seem that the audience assembled under the roof of Boston’s Masonic Temple ever heard this profession of faith. We do not know how it would have received this invitation to abandon English encyclopaedias and the relics of Greek and Roman antiquity to go and find new religion and poetry in the fisheries of the East Coast, the pioneers out West, the prose of daily newspapers, electoral jousting or banking. It is true that the former Unitarian pastor was not new to the art of provocation. He had already urged his audiences more than once to reject the conspiracy of centuries past, and to bid farewell to the policed museums of Europe, to Doric columns and gothic ornaments, in order to fully embrace the present. ‘I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic’, he had already announced, to the shock of the Harvard fellows, ‘what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.’² We must thus take note: it was not in London under the glass-and-steel arcs of the Crystal Palace, nor in the fin de siècle Paris of the Eiffel tower, in the New York of skyscrapers or Russia of futurist and constructivist revolutionaries; it was in Boston in 1841, capital of genteel culture, intellectuals and aesthetes enthused by classical philology, French civility, and voyages to Italy for its antique ruins and Renaissance masterpieces, that the modernist ideal, in the strong sense, was first formulated in all its radicalism – the ideal of a new poetry of new man.

      But one must also notice where the paradox lies in this declaration. The man who announces it has no personal taste for banking, or electoral stands: he thinks they turn man away from the only worthwhile quest – namely, the accomplishment of his own nature. And if he loves the calm of the countryside, it is so as to be there alone with his thoughts or with kindred spirits, and not in order to get involved with the activities of fishermen or the amusements of lumberjacks. He never travelled to the plantations of the South. And the conquest of the West, or the recent annexations of Texas and Oregon, were only known to him through newspapers. Their evocation here does not at all have to do with a personal passion for the great adventure of a new people and virgin lands. First of all, it defines change in the poetic paradigm: the poetry of the present time breaks with a certain idea of time, one regulated by great events and rhythms inherited from the past. It finds its material no longer in historical succession, but in geographical simultaneity, in the multiplicity of activities distributed in the diverse spaces of a territory. It finds its form no longer in regular meter inherited from tradition, but in the common pulse that links these activities.