One sentence in particular in his essay opens the prospect of a new world-a new poetic world, and perhaps a new world of human possibility as well: “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.” What America lacked was what Emerson called for: an evocation of what being a democratic man or woman felt like at its best, day to day.Įmerson was looking for a poet whose vision didn’t derive chiefly from books, but from American life as it was. But as to knowing “the value of our incomparable materials”-maybe that was something Whitman could claim. There was nothing especially tyrannous about him, nor would there be about his poetry. Sitting quietly, Whitman read, “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials.” I suspect that the phrase tyrannous eye puzzled Whitman. He surely read “Circles” and “Self-Reliance,” and “ The Poet,” an essay in which Emerson called out for a genuinely American bard. Whitman was taken with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson that summer. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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