118 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865even the humblest, everyday subject or event. From this, it also follows that everyone
can be a gatherer of knowledge, a scholar. The sources of knowledge are everywhere
and are accessible to anyone who cares to attend. Americans can all be American
scholars. There will be a genuine democracy, of men thinking, corresponding to the
democracy of facts.
Emerson’s belief in individuality led naturally, not only to a commitment to
democratic equality, but to a conviction that life was process. “Nature is not fixed but
fluid,” he said. Change is at the root of existence, change in human beings as well as
nature; and so “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” This had vital
consequences for Emerson’s poetry. “It is not meters, but a meter-making argument
that makes a poem,” he insisted in “The Poet,” “a thought so passionate and alive,
that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and
adorns nature with a new thing.” For Emerson, poetry had to be as “free, peremptory,
and clear” as its subject and creator, it had to be original and organic rather than
imitative (“Imitation is suicide,” he tells the reader in “Self-Reliance”); it had, in
short, to dramatize the liberated self. As the supreme creative power, illuminating
and transforming all that comes in its orbit, the self is placed at the center of
Emerson’s poems. The stylistic result is something often close to free verse. As poet,
Emerson does accept the preliminary discipline of a particular rhyme and rhythm
scheme, but he never lets that scheme inhibit his patterns of speech and thought. He
allows himself to vary lines and meters at will; irregularity and disruption are
permitted, as long as the basic sense of rhythmic speech – a speech coming directly
from the primitive and oracular self – is retained. “The rhyme of the poet / Modulates
the King’s affairs,” Emerson declares in “Merlin” (1847), and then goes on in such a
way as to illustrate as well as celebrate the liberating spontaneity of true poetry.
More notable still is the effect of the ethic of self-reliance on the actual, material,
and moral landscapes Emerson describes. In poem after poem, the self is shown
recreating the world, transforming it into something freshly seen and fully discovered.
In “The Snow-Storm” (1847), for instance, the poetic vision reshapes the scene just
as “the frolic architecture of the snow” is described refashioning familiar objects into
fresh and unfamiliar shapes. And in poems like “Uriel” (1847) and “Merlin,” the poet
is translated into an incarnation of God, whose acts of seeing and naming correspond
with His original act of making the world. In effect, Emerson puts into practice here
the belief he expressed in Nature and elsewhere that the poet does in words what
everyone can do in action: that is, remake and reorder their surroundings. Emerson
never ceased to believe in what he called the “infinitude of the private.” Although, in
his later work, there is a growing emphasis on the difficulties of knowledge, the
limitations imposed by “fate” and the intimidating vastness of nature, he remained
firmly convinced of the authority of the individual. He stayed loyal to the idea that
every person had the power to shape and change things, which is one reason why, in
the 1850s, he became involved in the movement to abolish slavery. “Life only avails,
not the having lived,” he wrote in “Self-Reliance.” “Power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the
shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” As Emerson saw it, the permanentGGray_c02.indd 118ray_c 02 .indd 118 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM