[lit-ideas] Emerson and Surprise

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2015 09:22:50 -0800
I've begun Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens, The Poems of our climate.  On
page 5 he writes, "I return to Emerson's lecture on The Poet, where he says
of Pegasus, 'Surprise and wonder always fly beside him.  There is no poetry
where they are not.'  The same emphasis upon surprise is at the center of
the later, rambling essay, Poetry and Imagination, where after rightly
observing that 'conversation is not permitted without tropes,' Emerson more
daringly makes of natural change only a series of tropes: 'The poet accounts
all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses them
representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value much their
primary meaning.  Every new object so seen gives a shock of agreeable
surprise.'"

 

I have never appreciated Emerson but can't remember why.  At one time I
thought Whitman wonderful (as Bloom still does) but Emerson struck me as
someone who studied Eastern religion.  I thought why study Emerson when I
can study Eastern religion for myself?  But this passage and a few others
quoted by Bloom are interesting.  I confess that I feel as Emerson (via
Bloom) suggests when I am most . . . intensely . . . a poet.  That was some
of what was going on in the poem "in the wind."  Even though I myself have
been as argumentative and insistent upon logic as anyone, I don't feel that
way at the present time, a time when I'm concentrating upon poetry.
Besides, I thought, the words being fought over here recently didn't really
mean much, or rather their meanings didn't count for much in light of the
tropes one can bring about in a poem - at least not enough for someone to
say (I paraphrase) "I am too offended to stay here any longer" - and I
hasten to confess that I've done that very thing in the past - when I was
someone else.

 

I suspect Mike Geary has read more of Emerson than I have - my loss.

 

Lawrence

 



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[lit-ideas] Emerson and Surprise

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