Emerson belabored the essay, and so too his poems, but (just spilled a dollop of hot coffee on my leg) like (where is that?) Jean (ok), his journals offer a fascinating glimpse at a man working in pursuit of a more appropriate means of poetic utterance than that which he was receiving.

I've always resisted RWE until lately; today, however, I trust his intent, and there's evidence of his unrelenting effort everywhere in his writings.

But he was mule-headed too, and this seemed to get in his way. He missed his own poetry, that is, he didn't notice his poetry (which pops up all over in his journals), stuck as he was with this preconceived idea of what poetry was supposed to be, and so he kept writing Coleridgean symbol laden poems which depended heavily on the old iam and then too the pentameter (like his own tar baby), all the while chasing social transformation in his essays.

And I trust his unflagging faith that the poetic principle was key to the entire shebang, a breakthrough of sorts which he persisted in pressing toward, and in this effort of his, he made so much possible.

So he was pushing against this HUGE barrier (like nobody before), which weakened through his effort, even when he actually failed in busting through (and I hope all who try to write poems struggle against great and nearly unbreakable barriers).

And then there are his translations from Joseph von Hammer's German translations of Hafiz, and he's like, at points, making the crossover, the great escape from the clutches of received British models:

Come let us strew roses	 [[Hafiz]]

And pour wine in the cup

Break up the roof of heaven

And throw it into new forms




So soon the army of cares

Shed the blood of the true

So will I with the cupbearer

Shatter the building of woe




We will rosewater

In winecups pour

And sugar in the [vase in]censer

Full of muskmell throw




Thy harping is lovely

O play sweet airs

That we may sing songs

And shake our heads




Bring eastward the dust of the body

To that great lord

That we may also cast our eyes

On his beauty




(Journal IX 398-9)

that poems work in conjunction with one another
made by the many scattered folc

ever pressing that barrier by which we are otherwise constrained

even now I can hear it scraping along by the power
of disparate and cumulative poems

an organism of vitality here in all the blogs