fame (haha)

notebooks can properly be studied as important to evaluating his
writing as a process.

At the same time, Emerson unfortunately conflated and confused
process and product with person. The making of poems for Emerson
was one with a notion of identity. Despite the fact that his
theoretical poetics creates vast openings in an otherwise rigid
tradition of how poetry was and might continue to be practiced in
English, his idea that powerful poems translate into great men
(they are always men) clouds his work and continues to cloud the
thinking of scholars and writers today. Contemporary literary
criticism is filled with such nonsense, and this reflects in turn
on how literature is taught, written, and thereby disseminated.
Perhaps this is a form of mental illness, but such a psychological
examination into why we continue to insist on the greatness of
people with strong writing skills must remain open for later
examination.

To Emerson's credit, this notion of the greatness of the poet was
and remains a common but unfortunate attitude. He was unwittingly
subject to a prevailing and uncontested convention which was and
remains so widespread it continues to pass without comment! The
real question is: why do we perpetuate this blatant urge to
mythologize writers as better than innovative carpenters,
electricians, or teachers, for example? Ascribing greatness to
artists damages democracy. The failure to identify this faux pas
perpetuates and results in complicity with an endemic deceit and
fabrication. He or she who makes poems is not great due to the
quality of whatever gets made, and to claim that this is the case
only damages and marginalizes what we might otherwise achieve with
our arts. Worst of all, such notions of greatness lead us to
think of our predecessors as providing idealized models for that
which we strive to achieve; this is a dangerous and misleading
assumption. Romanticism is not a movement frozen in the amber of
academic periodization; those we know as Romantics rather
initiated a revolutionary movement in the arts which should be
understood as having nothing to do with celebrity and everything
to do with liberating humanity from rigid and prejudicial
limitations. How can this be possible through devotion to the
idea of celebrity and self-promotion in the hope that one might
become equally famous?