alienated majesty

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays: First Series (1841)

metre-making argument

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — 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.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

list making

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind, as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

to get bread

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread…

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1876, (Houghton Mifflin, 1910)

fossil poetry

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (Essays: Second Series, 1844)

silent poetry

Painting was called “silent poetry”; and poetry “speaking painting.” The laws of each are convertible into the laws of every other.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Art” (1841)