I thought I would read the whole of Poetry and Imagination but that was before I had the book it is in, Letters and Social Aims, from the library. Turns out the essay is 75 pages long! Not a typical Emerson length. And from the introduction to the book, I expect there might be a few not quite typical Emerson moments.

Letters and Social Aims is sort of a collected Emerson, essays that appeared in The Dial or that were originally lectures but not included in any of Emerson’s other books. Emerson did not want to do the book. He was feeling old and tired, becoming forgetful, and just not as sharp as he used to be. He wanted to just be retired. But his publisher asked Emerson if they could collect his Dial essays and Emerson said no, that he’d put the collection together. But after a year he’d only gotten one essay ready and it was riddled with errors. Then his house burned down. Sick with shock, friends and family sent Emerson traveling to Europe. While he was away they oversaw the rebuilding of his house. Upon his return, the publisher inquired when he’d be done with the book. Emerson couldn’t do it. The family asked Emerson’s dear friend and designated literary executor, to assist. James Elliot Cabot was glad to help. All the writing is Emerson’s but Cabot did all the work of putting the book together, asking Emerson to clarify this or that, or choose a version of an essay that had more than one incarnation. Emerson was relieved and readily acknowledged that Letters and Social Aims was Cabot’s book.

“Poetry and Imagination” is the first essay in the book and was, I think a series of lectures that got smooshed into one long multi-part essay. For this week I decided to read Emerson’s introduction and the sections “Poetry” and “Imagination.”

In “Introductory,” Emerson starts everything off by emphasizing the connectedness of all things: “There is one animal, one plant, one matter and one force.” The universe is symmetrical and one things flows into another. No doubt Emerson would have found stem cells fascinating proof of his ideas. But great as science is, when it becomes specialized and fragmented and neglects to include the big picture in it’s study, focuses on the plant with no thought of the plant’s ecosystem for example, science becomes “false by being unpoetical.” Science forgets how much it owes to the imagination.

So Emerson sets us up nicely for his discussion of poetry which he begins, “The primary use of a fact is low; the secondary use, as it is a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth.” Facts are necessary and important but we can’t stop at the facts, we must go beyond them. Facts build the foundation for poetry, but poetry turns them into metaphor, into symbol, into a concrete example of thought: “the higher use of the material world is to furnish us types or pictures to express the thoughts of the mind.” Emerson uses “Hindoo” philosophy as an example. The external world doesn’t really exist at all, it is only phenomenal, a series of deceptions “through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul.” Life becomes a means to the end of learning metonymy. “Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist.” In other words, the job of poetry, and by extension the poet, is to take the facts and see through them to their meaning and the thought which is held within and beyond them.

This seeing is a sort of second sight that occurs with the help of imagination. Imagination is not Fancy, the two are often confused.

Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all Nature of that which it is driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types, for amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy.

. Imagination is moral. It is serious. Fancy is for amusement only. “Imagination is central; fancy superficial. Fancy relates to the surface, in which a great part of life lies.” Fancy does not provide us with second sight.

Imagination helps us see past the apparent, past the bare scientific fact, to what is not apparent. Because Emerson believes “the world exists for thought” and it is the things in Nature which provide the keys, to thought, the symbols, the images, he can say “Poetry, if perfected, is the only verity; is the speech of man after the real, and not after the apparent.” And since all things are connected, are all part of one big whole, “Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things–marching in the direction of universal power.”

Would it surprise you to know that Emerson didn’t much like novels? He read a few, enjoyed Sir Walter Scott immensely, but found particular resonance in Madame de Stael’s Corinne which he read a couple of times. But to Emerson, prose equaled reality, the surface world of facts, the apparent. For him, poetry was “the only verity.”

Next week’s Emerson: the rest of “Poetry and Imagination”