The listlessness of Emerson’s poetry is surprising, given the veneration he expressed for the art. Some of his best prose is devoted to lobbying for the special advantages of poetry. These works are thrilling because they are written in thrilling sentences. This does not necessarily imply that Emerson’s poetry will be thrilling, though he must have intended his large claims for poetry to be tested on his own work. Like many of his essays, “The Poet” was printed with an original short lyric as its epigraph. The mediocrity of these poem-epigraphs is often emphasized by the essays’ attempts to honor them as superior forms of expression. It makes for a strangely rigged contest between turbocharged prose and the rickshaw verse it ostensibly reveres. Emerson’s “poet”—a “complete man,” a “man without impediment,” a “sayer” and “namer,” like Adam—would not have printed the lacklustre verses appended to “The Poet,” which venerate “Olympian bards” and “divine ideas” with rhymes as bouncy as a Super Ball.
In “Merlin I,” written, like “The Poet,” in the eighteen-forties, Emerson plays the unwinnable game of arguing in metre against metre and in rhyme against rhyme:
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader’s art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
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