2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam
2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam
In this chapter we are discussing themes in or related to Leaves of Grass. We shall address now the following subjects: the “poetic function” of the language, which is part of the “Scheme of verbal communication” (discussed in the next chapter, in section 3.2, “The method”); how this function relates to Emerson’s idea of poetry, and how his conception will lead us to another poet, William Blake, and then to religiousness and the mythical figure of Adam, as well as the connection between these topics and Whitman. The fact is that the poetic function has a preponderating position in poetry or in creative prose, such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, because this is the function where the language is turned upon itself, where the writer searches for the most beautiful or precise configuration possible to express an emotion or an idea. On the other hand, we can not deny the apparently opposite factor, by which we mean the appearance or existence of poetic constructions that show up in a given language, which is inherent to Emerson’s idea that “Language is fossil poetry”, or the creation of proto-poets long forgotten, as we will see in a quotation below. In both cases, modern poetry and “fossil poetry”, the poetic function is the primary linguistic factor under focus. So, this idea of poetry appearing naturally in common speech had been expressed by Whitman’s Master[1], Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist (1803–82), who was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Divinity School.[2]
Before we present some of Emerson’s ideas, let us take a brief look at his life and works. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, the “Sage of Concord” (he later lived in Concord, Massachusetts) established himself as a spokesman of transcendentalism and as a major figure in American literature. Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement that thrived in New England from 1836 to 1860. It originated among a group of intellectuals who developed their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. They were inspired by Kant and English authors such as Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Emerson believed that the “moral law” was the “transcendental law, through which man discovers the nature of god, a living spirit.” The ideas of transcendentalism were expressed by Emerson in essays such as “Nature” (1836), “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet” and “The Over-Soul” (1841), and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854), “the revelation of the simplicity and divine unity of nature”. The movement began with the meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. Thoreau, like Emerson, lived in Concord and attended Harvard College, which they paid by doing chores, given their scarce livelihood. Later, both became lecturers. Both, too, were the first persons to recognize Whitman’s poetic genius from the beginning. Thoreau is also the author of “Civil Disobedience”, “the origin of the modern concept of pacific resistance”.
