The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the poet's unique ability to see deeper meanings in nature and existence, using them as symbols for expression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the profound insight that poets possess, allowing them to perceive and interpret the world around them beyond mere facts. They recognize the greater significance behind elements of nature, like stars and animals, transforming these observations into powerful symbols that enrich their poetic expression. Emerson suggests that poets ride these elements as vehicles for thought, illustrating how artists connect personal experience with universal truths.
In practice
In a lecture about the role of art in society, one might quote Emerson to illustrate how poets perceive the world.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that's ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience.
The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.
Is the cinema more important than life?
All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.
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