Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
Interpretation
Art creates a world of its own, demanding our full attention and devotion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the nature of art and its ability to captivate our focus completely. He suggests that in the presence of a work of art, whether it's a poem, a sculpture, or a beautiful garden, it becomes the sole pursuit worthy of our efforts, momentarily overshadowing all else in life. This intensity of focus on beauty, whether in crafted creations or nature, emphasizes the profound impact art has on our perception of what is meaningful.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of art in our lives, one might use this quote to highlight how art captures our attention.
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?
Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.
I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.
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