Dec 3, 2008
“Each and All” is usually treated as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best nature poems. It seems to have developed from a journal passage Emerson recorded in 1834 about recalling seeing seashells on the shore when he was a boy. He picked some up and took them home. When he got them there and looked at them, they appeared “dry and ugly.” From that episode, he said in the journal passage, he learned that what he called “Composition”—things in arrangement with other things—was more important than the beauty of anything alone in terms of its effect on the...
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