SOURCE: “‘Metre-Making’ Arguments: Emerson's Poems,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 218-42.

[In the following essay, Morris presents an overview of Emerson's poetical works.]

“I am not the man you take me for.”

Consideration of Emerson's writings without significant emphasis on his verse would in some ways produce Hamlet without the prince, for Emerson seems to have identified himself primarily as a poet. During his New York lecture tour of March 1842, he wrote to his wife Lidian of feeling alienated from and misunderstood by his dinner companions, the social reformers Horace Greeley and Albert Brisbane:

They are bent on popular action: I am in all my theory, ethics, & politics a poet and of no more use in their New York than a rainbow or a firefly. Meantime they fasten me in their thought to “Transcendentalism” whereof you know I am wholly guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known & fixed element like salt or meal: so that I have to begin by endless disclaimers & explanations—“I am not the man you take me for.”

(LA 3: 18)¹

By “poet,” Emerson didn't mean exclusively a writer of verse, but instead a person whose energy was fundamentally both iconoclastic and—as he emphasizes in his lecture and essay “The Poet”—affirmative, creative, and imaginative. For Emerson, the best preachers, the best scholars, and even the best social activists are all poets. In the Divinity School “Address,” he calls for the preacher to be “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (LA 89); in “Literary Ethics,” he speaks of “immortal bards of philosophy” (LA 98). In “The Method of Nature,” whoever seeks to realize his “best insight” becomes one of the “higher poets” (LA 131); in “Heroism,” the life of the great person is “natural and poetic” (LA 376); and the “Representative Man” Plato, although not literally a poet, is “clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet” (LA 635). This inclusive use of its terminology shows how important Emerson felt poetry to be, and how closely he identified himself with it.

Not only was Emerson consistently referred to and thought of in his own time as a poet-essayist, his verse has exerted a persistent influence on other poets. It is so much like that of his admirer Emily Dickinson that readers often mistakenly attributed her anonymously published “Success is counted sweetest” to him.² Later, Emerson's fellow poet-essayist George Santayana chose to speak on “Emerson the Poet” during the 1903 Harvard Memorial Week celebration of the centennial of Emerson's birth. And twentieth-century poets who have admired the verse include, among many others, E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, and A. R. Ammons.

Nonetheless, modern readers and scholars have tended to view his poetry as secondary to the “essential” Emerson. Until very recently, no current edition of the poems was available, and even now just three modern book-length studies of them exist, all dating from the 1970s.³ This imbalance of attention, however, is beginning to be corrected. New primary material is being published, including the Library of America Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations and a forthcoming edition of the poems in the Harvard Collected Works; the poems are receiving more extensive representation in anthologies; and significant critical analyses are emerging.

Such “recovery” is fitting. Emerson wrote poetry from the time he was a boy to nearly the end of his life, penning thousands of lines (both original and translated) into his journals and notebooks—particularly into the Poetry Notebooks, which span half a century.⁴ Using much the same method of composition as he did for his prose, Emerson would often record his initial inspiration or a preliminary draft, then later shape the material into finished pieces. He published these gleanings for over half a century, from 1829 to 1880, seeing into print more than 200 poems and translations.

Emerson collected his verse into two major volumes, both published at the urging of his admirers and after his enshrinement as an important literary figure. Poems, dated 1847 (it actually was printed in December 1946), contains 256 pages, with 56 poems and two translations. May-Day and Other Pieces, a smaller book of 205 pages, was published 20 years later, in 1867. Many of the poems in both volumes had appeared previously in giftbook anthologies or little magazines—most frequently The Dial, edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller, for Poems; and James Russell Lowell's the Atlantic Monthly, for May-Day. A section of May-Day had also been published in Emerson's prose collections as individual epigraphs, for, in a virtually unprecedented gesture that I will discuss below, Emerson prefaced many of his essays with original poems.

The first of Emerson's books of poetry, the 1847 Poems, contains the majority of his most famous pieces—works such as “The Sphinx,” “The Rhodora,” “Uriel,” “The Snow-Storm,” “Bacchus,” “Hamatreya,” “Threnody,” and the Concord “Hymn.” While its earliest text is “Good-Bye,” dating from 1823, the volume also includes several significant poems composed in the 1830s (“Each and All,” “The Rhodora,” and Concord “Hymn,” for example).⁵ However, most of the compositions were written in the 1840s, during Emerson's editorship of the The Dial, and first appeared there (they are thus in a sense “occasional” pieces—done particularly for publication in The Dial). The second volume, May-Day, is generally considered a less groundbreaking work—its poems are smoother and more conventional overall—but it nonetheless contains a substantial number of important texts, among them “Brahma,” “Days,” “Voluntaries,” and “Terminus.” Of the 30-some poems, excluding translations, that Emerson published but did not collect in these two books, eight appear in the 1876 Selected Poems that he prepared with his daughter Ellen and his friend James Elliot Cabot, and 15 more are printed as essay epigraphs.

This poetic canon displays considerable range. It contains quatrains and long poems; rhymed, blank, and experimental verse; patriotic tributes, social protest poems, and Romantic lyrics; elegies, free translations, love poems, and hymns. Its tones are alternately comic, meditative, narrative, and oracular. At the same time, the pieces coalesce around a set of recurrent issues and strategies central to a poem that Emerson repeatedly positioned at the thresholds of his volumes of verse, “The Sphinx.” This piece opens Emerson's 1847 Poems, his Selected Poems, and the volume of poetry in the first edition of his collected works.⁶ Following Emerson's lead, I, too, begin with “The Sphinx,” and employ it in this essay as an interpretive paradigm for Emerson's poetry as a whole, for individual poems, and for the essay epigraphs.⁷

Originally published in the third issue of The Dial (January 1841), the 132-line, 17-stanza narrative is quite literally a “metre-making argument”⁸ between a contemptuous Sphinx and an indomitably cheerful poet. At the beginning of the poem, the “drowsy” and brooding Sphinx calls for a “‘seer’” to answer her “‘secret,’” and thereby bring her health and animation. When she goes on to taunt humanity for its ineptitude and impotence, a mysterious “great mother” joins in to lament the condition of her juvenilized “‘boy,’” humankind. As though to refute their claims, a cheerful and confident poet appears, who praises and blesses the Sphinx. In response, the Sphinx utters an enigmatic pronouncement and soars away, evanescing into the universe.

Its notable degree of undecidability and the richness of the mythological material upon which it draws combine to make “The Sphinx” a highly suggestive choice for what I have called a “threshold poem.” I use this term to identify a distinct yet previously unrecognized genre of poetry encompassing various types of introductory verse: initial sonnets, seventeenth-century emblem-book inscriptions, epic invocations to muses, the prothalamion and epithalamion, and other poems of dedication, preface, and prologue. A particular subgroup within this broad, highly self-reflexive tradition are those poems that function, like “The Sphinx,” to initiate volumes of poetry.

“The Sphinx” also exemplifies another distinctive (yet overlapping) form of threshold poem. In thematizing the difficulty of poetic expression, it claims a place in the tradition of poems about the inability to write or the absence of inspiration—Milton's sonnet on his blindness, for example, or Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode.” Often these works, like “The Sphinx,” function as threshold pieces for volumes of verse. We might think of Sidney's first Astrophil and Stella sonnet, which both begins the sequence and voices anxiety about the poet's ability to begin; or Bradstreet's poetic preface to The Tenth Muse, which questions her ability to write poetry even as it introduces the poetry she has written. Since the answer to their dilemma is creation, a remedy provided by the poems themselves, the category is by definition both ironic and paradoxical: these are poems about their own impossibility. Such is, of course, especially the case with threshold poems about lack of inspiration, for these texts “answer” blockage both through their own existence and through the verses they introduce. “The Sphinx” provides a consummate instance of this variant.

Emerson's threshold poem is also provocative because it participates in a recurrent preoccupation of its time. Nineteenth-century American writers were especially enticed by the Sphinx figure, bestowing upon it the primary regard that we, following Freud, have tended to grant Oedipus. Melville's chapter “The Sphynx” in Moby-Dick, for example, depicts the sperm whale's head as a Sphinx; in Poe's riddling short story “The Sphinx,” the conundrum is an inscrutable and deadly disease; and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps employs the image of the Sphinx to represent women's struggle for self-expression in her novel The Story of Avis (originally entitled The Story of the Sphinx). And countless other “Sphinx”es appear in periodical literature of the time.

As befits its subject, Emerson's “The Sphinx” has always been considered especially puzzling, even for the notoriously enigmatic Emerson. Despite the abundance of critical attention the poem has received, scholars continue to debate precisely what the Sphinx is supposed to represent, what her question is, and whether the poet's reply to her is astute or absurd.⁹ When he encounters her, instead of reinscribing the Sphinx's traditional association with death, the poet affirms her (“‘Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges / Are pleasant songs to me’”). He identifies her as idealism, the “‘love of the Best’” that paradoxically can silence with castigation, but that is also the only impetus for self-improvement.

The Sphinx responds by confirming the poet's answer and further identifying herself as part of the poet himself—“‘I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow / Of thine eye I am eyebeam.’” Animated by poetic acceptance, the Sphinx then soars and disperses into nature. In direct contradistinction to traditional myths, which culminate in her plummeting death, “The Sphinx” ends with her ascension. Once “drowsy,” “heavy,” and brooding, the now “merry” creature silvers, melts, spires, flowers, and flows. And since “metaphor” is “movement,” the Sphinx essentially becomes both metamorphosis and rhetoric. We find, then, that the answer to the riddle of existence is not so much “man” as “language”—“man” as “Sphinx” is fundamentally figuration, metaphor, poetry.

The Sphinx nonetheless leaves the readers and the poet amid uncertainty with her final enigmatic utterance, now spoken through an equally obscure “universal dame” with “a thousand voices.” Emerson, in other words, closes this poem—itself a riddle about a riddle—with yet another puzzle, one that echoes the paradigmatic conundrum of the Hebrew God's self-identification, “i am that i am” (Exodus 3:14; a locution not unlike “‘Of thine eye I am eyebeam’”):

Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame:
“Who telleth one of my meanings,
Is master of all I am.”

This “answer” leaves ambiguous the crucial issue of whether or not the poet actually has been this triumphant teller. Thus, just as she seems to assert her own supercession, the Sphinx both returns to her role as riddler and achieves vocality to a hyperbolic, even sublime, extent.

This conundrum is reflected in the poem's structure, for “The Sphinx” ends on its most significant formal deviation. Given the established metrical pattern, the poem's last lines form a half stanza—a quatrain instead of an octave. One impression the curtailment produces is that the Sphinx finally stifles Emerson and the poet—that, returning to her role of throttler, she utters a closing quatrain to which the only available response is silence. In this reading, such a thousand-voiced Sphinx, like the thousand-snaked head of Medusa, overcomes the poet with her fecundity, so that the poem breaks off to leave the poet voiceless and a blank where his corresponding quatrain should be. An opposed perspective, though, suggests that this space remains vacant precisely for poetry to fill, so that the rest of the volume represents the poet's reply—all the other poems complete the stanza. In this view, the stanzaic fragment creates an avenue to the following pages. The poem thus replicates the function of the Sphinx at Thebes: it poses a test for readers so that its difficulty will prevent some from proceeding into the subsequent poems, but will open a gateway into the verse for others (rather like Jesus' parables).

As a threshold poem, then, “The Sphinx” performs multiple tasks. It provides riddling instructions about how to approach the rest of Emerson's verse. It raises in theme and form issues crucial to the poetry. It offers an intriguing figure for Emerson's life and writings. And, finally, it suggests theories of reading, writing, and intertextuality pertinent to the poems that follow, to Emerson texts generally, and to the act of interpretation itself. By invoking the mythological topos of the Sphinx at the threshold, Emerson places readers in the position of the dramatized poet figure and himself in the position of Sphinx, enacting at the portal of his volume a ventriloquistic play that characterizes his poetry and his prose.¹⁰ For “The Sphinx” activates crossings and reversals between genders, modes of discourse, forms of rhetoric, writer and reader, and subject and object that disrupt oppositional tendencies central to the cultures whose myths it employs.

In all these ways, the poem shows us how to read the rest of Emerson's verse, functioning as an initiatory riddle whose “meanings” emerge from the poems that ensue. The poem suggests that we approach Emerson's texts as the poet does the Sphinx, admiring their suggestiveness and difficulty rather than seeking to master them, all the while encouraging them to “‘say on.’” Readers are to continue through the volume, animated instead of overcome by the inexhaustibility of language and life. The subsequent poems then flow from the ongoing metamorphosis of issues raised in this threshold piece, and embody its multitude of voices and forms.

When we read Emerson's other poems through the interpretive rubric of “The Sphinx,” some of their most perplexing moments, structures, and styles are illuminated. Rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns raised by that poem recur throughout Poems and May-Day. Especially in the earlier volume, the texts are characteristically multivocal, dialogic, puzzling, and elliptical. They are frequently structured according to debate or inquisition. As David Porter and R. A. Yoder have emphasized, a high percentage of Emerson's poems tell the story of a poet figure, his search for voice, and his role as an unriddler. The poems also often explore other aesthetic issues suggested in “The Sphinx.” In addition, like “The Sphinx,” many contain figures of blockage, flow, speech, vision, and ascension.

The most crucial connection between the individual pieces in Emerson's first volume and “The Sphinx” is their variously manifested preoccupation with riddling. Poems as a whole, single compositions, or sections of texts may be read as additional riddles of the Sphinx, as her oracular utterances, or as responses to her questioning. Such is the case with many of the texts literally from their beginnings, for a number of the titles function as puzzles. Many of the more enigmatic are formed from obscure, misleading, or personal allusions. “Alphonso of Castile,” “Xenophanes,” “Hamatreya,” and “To J. W.,” for example, confused many readers. Emerson's “Merlin” is not primarily the Arthurian magician, but a lesser-known Welsh bard. And several titles—“Ghaselle,” “Saadi,” and “Hafiz”—refer to Persian poetry, an area no more a part of his readers' usual repertoire of knowledge then than now.¹¹

We get past such difficulty only to find that a surprising number of the poems are occasioned by direct or implicit questions. Sometimes these inquiries are stated at the beginnings of the poems, as in “The Rhodora,” subtitled “On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?” Most of the pieces contain embedded questions, and many end with them: “Uriel” closes with the couplet, “And a blush tinged the upper sky, / And the gods shook, they knew not why.” Other poems culminate by posing “solutions” that are themselves riddling—as “The Rhodora”'s “The self-same Power that brought me there brought you,” and the assurances about “gods” and “half-gods” at the end of “Give All to Love.”

At the same time, dialogue and multivocality are also pervasive, almost definitive qualities of the poems. Their tonal variety and instability may be read as further manifestations of the Sphinx, now speaking “Thorough a thousand voices.” Typically, Emerson leaves these tones unreconciled, or, one might say, unappropriated, by other voices in the poems. For Emerson, the poet is one who can hear the locutions of nature and translate them (almost literally “carry” them “across”) into verse. One of his most characteristic poetic strategies is to present the speech of natural objects or forces in direct quotation or paraphrase. In “Woodnotes II,” we hear the “pine-tree”; in “Alphonso of Castile,” the “Earth”; in “Dirge,” a “pine-warbler”; in “Threnody,” the “deep Heart.” In other poems, the narrator quotes himself, as in “Each and All” and “Berrying.” Sometimes, quoted sources quote themselves, as does Monadnoc in its poem. Or the quoted voices quote still others—the Fakirs cite Allah in “Saadi,” and the Sphinx, the “great mother” in “The Sphinx.” And in some of the most slippery texts, such as the “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” Emerson presents contradictory voices and disparate points of view without using quotation marks either to distinguish between speakers or to privilege a particular one.

Often, opposite interpretations of a poem arise from readers' being persuaded by one or the other contesting voice within a poem, or by readers' posing antithetical solutions to a text's fundamental riddle or conundrum. Some of the most interesting “debatable” issues involve art and sexuality, with poems seeming to posit traditional and orthodox solutions while actually suggesting more presumptuous notions. In “The Rhodora,” a poem replete with the language of Romance, the “Power” that motivates the blossom and the observer, traditionally thought to be God, may partake more of sexual than of divine energy. In “The Snow-Storm,” the identity of the sculptor is also more vague and threatening than readers often acknowledge. Its identification as a “fierce artificer” echoes a description of Milton's Satan as the “Artificer of fraud” in Paradise Lost (4:121). In a more playful note of irony, the wind in the poem might be seen as hanging “Parian wreaths” in derisive burlesque of the nineteenth-century American fad of imitating Greek architecture. And while readers often perceive the creative act of the sculptor as second-rate imitation of nature's, to “mimic” is usually to imitate “Mockingly.” The term thus suggests that the artist's imitation of nature is at best ambivalent, and that the two creators agonistically mock one another.

In conjunction with riddling and argument as forms of verbal play, and with the “merry” Sphinx and cheerful poet, the volume also contains lines of even more direct humor, often missed by overly somber readers. “Fable,” composed of a quarrel between a mountain and a squirrel, reveals its comic nature through a submerged closing pun. Asserting its own equal value to the mountain, the squirrel ends the poem by claiming, “‘If I cannot carry forests on my back, / Neither can you crack a nut.’” The real wit here turns subtly on the adage about a question or riddle being a “hard nut to crack,” so that the reader is now expected to be the especially clever animal who can “crack” the “nut” of Emerson's poem. Accordingly, the otherwise unfortunate line in “Hamatreya” about a dog—“‘I fancy these pure waters and the flags / Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize’”—is of course meant to be funny, spoken as it is by a farmer who is fundamentally ridiculous in thinking that he “owns” the earth.

A review of some frequently anthologized pieces in Poems indicates how much of the volume develops and expands upon preoccupations initiated by “The Sphinx.” “The Problem,” for instance, whose title is synonymous with “Sphinx,” consummately represents an “argument” with a “metre-making argument.” Responding to an implicit indictment of Emerson's own decision to be an artist instead of a preacher, the poem involves debate between two points of view, dramatizes a poet confronting an obstacle to his calling, and relies upon tropes of fluidity and petrifaction. Moreover, the poem both begins with a question and contains imbedded questions—sometimes, as in “The Sphinx,” in the form of catalogues.

“Uriel,” another quite puzzling poem, concerns many of the same issues. A narrative of a rebellious angel who is essentially a poet figure, this text also represents a sort of indirectly autobiographical apologia for the poet. With rhetorical similarities both to “The Sphinx” and “The Problem,” it not only contains the imbedded voice of Uriel in a riddling quatrain, but also involves argument between Uriel and the gods, speaks of Uriel as “solving,” and closes with an emphasis on riddling and mystery. We never truly know Uriel's fate, and in the end the gods still “kn[o]w not why” they reacted to it as they did.

“Hamatreya” represents a literally bipartite rendition of an argument between farmers and the earth over who is more powerful—over, finally, who owns whom. This poem, like “The Sphinx,” treats death as a contest between a man and a powerful mythic female figure; contains imbedded interrogation and interpolated voices, including that of a captious female figure; couches enigmas in elliptical and convoluted wordplay that centers upon pronouns (“Mine and yours / Mine not yours”); and culminates in a question that is actually a riddling paradox. In answer to the farmers' assertion of ownership and power, the earth seems to ask a question, but actually poses a conundrum that asserts the grave as the ultimate indication of mastery:

“How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?”

And the poem's title, moreover, is perhaps the most famously enigmatic among Emerson's many cryptic ones—we have yet to establish a definitive linguistic derivation of “Hamatreya,” though a surprising number of scholars have tried. My guess is that Emerson coins the riddling locution by conflating “Hamadryad,” or “wood-nymph,” and “Maitreya,” a character in Hindu scripture, perhaps to represent a bonding between two of his own seemingly opposite loves—American nature and Eastern philosophy.

The two halves of “Merlin,” one of the best and most frequently read poems of Emerson's, together exemplify the recurrence of figures, structures, rhetorical forms, and concerns that I have been exploring. “Merlin I,” addressed to an inadequate poet, echoes the castigating yet instructive voice of the Sphinx as it insists that the poet must “strike … hard” the aeolian harp strings of the imagination to create

Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.

This section of “Merlin” receives its momentum from figures of release and ascent. The poet is allowed to “‘Pass in, pass in’” to the “‘upper doors,’” just as Oedipus was permitted to pass the slain Sphinx to enter Thebes and as readers have been allowed to pass “The Sphinx” into the rest of the poems. He is then admonished not to

“… count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.”

Emerson often underscores the point he is making in the form of his verse. Here, the poet is told in irregular, oddly rhymed, un“count”ed lines to trust instinct rather than predetermined pattern.

The poem goes on to describe the true poet as one who, when bereft of imagination, need only “Wait his returning strength.” And an especially long heptameter line follows to illustrate that the poet will soon be able to soar with his recovered muse:

Bird, that from the nadir's floor
To the zenith's top can soar,
The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that journey's length.

This tone of confidence prevails at the end of “Merlin I,” answering the initial castigation. The very doors that had blocked the poet now open of their own agency to divulge their mysteries, even though no external force, however divine, could have budged them:

Self-moved, fly-to the doors,
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.

But celebration of limitlessness is only half of the equation. “Merlin,” like the Channing “Ode” (and, most famously, Emerson's essay “Experience”), presents a debate without differentiating between voices or clearly endorsing a perspective. Hence, “Merlin II,” complements “Merlin I,” providing the counterpoise to the emphasis on freedom (and power) in “Merlin I” to stress form (and balance) instead:

The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs;
—Balance-loving Nature
Made all things in pairs.
To every foot its antipode;
Each color with its counter glowed;
To every tone beat answering tones.

With a pun on “answering,” the “answer”—in politics, nature, and verse—is polarity itself. Since that polarity creates the bipartite structure of “Merlin,” “Merlin II” begins with a metapoetic gesture of self-reflection.

The emphasis on doubleness then reverses to become glorification of union, but, as in “The Sphinx,” the language of duality and unity wavers:

Coeval grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal meet.

Here, Emerson has even more strongly sexualized the harmonizing work of the poet and the nature of existence itself, using figures both of androgyny and of copulation. The entire universe is paired (like the poet's couplets), so that “The animals are sick with love, / Lovesick with rhyme.” Even concepts are sexualized:

Thoughts come also hand in hand;
In equal couples mated,
Or else alternated.

For if they remain “Solitary,” ideas are doomed to wander aimlessly, “Most like to bachelors. / Or an ungiven maid,” and to remain sterile, “Not ancestors, / With no posterity.”

Toward the end of “Merlin II,” lines treating fate and termination “couple” into iambic pentameter:

And Nemesis,
Who with even matches odd,
Who athwart space redresses
The partial wrong,
Fills the just period,
And finishes the song.

This passage contains a great many puns about writing poetry that connect “Nemesis,” this poem's Sphinx figure, and the poet. Nemesis “with even matches odd”—as does Emerson in these lines of alternating dimeter and trimeter. It works “athwart space” to end with a “just period”—as do these lines if they are metrically enjambed. When the poem “matches” them, the lines actually couple into classic iambic pentameter, the form of Milton, master of “period”ic syntax. Yet this closing “couplet” of pentameter rhymes, as Milton's blank verse does not, so that Emerson's prosody also alludes to the neoclassical heroic couplet of Pope, and thus in another way to formal stability.

The final lines of “Merlin II” celebrate spinning sister-poets, the fates. These are threatening female figures like Nemesis and the Sphinx, who sing “subtle rhymes … / In perfect time and measure” (as the poem makes a sudden shift into irregularly but heavily rhymed tetrameter). These figures act as divine architect-artists who fashion individuals even while “two twilights,” the two thresholds of birth and death, “Fold us music-drunken in.” This last image of enclosure makes human life—paradoxically—a wild revelry presided over by benevolent spirits who gently tuck children into bed at night. In the “Sisters,” Nemesis, the poet, and the twilights, we find figures of the Sphinx again, now (in 1846, when “Merlin” was composed) much like the “Beautiful Necessity” to whom Emerson would have us “build altars” by the time of his 1850 essay “Fate” (LA 967).

A similar effort to accept fate is central to “Threnody,” the penultimate text in Poems, a work also composed in the mid-1840s. In this long elegy for his firstborn child, Waldo, Jr., who died suddenly of scarlatina at age five, Emerson confronts one of the most dread Sphinxes of all, the death of his very young son. As he does so, problems traditionally associated with Greek and Egyptian Sphinxes—inscrutability, death, time, family, guilt, and art—converge. “The Sphinx” and “Threnody” begin with humanity in similar conditions of need, both looking for someone to answer questions about offspring and fate. “The Sphinx” is concerned with “Life death overtaking,” and “Threnody” with the absence of “Life, sunshine, and desire.” Finally, both poems seek answers to their dilemmas, but the responses do not so much answer as reconstitute what “answering” means.

The most frequently commented upon, and criticized, feature of “Threnody” is its tonal bifurcation. The first 175 lines and seven stanzas represent a heartfelt lamentation for young Waldo—virtually an outpouring of emotion in the voice of the grieving father. The following 114 lines appear as two stanzas of direct quotation in the voice of the “deep Heart” as it responds to the grieving father. “The Sphinx” can provide readers a clue about how to read the irresolution within the latter poem, and show how its abrupt shift is actually one of its strengths. For the disparity within “Threnody” replicates the debate of poems like “The Sphinx,” and the structure of those like “Merlin”: Emerson allows contradictory perspectives to coexist. “Threnody”'s tones of despair and consolation are both real, and are fundamentally unreconcilable. The solution in “Threnody” is acceptance and love of the universe, as in “The Sphinx,” but, as in the earlier poem, love and affirmation remain riddles. For the poem does not allow part two ever to neutralize the pain of part one, and it never explains how one can love a universe arranged so that one's five-year-old child would die.

We find the same philosophical and structural tension between and within two crucial Emerson essays written at the same time as “Threnody” and dealing with the same concerns, “The Poet” and “Experience.” These three pieces are, in fact, best read together, with each inflecting the others' perspectives. That interrelationship illustrates how I suggest we read and teach Emerson's work generally—exploring, for example, “The Snow-Storm” with the anecdote about the snow storm in the Divinity School “Address,” and poems such as “Uriel” and “The Problem,” with the address itself. My point is that the moods of “Threnody,” “The Poet,” and “Experience,” as well as their structures, share in the preoccupations and rhetorical gestures I have explored throughout the Poems. Although we long read “The Poet” as one of Emerson's most affirmative essays, and “Experience” as one of his most skeptical, we are increasingly coming to appreciate how fully the essays echo one another.¹² Their contiguous placement and their vacillation of tone, especially within “Experience,” replicate the bipartite structure and wavering point of view of “Threnody,” and, less precisely, of other Emerson poems.

Emerson's Poems, then, move from a narrative of overcoming threat and silence to scenes in which death itself has become the primary impulse for the poetry. In the middle, they are composed of a host of voices in a variety of personas. With “Threnody” and the poems immediately before and after it, “Dirge” and the Concord “Hymn,” Emerson closes his first volume of poetry on an elegiac yet triumphant note that brings to a sort of culmination the tension between threat and affirmation that he initiated at the volume's threshold.

The second of Emerson's two primary collections of poetry, May-Day and Other Pieces, did not appear until 20 years later, in 1867, and thus represents one of his last significant book-length publications. The volume contains seven parts: two long poems, “May-Day” and “The Adirondacs,” each of which forms its own section (together about one-fourth of the total volume); three substantial sections of midlength poems, “Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces,” “Nature and Life” (with a posthumously published poem by Emerson's brother Edward), and “Elements”; and two short sections of mostly very brief poems, “Quatrains” and “Translations.” Scholars have emphasized that May-Day, especially in its title poem, represents the sexagenarian Emerson's answer to his own aging process.¹³ The structure of the volume would seem to reinforce this connection, as though the first sections corresponded to Emerson's more productive decades and the final brief segments to the waning of his creative powers. Certainly May-Day's texts are preoccupied, even more than those of Poems, with the challenges of confronting limitation and finding rejuvenation.

In addition to reading those concerns as personally reflective ones, however, I suggest that we also view the May-Day volume in a way that previous scholarship has not noted.¹⁴ Its 1867 publication, soon after the end of the American Civil War, invites us to read May-Day along with Melville's Battle-Pieces and Whitman's Drum-Taps as part of the literary response to the war itself. A few of the poems in Emerson's volume—“Freedom,” “Ode Sung in Town Hall,” “Boston Hymn,” and “Voluntaries”—treat the conflict directly. Many others address it implicitly, either tropically or through such subjects as camaraderie, reconciliation, and restoration.

Some poems, including the volume's titlepiece, call upon the poetic spirit as a salve for wounds and the herald of a new age of greater freedom, with spring as a trope for national renewal. Emerson had made a similar gesture of responding to a political occasion metaphorically, and connecting politics and poetry, years earlier. Len Gougeon has pointed out that Emerson's first answer to the passage of the 1850 Missouri Compromise and its Fugitive Slave Law was in the form of poems he sent to the antislavery annual The Liberty Bell at the request of its editor. Ordinarily, material in The Liberty Bell treated abolition directly; Emerson's poems, however, translate philosophical Persian texts about poetry and rebirth. The connection of May and springtime with postwar healing (which we find in Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”) is also Emersonian. Eduardo Cadava has shown that Emerson characteristically uses nature imagery in conjunction with political events, as in “Boston Hymn,” when he associates snow with the Northern forces, and in “Voluntaries” when he employs snow, and the aurora borealis, to represent the North.¹⁵ Emerson's connection of springtime and Reconstruction extends the same strategy.

Even in its concern with the war and its aftermath, however, the volume shares affinities with the earlier Poems—a fact that Emerson's repeated use of “The Sphinx” as a comprehensive threshold poem implies. For with the war and again following it, America was forced to face the question of national identity—forced (as were Oedipus and the poet when they met their Sphinxes) to confront the issue of who it was. Such a challenge, the titlepiece and the volume imply, can best be met through the power of poetry, which is to bring war-torn yet now-virtuous America the vitality of spring.

Emerson does not, however, start his volume of war poetry with poems that relate to battle, then move to poems that emphasize healing and regeneration, as does Whitman in Drum-Taps. Rather, he inverts that more predictable structure, beginning the volume instead with a threshold poem that both describes and provides the balmic equivalent to the “rue, myrrh, and cummin” brought by the poet of “The Sphinx.” Thus, his readers move immediately to the anodyne of poetry. “May-Day”'s simultaneous role as title and threshold poem, reinscribed by the book's serendipitous publication just before May Day (on April 29), attests to the importance of its sexually exuberant celebration of spring. In more than 500 lines of irregularly rhymed tetrameter (mostly in couplets and alternating rhyme),¹⁶ the poem loosely consists of a series of odes that celebrate fertility much like classic Renaissance songs to Hymen. Its subject also makes Emerson's longest single poem a reverdie, a verse that welcomes the springtime regreening of the earth, in the long tradition of such poems as the Middle English “Cuckoo Song,” the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's “When Daisies Pied,” Herrick's “Corinna,” many of Dickinson's spring songs, and, in modern times, cummings's “in just.” As such, “May-Day,” like “The Sphinx,” establishes the keynote of its volume.

At the same time, a number of lines in “May-Day” allude to the war through martial and emancipation imagery. The passages often employ images of blockage and fluidity to indicate the need for spring, when “the bondage-days are told [i.e., finished], / And waters free as winds shall flow.” Because “The world hath overmuch of pain,” Emerson writes, it is in particular need of pleasure, a time of “cheer” and “joy” when spring will “Rebuild the ruin, mend defect,” just as the poet cured the Sphinx. Spring will create “liberated floods” and “new-delivered streams,” bringing in summer, when—as the poem makes explicit the connection of national trauma and sexuality—the world will celebrate a “Hymen of element and race.” Then, “one broad, long midsummer day / Shall to the planet overpay / The ravage of a year of war.”

Thus, this threshold poem also focuses on the issue most central to the earlier poem and volume—how to respond to the sphinxes of impotence and death with cheer and potency. “May-Day” bears other resemblances to “The Sphinx” as well. It, too, represents a riddling answer to the riddle of existence, unexpectedly (especially for this aging ex-cleric) emphasizing that creativity and renewal derive from an internal “storm of heat” whose release generates life. The subsequent poems and translations illustrate that productivity even as they address it metapoetically, returning again and again to notions of regeneration and recuperation.

Immediately after “May-Day,” we find a poem that is in many ways its counterpart, “The Adirondacs,” a long narrative piece in a blank verse that complements its lyrical, heavily rhymed predecessor. Like “May-Day,” “The Adirondacs” concerns the importance of natural renewal. Unlike “May-Day” and its glorification of heterosexual love, this poem celebrates male bonding.¹⁷ “The Adirondacs” tells of a summer camping trip Emerson took with a group of friends, among them author and Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell and the naturalist Louis Aggasiz, in 1858. Despite its antebellum composition date and publication, the poem's appearance in May-Day would have made “The Adirondacs” 's celebration of camaraderie and renewal resonate politically for a nation just having emerged from the strife of brother fighting brother.

Though “The Adirondacs” devotes itself mostly to the tale of the explorers' energizing journey, it closes with the one direct mention of the Sphinx in Emerson's poetry other than in her own eponymous piece. As the men leave the woods to return home, Emerson writes:

And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,
Permitted on her infinite repose
Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,
As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

Thus, a text again culminates with a riddle about a riddle—it is very tentatively “as if” the men (like perhaps the poet in “The Sphinx”) had penetrated the silence and mystery of nature.

The next section of May-Day, “Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces,” treats the Civil War and emancipation directly in four of its 11 poems. Emerson composed the first of these political poems, “Freedom,” at the request of Julia Griffiths for the December 1853 Autographs for Freedom, an antislavery volume to benefit the Rochester (New York) Anti-slavery Society. At first, “Freedom,” like the earlier “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” seems to be essentially an apologia for Emerson's lack of direct participation in the fight for freedom. However, both poems also function like classical praeteritio, the rhetorical device by which a speaker draws attention to something by announcing its omission (“I'll pass over the fact that the candidate stole millions”). They are thus intrinsically ironic—by virtue of their very existence, they address what they say they will not. What is more, while “Freedom” claims that Emerson is unable to “rehearse / Freedom's paean in my verse,” he next proceeds even more directly to do just that. In the following poem, the “Ode Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857,” written to help raise money for Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Emerson exhorts America to “bid the broad Atlantic roll, / A ferry of the free,” and assure that “henceforth, there shall be no chain.”

The third of these “freedom” poems, “Boston Hymn, Read in Music Hall, January 1, 1863,” is even more explicit. Emerson composed it when another friend, John Sullivan Dwight, asked him to read a poem to begin the celebration for the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. “Boston Hymn” became famous immediately, and was sung by the African-American South Carolina regiment commanded by the white literary figure T. W. Higginson. The quatrain that alludes to the then-current debate about how emancipation was to be achieved is especially moving. A proposed solution (one that Emerson himself had supported) called for the government to recompense slaveholders for the “property” they would lose upon emancipation. Now, Emerson forcefully assumes the voice of God, whom he quotes, to command:

Pay ransom to the owner,
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.

Finally, later in 1863, Emerson wrote his most frequently anthologized political poem, “Voluntaries,” to honor the slain members of the Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry and their white commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw. This illustrious group of soldiers is also commemorated by a statue that now stands on Boston Common, and by a number of additional poems, among them the modern elegy “For the Union Dead,” by Bostonian Robert Lowell. Emerson himself had earlier spoken at a fund-raising event for the group, with whom he felt a particular connection through his friendship with Col. Shaw's father, Francis Shaw. Emerson sent “Voluntaries” in September of 1863 to Mr. Shaw after the combat deaths, on July 18, of Robert Shaw and nearly half of the soldiers under his command.

“Voluntaries” begins in a mood of reverence by invoking the “Low and mournful” tones of a slave, then goes on to celebrate freedom's new cohabitation with the heroic black race. The poem asserts its faith in the ultimate triumph of the slain Northern soldiers, a victory achieved because of the probity of their cause and evidenced partly, in the Greek and Latin heroic tradition, by their immortalization in this verse. Emerson predicts that the evil Southerners finally will be “Reserved to a speechless fate,” while the virtuous dead will be crowned with laurels and honored in song. And Emerson's poem, of course, participates in the commemoration it prophesies.

These war poems indicate that Emerson's concerns in May-Day had shifted somewhat from the time of the earlier volume. In addition, these poems are on the whole less riddling in both form and subject than their predecessors. On the other hand, many of the pieces continue a number of structural, rhetorical, and thematic preoccupations of “The Sphinx.” “The Titmouse,” to cite one example, begins with a question much like that in “The Sphinx”—how to overcome lethargy; it is about poet figures (narrator and bird) who cheer; it uses imagery of petrifaction; it contains interpolated voices; and its “solution” involves interaction with nature. “Days” is another riddle, and another allegorization. The speaker of this 11-line parable is as overwhelmed by the personified Days as the poet is accused of being in “The Sphinx,” and as, in 1867, Emerson and the country were by the Sphinxes of age and war. The poem involves the adequacy of a respondent to mysteriously threatening and scornful female inquisitors, and requires the respondent to ask instead of answer—but with a question that is actually a test of her own worth. Its obscurity leads readings even now to remain, like those of “The Sphinx,” divided about whether the response was successful.

Finally, two of the most famous poems in the second collection, “Brahma” and “Terminus,” illustrate the evolution of Emerson's continuing concerns. Positioned at the threshold of its section, “Brahma” is the poem in Emerson's canon most often compared to “The Sphinx,” in both sympathetic analyses and parodies. Fundamentally a riddle, with an implicit “What am I” as its undertone, the poem assumes the voice of what may loosely be identified as the soul or the oversoul. It begins:

If the red slayer think he slays,
          Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
          I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Once more, then, readers receive the voice of a mysterious entity in enigmatic, oracular quatrains. The voice in “Brahma” again wants to know its own identity, and again Emerson presents his clues in opposites and paradox: Brahma asserts that “I am the doubter and the doubt,” for “When me they fly, I am the wings.” And the answer to this riddle is also linguistic, even poetic—Brahma's most direct statement of identity is “I [am] the hymn the Brahmin sings,” and the poem itself actually is that hymn, in the classic long measure of Christian hymnody. Thus the god, the voice, the Sphinx, and the individual become in fundamental ways both articulation and poetry.

In addition, the readers who hear of the “slayer” and “slain” in “Brahma” are those who have just observed North and South in those roles. Although “Brahma” was written and published in the late 1850s, for its 1867 readers, the language would have been inflected with events of the war. In this context, “Brahma” also becomes a meditation on the insignificance of residual divisiveness, an affirmation of life beyond tragedy, victory, and defeat. Echoing the message of “May-Day,” “Brahma” suggests that poetry can provide answers to the horrors of “slayer” and “slain.”

“Terminus,” Emerson's meditative poem on the individual's aging process, along with the three elegiac poems that accompany it, balances “Brahma” and “May-Day” in the structure of May-Day's central sections much as the closing elegies served as counterparts to “The Sphinx” in Poems. Its title is another riddle about its allegorized subject—this time the Greek god of bounds. And “Terminus” also addresses the questions of how to deal with the Sphinxes of depletion and death: it opens, “It is time to be old, / To take in sail.” Emerson's familiar concerns again cluster—the poem thematizes limitation, directly this time; contains figures of flow and blockage; portrays muses as at once helpfully provocative and potentially overwhelming; expresses anxiety about silencing; and contains interpolated voices, including that of a mysterious divinity the meaning of whose closing quatrain once more may be read in diametrically opposed ways. The poem ends by quoting a figure identified simply as “the voice … obeyed at prime” that tells the poet she should, even while closing in upon the shore, “‘banish fear, / Right onward drive unharmed,’” for “The port, well worth the cruise, is near, / And every wave is charmed.’” This advice, reminiscent of but different from Tennyson's in “Ulysses,” seems paradoxical in a poem that ostensibly urges readers “To take in sail.”

In a similar gesture of ambivalence, this time a structural one, May Day indeed does not “terminate” with these elegies, as Poems had, but instead contains three more sections: “Elements,” selected essay epigraphs; 30 “Quatrains” (or near-quatrains); and 18 “Translations,” all but one, a Michelangelo sonnet, renditions of Persian poetry. The quatrains and translations, by virtue of their length, subject matter, and very existence, are quite sphingine, gnomic utterances. In addition, the translations reveal a method of composition quintessentially Emersonian, for in them Emerson blends the Persian, its German rendition, and his own revisions to create poems that disrupt boundaries between origin and elaboration.¹⁸ That appropriative impulse is also at the heart of the final section of Emerson's verse I want to treat, his essay epigraphs, some of which are collected in the May-Day section “Elements.” I will close by exploring the existence of these “Elements” and other epigraphs as they stood originally, at the thresholds of Emerson's prose.

For 30 essays in five separate collections Emerson chose to print his own poems as epigraphs. That decision was altogether unconventional, or, more precisely, was anticonventional. At the thresholds of prose pieces, as on the lintels of doorways, we expect to see “sacred” text, whether from the Bible, or from Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, or Milton. The tradition is definitively deferential. That Emerson was acutely aware of, and resistant to, this sycophantic and possibly impoverishing tendency of the epigraph convention is evident in a statement from his essay “Quotation and Originality”:

Quotation confesses inferiority. In opening a new book we often discover, from the unguarded devotion with which the writer gives his motto or text, all we have to expect from him. If Lord Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the “Instauration” instead of the new book.

(W 8: 188)

He is even more adamant in his journal: “I hate quotation. Tell me what you know” (May 1849; JMN 11: 110).

In the epigraphs, then, Emerson boldly transposes and appropriates convention. Yet despite their peculiarity, and the fact that they are his verse that Emerson's readers most frequently encounter, the epigraph poems have received very little analytical attention. When teaching the essays and writing about them, we typically act as if the mottoes aren't there at all. It is as though readers are embarrassed by the short-lined, heavily rhymed, enigmatic pieces, and are anxious to get past them into the “important” material that follows. But not only are the epigraphs quite appealing as individual works, their presence before the essays even more insistently invites attention. As original, often lengthy, and sometimes independently printed verse “mottoes,” Emerson's epigraphs are generically distinct, significant modifications of both epigraphic and poetic convention. Their peculiarity combined with their own preoccupation with enigma invites us, I think, to imagine the epigraphs themselves as riddling Sphinxes at the thresholds of Emerson's essays.

First, the epigraphs serve as problematic guardians at the gateways, representing distilled challenges that we are to grapple with before we reach the prose. At the same time, the relation of the epigraphs and the essays to their titles is frequently a puzzling, even paradoxical one. The mottoes and essay “History,” for instance are not about “History” as much as about the priority of the soul over history. And, to cite a late occurrence of the same tendency, in the companion essays “Fate” and “Power,” the notion of “Fate” or “Beautiful Necessity” is paradoxical, so that the poem and motto titled “Fate” might be said really to be about “Power,” and those called “Power,” about “Fate.” In addition, the epigraphs frequently appear in rhetorical structures and forms that are directly or indirectly based on riddling—paradox, situation in medias res, and fragmentary or elliptical syntax, for example. And many of the verses thematize obscurity, thus becoming poems about themselves, the essays they introduce, and what Emerson saw as the ultimate inscrutability of life. Unlike travelers near Thebes, we may choose to overlook these elusive puzzlers. But then we miss valuable hints about the essays that follow, the pleasure of playing with the runic lines, and the provocation to self-confrontation and self-examination the epigraphs provide.

As he appropriates and extends the epigraph form, Emerson writes two basic types of poems, both related to “The Sphinx”: first, a sort of oracular wisdom verse that makes gnomic and riddling yet weighty pronouncements; and, second, fragmented narratives about the development of a poet-hero who can solve the enigmas that plague humankind, actually an externalization of the poetic impulse that Emerson would locate within all individuals. As a group, many of the epigraphs tell of this foundling son of Mother Nature, who in his “answers” to her produces the sort of oracular poetry that other epigraphs embody—prophetic in tone and tendency, but with an element of forbidden mystery.

Consequently, the epigraphs often double the riddle form—are frequently riddles about riddling, mysterious oracles about mystery. We find a good illustration of their terse ambiguity in the second motto to “History” (1841 and 1847):

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

Since the poem never identifies a subject, this quatrain is on one level the “I am” of children's riddles and a tradition extending at least back, for instance, to the Old English Exeter Book. The purest such construction among the epigraphs, this is the only motto in the first-person voice of its own subject, a common rhetorical strategy in riddling also employed quite frequently by Emerson's contemporary, Emily Dickinson. As in “The Sphinx,” the phrase in this context also recalls the riddling “I am” of God that I mentioned in conjunction with “The Sphinx,” and Coleridge's concept of the secondary imagination outlined in Biographia Literaria, the creating, synthesizing power of the mind that Coleridge calls “the infinite I AM.” Also, especially in the context of this epigraph, the phrase imports considerable theological weight from Eastern traditions. It directly echoes a text very dear to Emerson, the Bhagavad-Gita, in which the speaker of the “I am” is the soul: “I am the soul which standeth in the bodies of all beings.”¹⁹

Accordingly, that “soul” is the paradoxical topic of the first “History” epigraph, the companion to the poem I have been examining:

There is no great and no small
To the soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

This epigraph identifies the soul as the source of creation (and, by extension, poetic creation). And it makes explicit the point of the essay that follows, in which “History” is also really “soul,” because “there is properly no history; only biography” (LA 240). In a sense, then, Emerson has provided in the first poem the answer to the second.

The lovely motto to the 1860 essay “Illusions,” in The Conduct of Life, is my own favorite. Although Emerson did not choose to reprint “Illusions” as a separate text, the poem is increasingly anthologized. I see it as in some ways the culmination of the epigraphs, combining traits of the aphoristic and the narrative pieces finally to exist in a category of its own. An exploration of ambivalence toward perpetual change, “Illusions” finally celebrates the ongoing metamorphosis that occurs at the end of “The Sphinx.” It begins in syntax that is ambiguously both imperative and declarative:

Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.

These lines exemplify high Romantic apostrophe, in which the poet pretends to command what is manifestly beyond his control. In the course of the poem, these polarities of power and passivity converge: readers are reassured that the wave of progress will also restore what it subsumed. By the end of the piece, we come full circle to find that humanity, too, rides “the wild turmoil” of this threateningly perpetual wave “to power, / And to endurance.”

This epigraph and others play an important role in our understanding of the relationship between Emerson's various texts and voices, and, most importantly, between his poetry and his prose. In the essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson issues an arch rejoinder to anyone who might question the value of his vocation: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation (LA 262).²⁰ Here, an irascible Emerson invokes Deuteronomy's rendition of the Mosaic covenant, in which God cautions Moses to keep the words he has told him that day in his heart, to teach them to his children, to talk of them, and to “write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates” (Deut. 6:9). The doorway also figures prominently in connection with Passover, and with the sacrificial blood of Christ. Emerson's assertion in “Self-Reliance,” then, substitutes an arrogant yet fanciful rejoinder of his own for biblical text and the words of God.

Just as in “Self-Reliance,” where the word and act of “Whim” replace the ancient text, Emerson's own poetry does so before his essays, in the form of the essay epigraphs. They inscribe “Whim” upon the lintels of the prose. In this sense, the essays become elaboration, application, even “exegesis” of the initial poetic “scriptures.” The epigraphs thus combine the sacred and the jovial in their existence as whimsical pre-liminary conundrums. In a larger sense, we might also imagine the epigraphs and essays as together figuring the positions of poetry and prose in Emerson's life. Emerson positions the two together, establishing between the genres a dialogue in which formal divisions become happily indistinct. This invitation to pause at the thresholds of his essays provides our best hint about how to read the prose that follows—poetically.

Finally, the epigraphs place Emerson himself in the position of the Sphinx and readers in the position of Oedipus. They thus initiate at the gateways to his prose the destabilization of boundaries between author and audience, reader and writer that we have come to associate with Emerson's work. For his verse as a whole asks us to challenge our intellects, imaginations, and assumptions, to argue with ourselves, so to speak—as does Emerson's prototypical threshold poem “The Sphinx,” the crucial and complex whim upon the lintel of his first volume of verse.

Notes

1. I use the following abbreviations to cite parenthetically from Emerson's texts: CW, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971-); JMN, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-82); LA, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983); W, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4). Unless otherwise indicated, citations from Emerson's poetry are taken from Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations, ed. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1994). For their help in the preparation of this essay, I am indebted to Julie Vandivere, Catherine Tufariello, Tamar Katz, Cynthia Hogue, and Joel Porte.

2. Richard Benson Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. xxvi, 583.

3. Hyatt Waggoner, Emerson as Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); R. A. Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978); David Porter, Emerson and Literary Change (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1978).

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph H. Orth, Albert J. von Frank, Linda Allardt, and David W. Hill (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986).

5. Carl Strauch, groundbreaking scholar of Emerson's poetry, emphasizes the importance of 1834 as “the year of Emerson's poetic maturity” in his article of that title (Philological Quarterly 34 [October 1955]: 353-77).

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Poems, New and Rev. Ed. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876); and Poems, Vol. 9 of Emerson's Complete Works, Riverside Edition, ed. James Elliot Cabot (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4). Emerson's son Edward explicitly chose not to begin the Centenary Edition Poems with “The Sphinx,” choosing instead to start it with a much more accessible early poem, “Good-Bye.” This sequence of events gains even further Oedipal inflection when we note that Emerson himself apparently very much disliked “Good-Bye.” A letter from Ellen Emerson to Sarah Gibbons Emerson makes clear that Emerson allowed “Good-Bye” to be included in his Selected Poems at his family's insistence: “You asked me in one letter how we could let Father leave out ‘Goodbye proud world’ from the new volume [Selected Poems]. We were sorry, and several friends begged for it, but Father disliked it so much himself that all persuasion failed.” [Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 2: 245.] As justification for his action Edward argues that “The Sphinx” would deter readers at the start rather than entice them to read on:

   Not without serious consideration has the editor removed the poem, which his father put at the beginning of his verse, to a later place. But he has always shared the feeling of regret that Dr. Holmes expressed in his book, that “Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians by placing the Sphinx at the entrance of his temple of song.” In the mythology the Sphinx let no man pass who could not solve her riddle; and Emerson's Sphinx has no doubt put off, in the very portal, readers who would have found good and joyful words for themselves, had not her riddle been beyond their powers.

   (W 9: 403)

7. I discuss the importance of “The Sphinx” in my essay “The Threshold Poem, Emerson, and ‘The Sphinx’” (American Literature 69.3 [September 1997]: 547-70). Part of this chapter is adapted from that essay.

8. Emerson writes in “The Poet”: “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument which makes a poem” (LA 450).

9. Gayle L. Smith surveys the points of disagreement in her excellent essay, “The Language of Identity in Emerson's ‘The Sphinx,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 29 (3d Quarter 1983): 136-43. While agreeing in many particulars, I take issue with Smith's emphasis on the “identity” of the Sphinx and the poet.

10. Scholars have consistently recognized the propriety of the Sphinx as a figure for Emerson and his work, and modern scholarship has continued this emphasis on Emerson and his writings as Sphinxes. The second chapter of Barbara Packer's book on Emerson's prose is “The Riddle of the Sphinx: Nature” [Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1992)], and Yoder stresses the unriddling power of what he identifies as the recurrent Emersonian figure of the American Orphic poet. Emerson jokingly writes of himself as a Sphinx in an 1873 journal entry about his trip to Egypt: “Mrs Helen Bell, it seems, was asked ‘What do you think the Sphinx said to Mr Emerson?’ ‘Why,’ replied Mrs Bell, ‘the Sphinx probably said to him, ‘You're another’” (JMN 16: 294).

11. Hafiz, Shams od-Dīn Muhammad Hāfiz (1326?-?1390), of Shiraz; and Sa'di (whose name Emerson spells Saadi, Said, Seyd, and Seid), Mosharref od-Dīn ibn Mosleh od-Dīn Sa'dī, of Shiraz (ca. 1213-92), are two of the most famous Persian poets.

12. See, for example, B. L. Packer, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982); Richard Lee Francis, “The Poet and Experience: Essays: Second Series,” in Emerson Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, pp. 93-106); David Hill, “Emerson's Eumenides: Textual Evidence and the Interpretation of ‘Experience,’” in Myerson, Emerson Centenary Essays, pp. 107-21; Joel Porte, “Experiments in Creation,” in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 9: American Literature, ed. Boris Ford (London: Penguin, 1988).

13. See, e.g., Porter, pp. 130-33. Porter also emphasizes the title poem's thematization of the poetic process in relation to what he calls Emerson's “crisis of the imagination.”

14. Len Gougeon has treated the importance of issues associated with abolition and the Civil War as a part of his emphasis on Emerson as, in the title of Gougeon's book, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); see also Gougeon, “Emerson, Poetry, and Reform,” Modern Language Studies 19.2 (Spring 1989): 38-49.

15. Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), especially pp. 171ff.

16. “May-Day” exists in several versions. The first-edition text, that in the 1876 Selected Poems, a third in the Riverside Edition, and a fourth in the Centenary.

17. For a discussion of Emerson and the gendered construction of selves, see Julie Ellison, “The Gender of Transparency: Masculinity and The Conduct of Life,” American Literary History 4.4 (Winter 1992): 584-606.

18. On Emerson's translations, see The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, ed. Ronald A. Bosco (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993); Richard Tuerk, “Emerson as Translator—‘The Phoenix,’” Emerson Society Quarterly 63 (1971): 24-26; and J. D. Yohannan, “Emerson's Translations of Persian Poetry from German Sources,” American Literature 14 (1943): 407-20.

19. Charles Wilkins, trans., The Bhagavat-Geeta (London: C. Nourse, 1785), p. 85.

20. Stanley Cavell has devoted a good deal of attention to this same passage. See especially his two essays on Emerson in The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981).