A piece that Harold Bloom introduced me to -- it was included in a book of his: Ralph Waldo Emerson's definition, or vision, of poetry and its powers:
If
the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The
metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has
a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be
touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children.
We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is
the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are
thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their
world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we
divine that it does not stop... [W]hen
Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks extreme old
age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when
Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse,' compares good blood in mean condition
to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount
of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty
thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the Apocalypse, the ruin of the
world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her
untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily
relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; — we take the cheerful
hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as
when the gypsies say, "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die."
This is the first of a series of posts related to writing: the opinions of writers on the process, and their own working and ways, disappointments, glories, etc.
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