Perhaps along with other American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a writer whose paragraphs are considered models of structured composition. His sentences, though, are another matter. Robert Richardson, in his First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, declares that “for Emerson the sentence—not the paragraph and not the essay—is the main structural and formal unit,” and that this preoccupation “steered him away from narrative, from logic, from continuity, from formal arrangement and effect.” One can understand, then, the reluctance of writing teachers to hold up Emerson’s extended prose as an exemplar of formal paragraph construction.
But all the thought that was in those sentences! Richardson continues:
When his sentences work, which is often enough, his success can be traced to his taking endless pains with sentence mechanics. He liked sentences that had a little bite or pop, a flash-point, and he had several different ways of achieving this effect, which we may distinguish as the whip-crack, the back-flip, the brass ring (hole in one), and the mousetrap.
Richardson goes on to give an example of each type from Emerson’s writings: “Every man is wanted, but no man is wanted much” (the whip-crack, where the final position snaps the idea); “Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing” (the back-flip, where an unexpected logic is displayed); “Hitch your wagon to a star” (the brass ring, where an idea sounds its profundity); and “Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can” (the mousetrap, where the sentence catches an idea whole).
Yet for all that, it was the poet, not the prose writer, whom Emerson thought truly representative of the nature of human nature, because our prose sentences, even his, are still after the fact of the poet’s vision. In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson says:
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
So finely organized. Hours could be spent on the implications of that phrase alone. Organized administratively, as in well planned? Surely not. Organized as integrated, whole, organically cognate with? Perhaps we’re closer to his meaning there. Rich human depths to reflect upon. Robert Richardson’s short study of Emerson, still available, has much to say about reading and writing and language and poetry and art. He has written, as well, a biography of Emerson (Emerson: The Mind on Fire), and a biography too of Emerson’s worthy contemporary Thoreau (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind). Perhaps the one unanticipated lesson Emerson will teach us is how to savor the long, slow time it takes to read and ponder him. Much like a long, slow, savory meal with a friend whose insight we’ve come to rely upon.
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beautiful.
Brilliant!