The Poet-Intellectual

Emerson's self-conception as a literary intellectual hinges on his definition of the ‘Poet’, a term that shifts between literary artist, scholar, philosopher, priest, cultural critic, and man of letters (Buell 2003: 40–3). Emerson rarely uses this label to distinguish between the poetic in a strictly literary sense and other intellectual pursuits. Instead he prefers to apply ‘poet’ as an evaluative term that signals not only skills of poetic composition but also depth and universality of vision as well as heightened powers of perception. Versed in cultural criticism and artistic expression, the Emersonian poet is above all a ‘doctor’ (1903: 3/8; 1960–82: 7/468) who diagnoses society's spiritual and cultural state and devises necessary cures, which he transmits to the people in order to guide and instruct them. This recalls Novalis’ 1797 definition of the poet as a ‘transcendental physician’ (‘der transzendentale Arzt’) involved in the poetic ‘construction’ of ‘transcendental health’ (1987: 380). A more important context for Emerson's intellectual positioning is Thomas Carlyle's view of the literary profession.

In his ‘Novalis’ essay for the Foreign Review (1827), Carlyle associates literariness with difficulty: ‘[N]o good Book’, he says, ‘shows its best face at first’. Literature is not supposed to be an easy pleasure but requires potentially strenuous repeated reading and intense reflection, in marked contrast to the lesser literary ‘amusement from hour to hour’ for shallow readers who are ‘accustomed to see through every thing in one second of time’ (1827: 97–8).