Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.