Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet” includes this definition of poetry: “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” 

Emerson’s essay was published in 1844 in Emerson’s Essays: Second Series, and by then had already been influential: he gave it as a lecture two years before in New York to an audience that included Walt Whitman. And yet, nearly two centuries later, after arguably shaping the modern poetic tradition, this definition of poetry still has the capacity to baffle and provoke. Nearly every word is up for interpretation; his phrases, lingered over, grow sharper and increasingly strange. And the arrangement of the sentence—its grammar, its movement—is also both lovely and curious in how it keeps extending (or unraveling). Just some of our questions might include: What, precisely, does Emerson mean by “metre-making argument”? How to understand the sentence’s construction, with long dash, like a hinge or a caesura, between its two parts? How does this definition itself depend on poetic devices? And why the vagueness or even inarticulateness of the definition’s ending of “a new thing”?  

We will collectively work toward more definition of this definition.

This seminar will ask participants to respond to this single sentence and to make an argument about how to understand it. We expect that seminar participants will draw on their own fields of expertise, but bring those to bear directly on this seminar’s undertaking of explication of Emerson’s account of poetry. In particular, we anticipate that participants will close read Emerson’s definition by close reading a poem, of any era, relative to it. This is a project of refraction, as we each will read Emerson's theory through poetry, and bend it back again, from multiple angles.