From his student days through his life as a teacher, as a minister, and finally, after he was twenty-eight, as a freelance intellectual, Emerson always thought of himself as a poet. And while most of his best work is in prose, it is a prose which Emerson tried to keep to at least as high a standard as the usual language of poetry. Like Coleridge, he wrote only a few great poems (“Days,” “The Snow-Storm,” “Hamatreya”), and also like Coleridge, he is often a better writer about poetry than a poet. The essay “The Poet” is, for example, arguably the best piece ever written on literature as literary process. Emerson is the spokesperson for the idea that the poet is a sayer more than a maker. He asserts that the poet is not different from or better than us but representative of us, of the capacity that exists, as Jorge Luis Borges notes, during a few occasions in the life of every person. Emerson stands for the idea that the highest art shapes its own form, unique and organic, from within, as a pear grows. He insists that language is not fixed or final, that on the contrary it is vehicular and transitive—the means, and not the end, of art. Above all, Emerson contends that “art is the path of the creator to his work,” not the finished work itself. “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 is our strongest defender of expressionism in the arts, of the idea that self-expression is a basic human drive, one of the things all creatures live for. “It is a necessity of the human nature,” Emerson writes, “that it should express itself outwardly and embody its thought. As all creatures are allured to reproduce themselves so must the thought be imparted in speech. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. What is in will out.” “The man is only half himself,” he says in “The Poet,” “the other half is his expression.”

If the great poet is representative, “apprising us not of his wealth but of the common wealth,” so too are the other great figures in world history. In Representative Men, Emerson interprets afresh the great-persons theory of history. It was Thomas Carlyle’s view, in Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, that some individuals are simply born great, and that the rest of us should find fulfillment and happiness in our willing submission to them. Emerson consistently rejects this leader worship and the aristocratic point of view that supports it. Instead, he argues, each of the great persons of the past merely represents one aspect of our common humanity developed to a high level. So Plato comes to stand for the philosophical inquirer in each of us, Montaigne for the skeptic, Shakespeare for the poet, and so on. As he draws each portrait, Emerson is at great pains to praise what is general and imitable. What Plato has thought anyone can think. Pitting his belief in self-reliance against Carlyle’s reliance on the hero, Emerson is careful to end each sketch with a cold-eyed account of the subject’s imperfections.