Emerson’s “The Poet”

If I handed you an essay called “The Poet,” you’d likely expect an analysis of, say, the poet’s meter or imagery and symbolism. But if the essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet,” you won’t find any of this. Rather, you’ll read that “it is not meters but meter-making argument that makes a poem.” And “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol.”