Reading Comprehension: Selections from The Poet (1844), by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

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    The sign and credential of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal.

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...Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.

    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... The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

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The Universe is the externalization of the soul.

 


Reading Comprehension: Selections from The Poet (1844), by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

1. What is poetry, according to Emerson? (explain)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. What is special about what a poet does? Why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. What does Emerson mean when he writes, "The Universe is the externalization of the soul"? (explain)