Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetryedited by Albert J. Von FrankThe Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015We so love the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that we want to love everything he wrote in a lifetime ceaselessly busy with writing. And for a hundred years and more, this urge has extended to the man's poetry, as evidenced by the hefty new volume from the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, edited with skill and clarity by Albert J. Von Frank. In a brief introductory note, Von Frank does his best to strike the 'redressing-the-wrong' note:

Today he survives to us as a master of the essay form, a philosopher of self-reliance, and the central figure in the “transcendentalist,” or idealist, strain of American romanticism. It may be that none of his many claims on our attention has been more generally slighted than the commanding position he achieved as a theoretician and practitioner of poetry.

Likewise Dan Chiasson, in an excellent review of this volume in a recent issue of the New Yorker, strains his lumbago contorting the question to get the right answer:

Emerson's ideas were obviously badly served by the rickety verse structures he built for them. Seeing them strain and buckle under the weight of his mind and ambition led him, in “The Poet,” to call not only for a kind of poem, which, at least in theory, he could have written, but for a wholly new kind of person, a person he wasn't and didn't want to become.

But no, no, it just doesn't work. Even if Emerson wasn't a mediocre poet who occasionally wrote a good poem (a mighty, mighty big “if” - talk about rickety), there's no denying that he was, thoroughly, painfully, a poet of his time, and that he entirely lacked the quintessential gift of truly “major” poets to speak to any other time than his own (a gift his contemporary, Whitman, for instance, had in abundance). When we read the section of The Adirondacs dealing with camping bugs, for instance, what we see is resolutely, dolorously, what we get:

Hard fare, hard bed, and comic misery -The midge, the blue-fly, and the mosquitoPainted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:But, on the second day, we heed them not,Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.For who defends our leafy tabernacleFrom bold intrusion of the travelling crowd, -Who but the midge, musquito, and the fly,Which past endurance sting the tender cit,But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

 Or the joyful exhortation of Forbearance, from the early 1840s: 

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse?Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?And loved so well a high behavior,In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,Nobility more nobly to repay?O, be my friend and teach me to be thine!

We love Emerson, so lavish study upon him, and this Belknap volume, in addition to sporting a beautiful cover, comes laden with astute critical apparatus. In his famous and much-lauded essays, he created new and invigorating ways for people to think about their relations with the world. But in his poetry, he was a pallid, picayune echo of his more popular contemporary versifier, John Greenleaf Whittier. Whom nobody loves, and hence we're not exactly tripping over critical editions of his “major poetry.” Emerson the poet got lucky with a phrase here or a thought there, bright spots in a sea of dreck. Emerson the essayist and teacher – eternally challenging, eternally young – will have to suffice.