"The Poet"

"The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands at the center."

"the poet is the namer, or language maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses."

"The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that."

"The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind'; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar."


(Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet")