In his essay “Shakespeare, or the Poet”, Emerson asserts that poetic genius requires two things. First, the ability of the poet to see natural phenomena as moral phenomena – that is, to turn things in the world into metaphors of our inner lives. The poet turns things into signs that convey “a certain mute commentary on human life”. No less important is a second trait: the poet’s “cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet – for beauty is his aim.” The poet’s cheerfulness involves his ability to see the beauty of the world, to see things “for the lovely light that sparkles from them”.
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A cheery mood, we might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise.
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