1 The Impersonal Personified: Emerson’s Poet Yves GARDES, Université Paris Dauphine DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2019.1665925 Emerson’s confidence in his vocation as a poet was never defeated throughout his lifetime. Notwithstanding his repeated frustrating efforts to compose poems, he never challenged the thought of being a poet at heart: I am born a poet, of a low class without a doubt yet a poet. That is my nature & vocation. My singing be sure is very “husky”, & is for the most part in prose. Still I am a poet. 1 In this famous 1835 letter to his wife Lydia Jackson, Emerson contrasts the peremptory assertion of his poetic ‘nature’ and ‘vocation’ with the practical grounding of his poetic work in the ‘low’ and in ‘prose’, thus emphasising the discrepancy between an essential aspiration pertaining to his idealist philosophy and the acknowledgement of incomplete success. Strikingly, a similar comment on his poetic talents is passed in his journals almost thirty years later and provides further insight into Emerson’s understanding of his peculiar position as a poet: I am a bard least of bards [...]; but I am a bard because I stand near them, and apprehend all they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say, and, moreover, I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which have the like scope and aim: – What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold. 2 While his poetic stutter prevents him from producing full stanzas, Emerson nonetheless entertains the thought of being a poet, since he may ‘apprehend’ what poets ‘utter’ freely in verse. The indeterminacy of Emerson’s status as a poet has stirred up much criticism and the question was first settled in the 1970s. In their joint analyses of the poems and the essays, Waggoner, Porter, and Yoder to a lesser extent, struggle to make a case for the poems, frequently turning back to the prose for evidence of poetic talents and concluding that Emerson was a ‘failed’ poet. 3 The reason for this verdict is that, more often than not, these authors read the poems against the essay ‘The Poet’, in which Emerson portrays an ideal poet whose traits and abilities are never all accounted for in the poems. In order to discuss Emerson’s status as a poet, this essay adopts a different approach and takes on Sharon Cameron’s suggestion that the essay ‘The Poet’ displays Emerson’s bipolar attitude towards his poetic gift. In her essay ‘The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal’, she identifies a ‘double voice’: [O]n the one hand, the reference for the speaking voice is the unemancipated person who anticipates the poet. But, on the other, the poet being evoked also seemed referenced to the 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Ralph L. Rusk et Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1995), Vol. 1, p. 435. 2 Quoted in R. A. Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. xv. 3 See Hyatt Waggoner, Emerson as Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); David Porter, Emerson and Literary Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America.