Robert Richardson writes about Emerson's poetry, especially "Each and All" and "The Snow-Storm" and "The Rhodora" and how they represent something fundamental to Emerson's developing consciousness.
All these poems are animated by the same fundamental insight that is now a living, emotionally experienced reality for Emerson. The world itself is the great poem, the source of all the verbal approximations of itself. When the poet can hold fast to this connection, he has access -- through his own poor powers - to the world's power and beauty. This is one of the central insights of Emerson's life. Not only did it never leave him, it never lost its sweet urgency, its sensuous hold on him, its ability to lift the common moments of everyday life on the updrafts of awareness that reader are always wanting to call mystical experience. At the core of Emerson's life from now on is this willed surrender, this giving oneself over to the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day. (179)
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