Poetry is in the world, in things, in people

JMW Turner (1843) Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis

Robert Richardson, in Emerson: The Mind on Fire, claims that, "'The Poet' [by Emerson] is arguably the best piece ever written on literature as literary process, and it is the major statement of international romantic expressionism, the idea that expressing our thoughts and feelings is not only one of the fundamental and given aspects about human nature -- a basic drive, like sex -- but also one of the main purposes of human life."

To Emerson, poetry "is not an acquisition, a possession, a skill, or a trade. Its forms are nothing except as they reflect the spirit, inner fire.  The forms of poetry by themselves do not matter.  What matters is the source of poetry:"

For we are not pans and barrows, not even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.

Richardson says, "Emerson also insists that the poet is a sayer, a namer, and not a maker.  A poem is the result of seeing and saying; the art is in the process.  The final product marks the end, the death, of the process, the point at which fossilization sets in.... Poetry for Emerson is not a collection of finished poems but the process that produces poems.

poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempts to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

Richardson: "The poetry is in the world, in people, in things. It is the poet's job to catch it and set it down.  Thus originality (in the sense of novelty), so important to most romantics, is not of much interest to Emerson."