10 Poems I Like Part V

Listen to the episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Greetings, friends. I hope all of your summers have gotten off to a swimmingly good start, apocalyptic heatwaves notwithstanding. I have some good news and I have some bad news. The bad news is that this will be the only Versecraft episode this month, as very soon I will be traveling with my wife to visit libraries in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands for her dissertation– horrible grunt work, I know. I will also be meeting up with my good friend Cameron Clark in Scotland, as well as several other lovely folks in the UK literary scene. I can’t wait to tell you all about all of these things when I get back.

The good news is that, on this episode, you get ten poems for the price of one. That’s right, it’s time for another round of my world-famous 10 Poems I Like series. If you’d like to follow along with the poems as I read and discuss them, check out the link to my Substack, and please do consider purchasing a paid subscription, as every little bit helps to make this program possible. Alright, let’s get this show on the road.

Now, here in the States, we have recently been subject to all kinds of embarrassing attempts to celebrate our bloody, haunted, hypocritical, wonderful nation’s quarter-millennium anniversary. Here on Versecraft, I’ll celebrate it by beginning with a poem by our motherland’s quintessential sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson, who lived from 1803 to 1882, is not a figure who can be encompassed in a brief paragraph, so I will not try. Suffice it to say that he took a smattering of German Idealism, Stoicism, Indian mysticism, and Unitarianism, put a smile on the gloomy face of that philosophical potpourri, gave it an REI membership, and called it Transcendentalism, which, through a number of indelibly eloquent essays, he transformed into what Harold Bloom identified as our national religion. Thoreau and Whitman were his disciples, and through them, every American who has ever pretended to be an outdoorsman or been a little too happy about making lists. Though Emerson is of course best known for his quasi-philosophical essays, he also moonlighted as a poet, and sometimes he was pretty good, like in this one: