Poetic Portals: Emerson’s Essay Epigraphs

Abstract

Notes that, while original verse epigraphs frequently preface Emerson’s essays, most readers and scholars have ignored them. Explores the generic and theoretical significance of these largely neglected threshold poems. Claims that by disregarding them, readers lose the pleasure of engaging the poetry and elide perspectives crucial to the prose that follows because the epigraphs resonate with the playful and arch rejoinder of what Emerson identifies in “Self-Reliance” as “whim.” Argues the epigraphs combine sacrality and joviality as fundamental for understanding relationships among Emerson’s various texts and voices.