SOURCE: "Toward the 'Titmouse Dimension': The Development of Emerson's Poetic Style," in PMLA, Vol. 87, No. 2, March, 1972, pp. 255-70.

In this excerpt, Yoder presents a chronological study of Emerson's poems to reveal the development of Emerson's poetic style. Yoder finds that Emerson's use of poetic techniques, his themes, and his poetic structures follow a progression that coincides with his changing concept of the "poet's identity."

… The task of defining Emerson's poetry is difficult because, unlike Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the acknowledged giants of nineteenth-century American poetry, Emerson has no distinctive, original, easily defined style. It has been customary to borrow Emerson's own favorite organic metaphor and condemn him on just this ground, that his poetry never ripened and blossomed into unique, distinctive expression; in other words, that he never found himself as a poet. The charge carries some truth; Emerson was, after all, a diffident, often dissatisfied experimenter, as...