Poetry

Expert Poets: Emerson and Whitman

An Essay

cg fewston

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman offer readers a unique view on language development and its inherent role in man and nature. And it is with Emerson’s and Whitman’s expert understanding of language, poetry, and Nature that readers are rewarded with further insight into the world around them.

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Some of what Emerson writes in his poem “Nature” reminds me of “The Natural Approach” developed by Tracy Terrell in 1977, developed later along with Stephen Krashen, to language acquisition and development, focusing more on understanding meanings rather than grammar structures; in this method “language is viewed as a vehicle for communicating meanings and messages” (Richards & Rodgers 178, 180).

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This is rather different to what Chomsky argued: “Much of human language use is not imitated behavior but is created anew from underlying knowledge of abstract rules. Sentences are not learned by imitation and repetition but ‘generated’ from the learner’s underlying ‘competence’” (Richards & Rodgers 66). However, Chomsky was more grammar oriented than others. One more: “Sociolinguistic competence refers to an understanding of the social context in which communication takes place” (Richards & Rodgers 160).

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Emerson touches on these points when he writes: “Words are signs of natural facts” – I believe he is referring to words as meanings and messages – “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance” (Emerson). Here language, as Krashen and Terrell mentioned, is a “vehicle” to express a “material appearance” and is very natural in our human development. This is also relevant to Emerson’s statement: “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” I would argue that Emerson’s use of “spirit” and “spiritual” to describe language would best be understood if, as a linguist might, as an abstract or emotional thought and the “natural” word use could refer to something concrete – hence: “enraged man” (anger) would refer to the spirit (i.e., the emotions or the abstract one cannot touch) and “lion” (symbolic meaning through visual evidence) would refer to the natural world (i.e., the concrete evidence, not-abstract). And this further explains when Emerson writes that “Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”

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But what does all this mean? Well, I believe Emerson has already touched on “the natural approach” where language is a “vehicle of messages” and Chomsky’s “abstract rules” but uses this to lend additional support to his final argument – that language is a social construct (i.e., Sociolinguistic competence). Emerson explains this social connection:

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet (1803-1882)

“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity of truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost.”

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Likewise, Walt Whitman in “Sea-Drift” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” both poems found in Leaves of Grass, utilizes personification to illustrate just how Nature can be a healing force during a man’s distressing period.

“Sea-Drift” describes one man meandering through nature, specifically on a beach, while he experiences anguish after having lost his brother. The narrator of the poem laments:

From your memories sad brother…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves.

(Whitman, “Sea-Drift” 11, 17, 23-24 Web)

The man, in utter sadness, falls to the beach in tears, meeting the ocean’s pulse of time and gradual consolation in the process. The narrator then correlates a childhood memory of two birds, one male and one female, to his own loss of his brother. The memory portrays a she-bird vanishing, “nor ever appear’d again,” (53) and the he-bird calling on his mate in dire hopes of her return and “pour’d forth the meanings which [the narrator] of all men know” (68) through his own loss and pain (Whitman, “Sea-Drift” Web). The poem ends with the narrator understanding the he-bird’s loss and desperate calling to its mate, much as he does to his dead brother: “Listen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes, / Following you my brother” (Whitman, “Sea-Drift” 79-80 Web). Nature ultimately, and finally, acts as a cathartic force, driving the mourner from reflective memories and closer to healing and understanding of the normalcy of loss and death. The narrator continues to exemplify this mood of healing and understanding:

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love.

(Whitman, “Sea-Drift” 81-84, 87-88 Web)

The narrator’s own love cannot soothe from within, but it is an external force which creates the healing power to begin. Nature illustrates to the man that time does not cease, in any form, because of death, but instead life rages forward, through the pain, offering tough love to those left alive to suffer the death of loved ones.

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Whitman continues the theme of Nature’s therapeutic mending, illustrated with the ceaseless waves of continual healing. In “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” Whitman chooses to follow the flow of life, which he writes: “Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)” despite the tragedy confronting him, and further exclaims his own unification with Nature, “I ebb’d with the ocean of life” (Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 62, 1 Web). Death, therefore, becomes a cycle and not an ultimate end to life. The narrator continues:

As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift.

(Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 22-25 Web)

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Transcendence emerges from the earlier poem, “Sea-Drift,” and it is one of knowing that mankind and their woes are small matters compared to the endless cycles of nature and surrounding life, with the narrator claiming “I too am but a trail of drift and debris” and further illustrated by the narrator’s attempt to comprehend the universal and infinite: “I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single / object, and that no man ever can” (Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 53, 38-39 Web). By the end of the poem, the narrator furnishes a higher understanding of Nature’s existence, one that is not completely cruel but rather sincere, offering its “sobbing,” and that mankind is indeed at the mercy of such Nature by reporting “We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out / before you” (Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 81, 83-84 Web).

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Both poems, in sum, exhibit one man’s anguish from having been confronted with death and to understand, as a survivor, that life and death do continue onward, and illustrated through Nature’s oceanic waves. Furthermore, Whitman offers a personal view of how Nature can be a comforter as well as an illustrator to how life continues, ebbs, and willfully knows that death is only one part of the dramatic whole of life.

As expert poets Emerson and Whitman must have known that language is derived from mankind’s attempt to decode nature into meaningful messages, and it is Nature, our supreme social context – so to speak – provides all the important messages we need to live a correct way of life; however, when we lose such connections to the natural world, mankind becomes lost to the path which is correspondent to harmony and peace.

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Walt Whitman, American Poet (1819-1892)

Bibliography:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.”

Richards, Jack C. & Theodore S. Rodgers. (1986). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.

Whitman, Walt (1819-1892). “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1891-1892). Whitmanarchive.org. Walt Whitman Archive, Eds. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, n.d. Web 2 March 2011.

—. “Sea-Drift” (1891-1892). Bibliomania.com. Bibliomania. n.d. Web 2 March 2011.

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cg fewston

CG FEWSTON

cg fewston

The American novelist CG FEWSTON has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Italy), a Visiting Fellow at Hong Kong’s CityU, & he’s a been member of the Hemingway Society, Americans for the Arts, PEN America, Club Med, & the Royal Society of Literature. He’s also a been Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) based in London. He’s the author of several short stories and novels. His works include A Fathers Son (2005), The New America: A Collection (2007), The Mystics Smile ~ A Play in 3 Acts (2007), Vanity of Vanities (2011), A Time to Love in Tehran (2015), Little Hometown, America (2020); A Time to Forget in East Berlin (2022), and Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being (2023).

cg fewston

He has a B.A. in English, an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors), and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction. He was born in Texas in 1979.

cg fewston
cg fewston

Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being is a captivating new dystopian science fiction novel by CG Fewston, an author already making a name for himself with his thought-provoking work. Set in the year 2183, Conquergood is set in a world where one company, Korporation, reigns supreme and has obtained world peace, through oppression... The world-building in the novel is remarkable. Fewston has created a believable and authentic post-apocalyptic society with technological wonders and thought-provoking societal issues. The relevance of the themes to the state of the world today adds an extra wrinkle and makes the story even more compelling.”

cg fewston
cg fewston

“A spellbinding tale of love and espionage set under the looming shadow of the Berlin Wall in 1975… A mesmerising read full of charged eroticism.”

Ian Skewis, Associate Editor for Bloodhound Books, & author of best-selling novel A Murder of Crows (2017)  

“An engrossing story of clandestine espionage… a testament to the lifestyle encountered in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War.”

“There is no better way for readers interested in Germany’s history and the dilemma and cultures of the two Berlins to absorb this information than in a novel such as this, which captures the microcosm of two individuals’ love, relationship, and options and expands them against the blossoming dilemmas of a nation divided.”

~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

A Time to Forget in East Berlin is a dream-like interlude of love and passion in the paranoid and violent life of a Cold War spy. The meticulous research is evident on every page, and Fewston’s elegant prose, reminiscent of novels from a bygone era, enhances the sensation that this is a book firmly rooted in another time.”

~ Matthew Harffy, prolific writer & best-selling historical fiction author of the “Bernicia Chronicles” series

“Vivid, nuanced, and poetic…” “Fewston avoids familiar plot elements of espionage fiction, and he is excellent when it comes to emotional precision and form while crafting his varied cast of characters.” “There’s a lot to absorb in this book of hefty psychological and philosophical observations and insights, but the reader who stays committed will be greatly rewarded.”

cg fewston

GOLD Winner in the 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Awards for Contemporary Realistic Fiction

FINALIST in the SOUTHWEST REGIONAL FICTION category of the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence 2020 Awards (NIEA)

“Readers of The Catcher in the Rye and similar stories will relish the astute, critical inspection of life that makes Little Hometown, America a compelling snapshot of contemporary American life and culture.”

“Fewston employs a literary device called a ‘frame narrative’ which may be less familiar to some, but allows for a picture-in-picture result (to use a photographic term). Snapshots of stories appear as parts of other stories, with the introductory story serving as a backdrop for a series of shorter stories that lead readers into each, dovetailing and connecting in intricate ways.”

~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

“The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello.”

“In this way, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the ‘purity’ of art, the ‘corrupting’ influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships.”

“Fewston’s lyrical, nostalgia-steeped story is told from the perspective of a 40-year-old man gazing back on events from his 1980s Texas childhood…. the narrator movingly conveys and interprets the greater meanings behind childhood memories.”

“The novel’s focus on formative childhood moments is familiar… the narrator’s lived experiences come across as wholly personal, deeply felt, and visceral.”

cg fewston
cg fewston

American Novelist CG FEWSTON

 

cg fewston

This is my good friend, Nicolasa (Nico) Murillo, CRC, who is a professional chef & a wellness mentor. I’ve known her since childhood & I’m honored to share her story with you. In life, we all have ups & downs, some far more extreme than others. Much like in Canada, in America, the legalization of marijuana has become a national movement, which includes safe & legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use & research for all.

“This is a wellness movement,” Nico explains. The wellness movement is focused on three specific areas: information, encouragement, & accountability.

In these stressful & unprecedented times, it makes good sense to promote & encourage the state or condition of being in good physical & mental health.

To learn more you can visit: Americans For Safe Access & Texans for Safe Access, ASA (if you are in Texas).

The mission of Americans for Safe Access (ASA) is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research.

Link: https://www.safeaccessnow.org/

TEXANS FOR SAFE ACCESS ~ share the mission of their national organization, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), which is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research, for all Texans.

Link: https://txsafeaccess.org/about-1

Stay safe & stay happy. God bless.

 

Nico Murillo Bio ~ Americans & Texans for Safe Access ~ Medical Cannabis

 

 

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