Excerpt from Clews to Emerson's Mystic Verse

"When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room." - Shakespeare.

One would have supposed that the beauty of Emerson's spheral songs would before this have given them wide vogue among the circles that have recently come into the full enjoyment of his philosophical prose and adopted him into their calendar of saints. Instead of the two or three plain and not over-attractive editions in which his poems are issued it would seem as if before this the demand for them would have been such that they could have been printed on costly paper, filled with delicate engravings, and bound like rarest missals. One trouble seems to be that the numerous poems containing obscure and mystical passages have never been annotated. Probably, too, the omission hitherto to explain a single one of Emerson's mysterious titles has helped to repel people who hate opacity in a poet.

Yet, after all, the age has caught up with Emerson. The old jests about the unintelligibility of Transcendentalism are out of date. The tradition that Emerson is always irritatingly obscure to the general reader has drifted along unchallenged as one of the cela va sans dire's. But the fact that thirty-five of his poems - one-third of all - have been issued by his publishers in an excellent educational series for schoolboys and schoolgirls, and that the notes are chiefly illustrative and not the explanation of difficult thought, is proof positive that he is at last one of the popular poets. He is no longer obscure, except in certain of his higher mystic utterances, of which it is the object of these papers to give interpretations. I expressly omit passages which have heretofore anywhere been cleared up.

Fifty years ago Emerson's poetry was a stumbling-block and offence to all but a few.

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