Unlike his prose which ha been praised almost unanimously as the best representative work of the American Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson`s poetry has been receive conflicting comments from Emersonians. Sometimes they admired Emerson`s poetry without much literary analysis, and sometimes, they, like the New Critics, simply dismissed it as unsuccessful poetry lacking the verbal artistry such as paradox and irony. In other words, either the admirers have generally seemed unable or unwilling to express the reasons for their admiration in `literary` terms, or the detractors condemned in a matter-of-fact tone that Emerson was a great philosopher, but not a good, or even a `legitimate` poet. The reason beind these contradictory assertions about Emerson`s poetry is the desire to treat I s as a finished statement and to look at it through the analytic microscopy. Seen through that kind of microscope, Emerson`s poetry seems to be a versified description of his philosophy, or artificial handiwork with ideational leap and without aesthetic elements. The purpose of this study is to examine Emerson`s poetry, not as a summary of a finished philosophical document, but as an ongoing process of religious search, and to approach it from a new perspective by reading it through the perpective of the Oriental thought. It is hoped that through this comparative study, we can have a better and broader understanding of Emerson`s poetry, and ultimately a more balanced perspective on Eastern/Western cultures.
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