nduce; and to
them, of all men, the severest criticism is due."

These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus."

His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They
lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems
to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited
from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but
with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric,"
and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple,
sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be
forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used
absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be
very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the
poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some
of the best of Milton's own.

In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson
was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet
or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the
term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat
at eighty degrees of Reaumur is a very different matter. The rank of
poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to
our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to
this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular
poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the
popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered
passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.
Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a
great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that
length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is
crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.
And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in
the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on
Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and
"Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a
school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of
poet.

It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in
a great writer which are to become commonplaces i