Emerson and Thoreau both regarded poetry as a form of literature peculiarly suited to express Transcendental insight into the divine. Emerson also presented poetry as a kind of demonstration of correspondence, a simultaneous manifestation of the properties of physical form and ethereal spirit. He wrote in his essay "The Poet":
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.
Ultimately, then, the spiritual origin of the poem precedes the poem as "thing," as an object possessing physical form as well as idea. And through the beauty of its form, something of the underlying spiritual impetus behind the poem is revealed.
Emerson not only explored the relationship between the material and the spiritual in his writings, but also directly addressed the discrepancy between philosophy and our experience of life, notably in the essay "Experience." While he rejected narrow and limiting approaches and institutions, he was tolerant of humanity and of social forms. On a basic level, he accepted the world he lived in as it was, and sought to reconcile it with the higher spiritual reality that he perceived beyond.
In Nature, "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," and a few other key early pieces, Emerson expressed most of the major ideas that he explored throughout the rest of his work. In the course of his career, he examined a broad range of subjects — poets and poetry, education, history, society, art, politics, reform, and the lives of particular individuals among them — within the Transcendental framework that he set forth early in his career as a lecturer and a man of letters.
