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“The Poet” was published in Emerson’s collection Essays: Second Series (1844) and was based on a lecture (heard in New York by Walt Whitman) Emerson gave in 1842. The essay is exuberant, original, and at times rhapsodic. In it, Emerson describes how the poet is “representative,” standing “among partial men for the complete man.” The only one capable of articulating the transcendent nature of things, the poet is the one who can identify “symbols” and “emblems” of the world: “The world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity . . . there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature.” The poet “re-attaches things to nature and the Whole” by “saying” or naming. Emerson writes that the poet has better perceptions than the rest of humanity, “he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing of metamorphosis . . . his speech flows with the flowing of nature.”

In “The Poet,” Emerson also states that good poetry is not solely a matter of technical prowess: “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 poet speaks most “adequately…when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . not with the intellect.” Emerson observes that a lifestyle “on a key so low and plain” is stimulant enough for poets, our “liberating gods.” At the end of the essay, Emerson laments the lack of poets writing about America: “America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”