After he’d spent years reading Emerson’s “Brahma,” Robert Frost said: “I can now understand every line in it but one or two.”
The poem has 16 lines, and Frost found the last two murky. In particular, the Christian tone of the phrase “meek lover of the good” bothered him.
I don’t like obscurity and obfuscation, but I do like dark sayings I must leave the clearing of to time.
Frost’s sensibilities are not mine, which is why I find him interesting. When I think of Emerson, I think of essays. Frost thought of poems such as “Ode (Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857)” “Give All to Love” and “Monadnoc.” He said:
I owe more to Emerson than anyone else for troubled thoughts about freedom.
• Sources: The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007, p. 202.
The Poetry Foundation has Emerson’s “Brahma” here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45868/brahma-56d225936127b
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