Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in the beauty of the soul of the individual and thought that this beauty was best represented in nature and in our environment. Emerson’s essays such as “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” convey some of his ideas of beauty and nature, but it is through his poetry that Emerson truly dazzles the reader with his sometimes lofty perceptions of beauty. Poetry, Emerson thought, was the best medium for communicating his ideas on the importance and value of beauty and nature.
The poem that best describes Emerson’s view of beauty and nature is “The Rhodora.” In it, Emerson directly addresses the beauty and wonder of the nature that surrounds and includes man. Emerson believes, in this poem, that the very purpose of nature is its beauty. There is no other purpose, it seems, for beauty except for being beautiful. Emerson believes in the idea of beauty for the sake of beauty. In the poem, he comes to the conclusion that “beauty [as represented by the rhodora in this poem] is its own excuse for being.” He attacks the “sages” for questioning the practicality of the flower, saying here that its beauty is its practical purpose! He writes, “I found the fresh rhodora… spreading its leafless blooms… to please the desert and the sluggish brook,” exclaiming, again, that sharing its beauty is the only purpose that the rhodora has or should have. He says in the last line, “the self-same power that brought me there brought you.” Here, Emerson gives nature, mankind, and beauty a unifying spirit, proclaiming that the same power that created the rhodora also brought him there to appreciate the flower.
Emerson believed that man, in his ever-growing haste, has started to take for granted such things as nature and beauty, losing, in Emerson’s mind, a precious part of life here on earth.
