Chapter 9 - Linen Shreds and Melons in a Field

Summary

Lydia Sigourney is often misunderstood as an excessively sentimental and possibly not very smart poet and a writer of ponderous advice handbooks for mothers and daughters. In the poem, To a Shred of Linen Mrs. Sigourney displayed having an unexpectedly witty, even iconoclastic, streak. Ralph Waldo Emerson found himself hankering after such worthier bards. He disliked poetry in which the meter influenced what the poet wants to say. Emerson's closest ally was Margaret Fuller who had written an unrhymed poetic sketch titled Meditations. Margaret Fuller's spirit of love quietly rebels against one of the most iconic images of Transcendentalism before Emerson had even had time to formulate it: the image of the solitary eyeball melting into the horizon. The works of other poets including Osgood, Waldo, Saadi Shirazi and Henry David Thoreau are also discussed.