The Correspondence in Ideas between the Poetry and the Prose of Emerson

The result of this interpretative survey, as supplemented by the formal tabulation of Part II, is the demonstration of three aspects of the correspondence in ideas between the poetry and the prose of Emerson. The first is the extensive range of the parallelism. As revealed in the classifications of both parts of this study, every important thought in the poetry finds some expression in the prose; conversely, nothing pertaining to Emerson's philosophy appears in the prose which is not at least suggested in the poetry. The second aspect demonstrated is the richness of iteration of the ideas in both forms of expression. Such profusion in the prose is of course obvious to the most casual reader, but the correspondence in the poetry with attendant variations in form becomes evident only by such systematic classification as here shown. In general, the verse gives fragmentary and suggestive expression to the ideas more completely developed by the prose, but often, as fully illustrated, a single poem contains an important thought expressed more vividly and tersely than in any prose passage. The third aspect demonstrated by this study is the relative frequency of occurrence of the various ideas in the poetry and prose respectively. Such quantitative measurements cannot be absolute, for the verse references are practically complete - except those referring to the beauty of external nature, while those from the prose of necessity are less exhaustive. However, the volume of the prose included in this study is much greater than the total volume of the poems while in turn the form of expression in the verse is more condensed.