'...a thought so passionate and alive'

Nogle gange er det godt at dvæle lidt ved den flamboyante del af litteraturteorien. I diskurskritiske og sprogskeptiske tider kan det være en ren lise at læse tekster, der i den grad har tillid til ordet. Og selvom jeg nærmest afskyr R. W. Emerson for hans homocentrisme og alt det andet sludder, som han har ladet det amerikanske folk opfostre på, så kan jeg ikke lade være med at blive blød i knæene over disse rent ud sagt sprogforelskede linjer fra essayet ’The Poet’:

For it is not metres, but a meter-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.

Det er godt at tænke om digte, at de bærer et vækstprincip i sig selv. Det er godt at tænke om sprog, at det gror som træerne gror. Ligesom det til alle tider er godt at læse Merleau-Ponty, der godt 100 år efter Emerson skriver:

In a sense the whole of philosphy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language.

And, in a sense, as Valery said, language is everything, since it is the voice of the things, the waves and the forest. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectic reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to resassemble them into a synthesis; they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth.’