...corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language" (9). Poets, or "wise men" are able to: "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again...employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God" (9). Once again, Emerson uses the word "harmony": "A life in harmony with Nature, the love of truth...

...language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things. . . " universal condition of things. He does not deny the significance of that religious emotion as...

...the "perversions" of desire and abstraction; the poet's goal, as Emerson puts it later, should be to "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again...to visible things; so that picturesque language is ... a commanding certificate" (16), a fully underwritten currency. This conception of a "picturesque...

...Ralph Waldo Emerson counts style as an index of the rhetor's attunement with God: wise men pierce . . . rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things;...employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. ... A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material...

...the "perversions" of desire and abstraction; the poet's goal, as Emerson puts it later, should be to "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again...visible things; so that picturesque language is... a commanding certifícate" (16), a fully underwritten currency. This conception of a "picturesque language"...

...intimately tied to humanity's place in nature, he urged us to overcome our decadent use of words and "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again...employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God." Emerson approached something like contemporary linguistic understanding of frames when he said, "A...

...chapter of Nature, that most writers fail to "clothe one thought in its natural garment," but that "wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things" (E&L 22-23). He is echoing Wordsworth's condemnation, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, of "poetic...

...relationship to the universe. The old and ossified is abandoned, and a new, organic language emerges as "wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words...employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God." 132 This regeneration reflects a return to the lost paradise that is associated with childhood. Thus,...

..."Don't . . . look at facts, but through them" (L 32). The whisperings of Emerson's studious ghost - "But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things" (EL 23) reminded the young poet to find and shape words adequate to his time and place, the soil of...

...language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten...and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself...