First We Read, Then We Write Quotes

“Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.”
― Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process