"I love Emerson, I just had a problem with something I read in his journal. He was talking about Asians. Chinese, specifically. He said they had no culture to speak of, no music. He said they're not even as good as the Africans, who are at least willing to carry our wood. And he said that they've done nothing useful except manage "to preserve to a hair / for three or four thousand years / the ugliest features in the world." The poem begins by looking at the face of this butcher. So it's about that-it's about countenance, and it's about what the culture defines as beauty or ugliness. It's a weird wrestling I'm doing with Emerson. I can't imagine me without Emerson. And yet there's this thing about him that gets to me. That's deep in the culture."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States19th-century philosophersRomantic poetsEssayists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Li-Young Lee 1995 interview included in Poetry in Person edited by Alexander Neubauer (2010)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 – 1882
US-amerikanischer Philosoph und Dichter
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