Yves Gardes is a lecturer at the University Paris Dauphine, and a PhD candidate in American Literature under the supervision of Professor François Specq at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. His dissertation focuses on Emerson's poetics and its paradoxes. “The Prison Metaphor: a Camera osbcura to Poetic Liberation in R.W. Emerson” is his first article.
In his seminal essay “The Poet,” Emerson elaborates a strategy for a poetic liberation embodied by the poet. This paper thus emphasizes the way in which Emerson uses the penitentiary metaphor to recreate the prison life of the intellect, and substitute it for a poetic camera obscura that filters natural light. Building upon Plato’s allegory of the cave, the camera obscura of the intellect becomes the space where the poet, intoxicated with divine breath and set up as a “liberating god,” casts the natural images of the outside world.
