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.