For those of you who may not know it already, I took the phrase “the unknown friend” from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in one of his journals in the Spring of 1848:
“Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts & not from the necessity of sale—who writes always to the unknown friend.”
This sentence is just one of the many for which I’m lovingly indebted to Mr. Emerson.
In a speech to the Academy of American Poets in 1958, Robert Frost said that he had often thought that he would like to name in a poem the men he thought of as our four greatest Americans: George Washington, as our pre-eminent statesman and general; Thomas Jefferson as our political thinker; Abraham Lincoln as our martyr and savior; and Emerson as our poet.
Larry,
Congratulations on your blog.
I was unaware of the Emerson’s “Unknown Friend”, but am all too aware of my own struggle against the practical pull of commerce in choosing to make impractical images that please me, while awaiting the arrival of an unknown friend.
Jerry Reed