"How good and sound and inviolable his innocency, that is never to seek, and never wrong, but speaks the pure sense of humanity on each occasion." -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Shakespeare Shakespeare, the Poet (1850) by Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of seven essays Emerson included in his book, Representative Men (also available from Cosimo Classics). Like the other figures in this collection, Shakespeare embodied, for Emerson, the essence of the qualities that accomplished poets possess. These were qualities Emerson felt are critical to a spiritually strong world.