Criticism > Poetry > Thoreau, Henry David - C. N. Srinath (essay date 1976)

Thoreau, Henry David - C. N. Srinath (essay date 1976)

C. N. Srinath (essay date 1976)

SOURCE: “Notes from ‘Chrysalis': Some Glimpses of Thoreau's Poetry,” in Studies In American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder, edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 183-93.

[In the following essay, Srinath claims Thoreau's poetry reveals a “vehement originality” that ignores the existence of his predecessors and contemporaries and comes closer to the English Metaphysicals for its terse quality.]

It may not be surprising for a student of American Transcendentalism to see how true to its spirit the writers were even in the choice of their medium, their chief medium being prose. There is perhaps a Yankee practicality in that choice but it would have been difficult to imagine a movement like the Transcendental not producing any poetry at all however intensely poetic their prose itself might have been. Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, to...

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