Criticism > Poetry > Thoreau, Henry David - Kenneth Walter Cameron (essay date 1960)

Thoreau, Henry David - Kenneth Walter Cameron (essay date 1960)

Kenneth Walter Cameron (essay date 1960)

SOURCE: “A New Thoreau Poem—‘To Edith,'” in The Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 16, 1960, pp. 40-1.

[In the following essay, Cameron maintains that the verses written to Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter, Edith, were actually written by Thoreau.]

When Edith Emerson was born on November 22, 1841, her father wrote in his journals:1 “Edith. There came into the house a young maiden, but she seemed to be more than a thousand years old. She came into the house naked and helpless, but she had for her defence more than the strength of millions. She brought into the day the manners of the Night.” These lines reflect Emerson's thoughts on infancy expressed in the last chapter of Nature (1836) and the doctrine of the “Lapse” expressed in Wordsworth's “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” They remind the reader of the faith of Bronson Alcott, expressed in his two manuscripts labelled...

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