Criticism > Poetry > Thoreau, Henry David - Ralph Waldo Emerson (essay date 1862)

Thoreau, Henry David - Ralph Waldo Emerson (essay date 1862)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (essay date 1862)

SOURCE: “Thoreau,” in Thoreau as Seen By His Contemporaries, edited by Walter Harding, Dover Publications, 1960, pp. 26-8.

[In the following excerpt from his essay on the life of Thoreau, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, Emerson says his friend's verses were “often rude and defective.”]

His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill, but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and he knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm in...

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