Criticism > Poetry > Thoreau, Henry David - Robert O. Evans (essay date 1969)

Thoreau, Henry David - Robert O. Evans (essay date 1969)

Robert O. Evans (essay date 1969)

SOURCE: “Thoreau's Poetry and the Prose Works,” in ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance, No. 56, 1969, pp. 40-52.

[In the following essay, Evans maintains that Thoreau's poetry and prose are linked, and so to consider the poems as individual entities diminishes Thoreau's stature as an artist.]

Despite Carl Bode's critical edition of Thoreau's complete poetry, with a brief introduction (1943) and a critical article by Henry W. Wells, “An Evaluation of Thoreau's Poetry,” the following year, little has been added to our appreciation and understanding of Thoreau as a poet since the pronouncements of Emerson,1 who at first thought highly of Thoreau's achievement. To Carlyle he explained that Thoreau's was “the purest strain, and the loftiest … that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest;” yet, by 1841, he had changed his mind. According to Bode, “his enthusiasm had...

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