I

Thoreau's reputation as a major American writer has not depended upon his poetry. Although Emerson, in an article on “New Poetry” in The Dial for October 1840, recognized him as an important writer, he classified Thoreau as a “portfolio” poet whose greatness lay in the future; and later Emerson advised him to burn his poetry. Eighty-one years passed from the time of Thoreau's death until a collected edition of his poetry appeared. And in spite of the general availability of the poems in Carl Bode's 1943 edition and then in the 1964 enlarged edition, little serious attention has been given to these works.

Nor has critical evaluation of his poetry varied much over the decades. Bartholow Crawford recorded that although the prose works have received praise, “the literary world has, however, been of one mind in relegating to an inferior position most of Thoreau's verse.”¹ Writing twenty-seven years later, Walter Harding expresses the same verdict: “Thoreau can hardly be considered a major poet.” And his judgment is unequivocal: “… most of his poetry is bad poetry.”² And so he echoes Van Wyck Brooks, who had dismissed the poetry with the following definitive line: “They were sound and scholarly doggerel, for the most part.”³ It is interesting to note, also, that in his recent The Continuity of American Poetry Roy Harvey Pearce does not examine the poetry of Thoreau at all; his few references are to Thoreau's prose, and his evaluation is again a lamentation for the writer's limitations: “Thoreau had everything except the talent and the will to become the purest of poets in the Adamic mode.”⁴ Frothingham, in his study, Transcendentalism in New England, ignored Thoreau altogether, merely noting that he did make several contributions to The Dial. This continued neglect can be detected in the many various books and articles dealing with American poetry and cultural life.

The reasons for this general neglect are not far to be sought. Thoreau himself, in later years, seldom wrote poetry, and then yielded to the advice of Emerson. And his later journals and letters deal less with poetic theory and more with natural and “real fact.” In October of 1857 he wrote in his Journal:

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

This autobiographical approach toward his verse has tended to color the character of whatever criticism of it has been written. Secondly, many of his poems appear, at first reading, to be rubrics embedded in the prose of his longer works. But as Bode has carefully shown,⁵ this dependence upon context is not always valid; sometimes the fragments were originally part of other independent poems. There is no evidence that he treated his verse as mere decoration for his longer and more fully developed prose works. Indeed, the importance of poetry in his life was always recognized by Thoreau as being central to his other concerns. Harding points out that “early in his writing career Thoreau apparently thought of himself primarily as a poet.”⁶ But even afterwards, when he had wandered into lecturing and living, he still tended to see things in analogy with poetry. “If I take up a handful of earth,” he wrote in October 1858, “however separately interesting the particles may be, their relation to one another appears to be that of mere juxtaposition generally. I might have thrown them together thus. But the humblest fungus betrays a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.” Throughout his life, Thoreau continued to approach experience with the same awareness of the dichotomy between poetry and science which he had articulated in February of 1852:

It is impossible for the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science. The poet's second love may be science, not his first—when use has worn off the bloom. I realize that men may be born to a condition of mind at which others arrive in middle age by decay of their poetic faculties.

Two months later he added in his Journal: “Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.” This also proves Thoreau's high respect for the poet and the poet's role in society. This respect led him to an acute awareness of the craft of poetry, and, as Wells has pointed out, “no part of Thoreau's voluminous manuscripts shows such painstaking revisions as his verse.”⁷ In spite of his limited output, therefore, and in spite of his apparently casual attitude towards his verse, there is no evidence to lead to the view that he was either indifferent or unsympathetic to the problems of poetic technique. On the contrary, as we have seen, he continued to see “with the side of the eye” throughout his lifetime, and his utterances concerning his theory of poetry may be found in almost every piece of writing, and if they were assembled, Lorch has suggested, they would comprise a “noteworthy body of poetic theory.”⁸ In the face of this evidence, then, it is a pity that Thoreau's poetry has not been more generally read. However understandable are the reasons for its neglect, there are also reasons for some attention to be given to it.

Although an assessment of the ultimate value of Thoreau's poetry is difficult because of its uneveness of quality and variety of tone, it has attracted attention as cipher to his prose works. Harding has expressed this approach: “Perhaps the greatest value of his poetry is that it often presents in epitomized form those ideas he expounded at greater length in his prose.”⁹ But the poems are interesting as independent creatures themselves. The purpose of the present essay is to use this approach, and to suggest two theses: (1) that there is in many of Thoreau's poems a structure which can be identified and described, and (2) that this structure can be seen as belonging to a poetic tradition of considerable antiquity and importance in both England and America—namely, the meditative tradition which flourished most robustly during the seventeenth century.

II

The most substantial examination of the meditative tradition is Louis Martz's valuable The Poetry of Meditation, in which he argues that although “poetry and meditation are by no means synonymous,” yet there is a “middle ground of the creative mind in which the two arts meet to form a poetry of meditation.”¹⁰ Although this kind of poetry is found most clearly in the works of the so-called metaphysicals, Martz suggests that it is more helpful to interpret it, not as part of a “Donne tradition,” but as part of a longer tradition which “found its first notable example not in Donne but in Robert Southwell.”¹¹ The historical limits of this tradition are difficult to define; Martz admits that much medieval verse fits his description, as do poems by Yeats, Hopkins, Eliot, and Taylor. Indeed, in his Foreword to Stanford's edition of the poems of Edward Taylor, Martz views the American as “the last heir of the great tradition of English meditative poetry that arose in the latter part of the sixteenth century.”¹² He therefore recognizes the migration of this tradition to America. In fact, America seems to have become the new home of the tradition, for “no such poetry was being written in the England of Taylor's day.”¹³ The new home had not been designed for the production of poetry, and, as Anne Bradstreet realized, it could be written only in those moments snatched from the responsibilities of a regular occupation. Neither Bradstreet nor Taylor could conceive of himself primarily as a poet. Yet in spite of these limitations, Martz says, Taylor forged a poetic style which became part of the American literary heritage:

Out of his very deficiencies he creates a work of rugged and original integrity. The result helps to mark the beginning of an American language, and American literature.¹⁴

And so the meditative tradition became an American tradition, and it would not be shocking to discover traces of it in writers after the time of Taylor.

The characteristics of the tradition stem from a clear vision of the nature, of man, and of God. “Fundamentally,” says Martz, “one can define the qualities of meditative style only in terms of some such principle as ‘the union of the power of the soul,' Herbert's ‘Simplicity,' Yeats's ‘Unity of Being,' or Hopkins' ‘instress' and ‘inscape.' One must see, first of all, deep within the poetry, an ideal vision of man's proper place and purpose in the universe: a ‘radiant gist' that germinates the qualities of meditative style.”¹⁵ In talking about the poetry of Taylor, Martz lists these qualities of meditative style more specifically as (1) rough phrasing, (2) colloquialism, (3) vivid and concrete imagery, and (4) Herbertian echoes.¹⁶ These qualities, in turn, reflect a structure which unites and fuses them together in a specific pattern; their co-occurrence is the result of more than accidental traits of individual style. As Martz says of some poems by Yeats, Eliot, and Hopkins, “one can find in their poems a total movement, a total structure, that shows a remarkable resemblance to the threefold method that has been discussed at length in my opening chapter.”¹⁷

The threefold method was designed to bring together the senses, the emotions, and the intellectual faculties of man “in a moment of dramatic, creative experience.” This moment, with its structure for concentration in a certain guided an controlled way, produces the meditation. St. François de Sales provided a basic definition of the meditation which Martz used:

In fine, thoughtes, and studies may be upon any subject, but meditation in our present sense, hath reference onely to those objects, whose consideration tends to make us good and devote. So that meditation is an attentive thought iterated, or voluntarily intertained in the mynd, to excitate the will to holy affections and resolutions.

The method used to achieve this state of spiritual vision is threefold, leading, as St. Bernard put it, from “humble effort” through “loving sympathy” to “enraptured vision.” “Reason,” he says, “by which we analyze ourselves, guides us to the first; feeling which enables us to pity others conducts us to the second; purity, by which we are raised to the level of the unseen, carries us up to the third.” Because of the spiritual state achieved in the third stage, the structure of meditation tended to become associated with mysticism. Technically, meditation is available to all without the need of special grace—a special grace which is sometimes felt to be necessary for a true mystical experience—but the distinction between the two was often blurred; the threefold method has close affinity with the stages of purgation, illumination, and unity in mystical thought. In each instance the individual has a discipline by which he may rise above his own isolated individuality and relate himself to spiritual laws. The subject of meditation, says Evelyn Underhill, “becomes a symbol through which [he] receives a distinct message from the transcendental world.”

This brief summary of the threefold method of meditation as it is presented by Martz is helpful in understanding the structure which the poet can derive from it. Since the final stage is one of unity with the spiritual power, it can rarely be described in natural terms; it is the ultimate state towards which the other two steps are directed. The significance of this stage can be only suggested through symbols; the perfect unity of God can be only sensed in the changing world of nature. “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature,” wrote Thoreau in his Journal in September 1851, “to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.” This higher vision is the result of hearing the “fine aeolian harp music to be heard in the air” (Journal, 21 July 1851). The first two stages, on the other hand, are more easily describable. The first is designed to prepare the meditator, or reader, for the experience; his attention must be focused and directed precisely at the image of the meditation. This, especially in Donne, is often accomplished by a startling or paradoxical opening line: “Go and catch a falling star,” “I can love both fair and brown,” “For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” “When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead” “Twice or thrice had I loved thee.” This opening device may be developed through several lines or even stanzas, and is the equivalent of the candle-flame or the prayer-beads of the mystic. It is primarily sensual. From it develops the second stage: an intellectual comprehension of its value. “All perception of truth,” wrote Thoreau in September 1851, “is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.” This section of the poem presents an intellectual illumination of the object of meditation; it offers an explanation of the startling image which grasped and focused the attention at the beginning. The threefold division is what Martz has called the structure of meditation:

Without expecting any hard and fast divisions, then, we should expect to find a formal meditation falling into three distinguishable portions, corresponding to the acts of memory, understanding and will—portions which we might call composition, analysis, and colloquy.¹⁸

This is the tradition of structure which he finds particularly well exemplified in works by Southwell, Donne, Herbert, and others of the seventeenth century.

III

The familiarity of Thoreau with these seventeenth-century authors has been established through his library borrowings, his own possessions, and his quotations.¹⁹ “From those wrestlers with the word and the spirit, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Cervantes—and from the eloquent writers in prose, like Sir Thomas Browne and the makers of the English Bible, he borrowed much.” His biographer, Canby, goes on to explain three areas in which this borrowing occurred. The first was in rhythm and phrasing:

All of these writers caused English to say spiritual things with passion and worldly things with poetic significance. There he got some of his rhythms, especially in poetry, and his way of making sentences that were not so much statements as pictures of a deeply felt reality.

It was natural for Thoreau to imitate this style, Canby says, because “his belief in the value of intuition filled his Journal, as it filled Emerson's, with ‘sayings,' each coming a fresh idea or observation.” Secondly, the influence of the seventeenth-century poets was felt in his vocabulary and imagery:

Disliking metaphysics, he was irresistibly attracted by the curious twists of language of these so-called metaphysical poets, who tried to pack philosophical meaning into the plainest statements. Not subtlety of doctrine but subtlety of expression, by which the feelings of man in the presence of God in nature become articulate, was his aim as it was theirs.

And finally, Canby suggests that the Zeitgeist of nineteenth-century Concord had significant similarities with that of seventeenth-century England:

There was a further kinship in that these seventeenth-century men were writers in a fresh world of new religious vitality, new science, new expectations of man; a wider, richer society than the New England ‘newness,' in less dangerous conflict with materialism, but with purposes and opportunities having much resemblance. They were creating the symbols by which the religious felt and thought, and had a language still plastic to mould; and so did the New Englander; not so plastic, not so mouldable, because worked upon through two centuries of intense literary activity, yet a language released and freshened by the exigencies of a new continent.

“Thus,” concluded Canby, “the seventeenth century deeply affected Thoreau's modes of expression, as it had earlier affected Emerson's, and gave him confidence.”²⁰ The symbolic and spiritual vitality of the metaphysicals was the prime poetic virtue for Thoreau. He admired its ruggedness and colloquialism. In his Journal on 30 November 1842 he wrote that “good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets.” Thoreau's theory of poetry was based upon this concept of the natural innocence of the poetic vision.

To him poetry was a direct expression of a particular kind of vision. His writings are strewn with images of sight and sound, and these are intended to suggest the urgency of the poetic perspective. On one occasion (Journal, 8 December 1859) he expressed it by saying, “The imagination requires a long range; it is the faculty of the poet to see present things as if, in this sense, also past and future, as if distant or universally significant.” On another occasion (Journal, 5 August 1852) he wrote:

I can tell the extent to which a man has heard music by the faith he retains in the trivial and mean, even by the importance he attaches to what is called the actual world. Any memorable strain will have unsettled so low a faith and substituted a higher. Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.

This music is the “kind of fine aeolian harp music to be heard in the air;” he goes on to say, “To ears that are expanded what a harp this world is! The occupied ear thinks that beyond the cricket no sound can be heard, but there is an immortal melody that may be heard morning, noon, and night, by ears that can attend, and from time to time this man or that hears it, having ears that were made for music” (Journal, 21 July 1851). It is a mark of serenity and health of mind for a person to be able to hear this sound. It is, simply, the attainment of the highest degree of awareness, of the unitive stage of the mystical hierarchy. In describing this end of poetry he often reverses the imagery to that of silence: “A momentous silence reigns always in the woods” (Journal, 25 April 1841), “To the innocent there are no cherubim nor angels … silence is the preacher about this” (Journal, 1 August 1841), “Silence alone is worthy to be heard” (Journal, 21 January 1853). It is understandable, therefore, that the poet of this highest stage has risen above the music of the march to the music of silence, and is, in the fullest sense, alone. “I thrive best on solitude,” wrote Thoreau in December 1856, echoing an entry he had made there in August 1854. “The true poet,” he wrote in May 1854, “will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrust, a forest bird.” Earlier he had developed the same idea:

The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of imagination's provinces, the realms of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagination are so boundless, the limits of towns are so petty. (Journal, 20 September 1851)

This concept of the poet, then, clarifies Thoreau's important statement noted earlier: “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.”

Thoreau, therefore, although he appears to have shown very little interest in the technicalities of mysticism or meditation, acquired both an approach and a poetic theory which paralleled the traditional concepts. The terms in which he saw the world and the role of poetry in it are terms very similar to those employed during the act of meditation; Thoreau's temperament seemed to be essentially meditative. Not only are several of his stylistic characteristics suggestive of this tradition—those characteristics listed by Martz as “rough phrasing,” “colloquialism,” “vivid and concrete imagery,” and “Herbertian echoes”—but also his concept of the goal or end of poetry suggests the final stage achieved by the mystic. It seems unlikely, certainly, that these views were deliberately acquired from his reading in the literature of the seventeenth century; rather, he probably discovered in these writings the virtues for which he had come to feel admiration, and the admiration turned into unconscious emulation of many of the characteristics. The most basic, of course, was the meditative structure with its threefold development, which, having come to the fore in Europe during the seventeenth century, was imported to New England to become part of the American literary tradition.

IV

Some of Thoreau's poems reflect an almost perfect tripartite structure, even in their brevity. This is seen, for example, in the following poem:

I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
Thou seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o'er.(21)

This poem opens with the four line imaginary setting; it corresponds to the vivid scene or similitude of the meditation. The next two lines are dependent upon the opening scene; they present the experience within the “recollected” mind; the element of memory and thought is introduced as a new perspective of the opening image is developed. Finally, the last two lines are neither sensuous nor intellectual; they express the resolution, the final stage of recognition and acceptance. And so, the poem moves through the threefold pattern of senses, intellect, and affections. The experience has developed from the initial image, through a setting of that image in “time remembered,” to a final realization of its eternal significance. A similar structure is found in “Greece”:

When life contracts into a vulgar span
And human nature tires to be a man,
I thank the gods for Greece
That permanent realm of peace,
For as the rising moon far in the night
Checquers the shade with her forerunning light,
So in my darkest hour my senses seem
To catch from her Acropolis a gleam.
Greece who am I that I should remember thee?
Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylae
Is my life vulgar my fate mean
Which on such golden memories can lean?

Although this poem is not directly religious, it retains both the meditative structure and the element of logic found in the “metaphysicals.” The progress of poem is marked by the “when … so,” presenting the similitude in six lines, and the consideration of it in the next two. The ninth line of the poem—“Greece who am I that should remember thee?”—acts as a link between the final two sections. As an act of intellectualism and remembering it belongs to the second section. But it raises a question that must be articulated more vividly in the final section. That the final section should end with a question is not surprising, for to be able to frame the right question is to clarify the experience and is often as complete a statement of the vision as is linguistically honest. Both Donne and Yeats in several of their major poems were forced to this resolution. Thoreau uses it again in “The Poet's Delay,” which is built upon the meditative structure both in stanza patterns and feeling:

In vain I see the morning rise,
          In vain observe the western blaze,
Who idly look to other skies,
          Expecting life by other ways.
Amidst such boundless wealth without,
          I only still am poor within,
The birds have sung their summer out,
          But still my spring does not begin.
Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
          Compelled to seek a milder day,
And leave no curious nest behind,
          No woods still echoing to my lay?

The image of the first stanza is obviously introduced by “see.” This seems to fix our attention, to focus it upon the object of contemplation. The second stanza presents the self-awareness of the poet; a wider perspective for his feelings is given as the similitude of the first stanza is set against a context of an ideal. Having been made aware, then, of his inward poverty and of the possibility of a greater fulfillment, the poet turns to seek some way of salvation. In other words, the poem—in crudely simplified terms—develops from the animal-like sensing of discontent, through an understanding of it achieved by thinking about it in a wider context, to a recognition of the need for some line of action—a gesture of the will. This pattern, as has been seen, bears a close relation to the practice of religious meditation. This relationship, as Martz has said about meditative poems in general, “is shown by the poem's own internal action, as the soul or mind engages in acts of interior dramatization.” The speaker, continues Martz as though he had this particular poem in mind, “accuses himself; he talks to God within the self; he approaches the love of God through memory, understanding, and will.”²²

This threefold structure could easily be adapted for longer works; any of the sections (though only rarely does it occur in the final one) could be enlarged by description. One poem begins, “Low in the eastern sky / Is set thy glancing eye,” and this first stanza presents the image of the star. Then follow three stanzas in which the significance of this image is clarified for the poet through his understanding; this section is actually introduced by the line, “Believe I knew thy thought.” The last two stanzas express the resolution, “Still will I strive to be / As if thou went with me'” and “I'll walk with gentle pace.” The moderately long and familiar poem “Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy,” also reflects this threefold structure. Stanzas 1 through 5 are a description of the boy; the next four present an understanding of the importance of their relationship; and then two stanzas indicate the action which must come from it:

The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,
          For elegy has other subject none;
Each strain of music in my ears shall ring
          Knell of departure from that other one.
Make haste and celebrate by tragedy;
          With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields;
Sorrow is dearer in such case to me
          Than all the joys other occasion yields.

To this structure are added two further stanzas which enlarge the final section by raising the possibility of redemption, and resolving it optimistically. Again, the logical element is seen in the final stanza:

If I but love that virtue which he is,
                    Though it be scented in the morning air,
Still shall we be truest acquaintances,
                    Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

Similar characteristics are found in “I am a parcel of vain strivings tied,” which Wells described as showing the strong influence of Herbert.²³ The first five stanzas present the similitude—in this instance, of man and the flowers of nature. The next stanza brings the intellect to bear upon the analogy:

But now I see I was not plucked for naught.

And the final stanza looks toward the future which will “soon redeem its hours.”

As has been noticed in several of the poems already examined, the sections of this threefold structure are often marked by a subtle change in point of view, indicated by a change in the tense of the verbs. The sensuous initial image is usually seen as directly present: “I walk in nature still alone.” The section of understanding is sometimes approached from a moral standpoint—the voice of other perspectives and other values: “I still must seek the friend”; “Fain would I stretch me by the highway side”; “Greece who am I that should remember thee?” And because the colloquy deals with the faculty of will, it is frequently written in a tense future to that of the initial image: “I will not doubt forever more”; “I'll walk with gentle pace”; “Henceforth the sun will not shine for a year”; “Still shall we be truest acquaintances.” If, as in the poem “I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind” quoted above, the initial image is in a past tense, the colloquy tends to be in a present tense. The second, or “discoursing,” part of the poem is sometimes indicated by an obvious word or phrase directly referring to thought; “methinks” is used a number of times, as is (less frequently) “I thought,” “I knew,” and “I believe”—or some variant of these. Another formal device employed by Thoreau is the question, or set of questions, which follows the initial image and asks the significance and implication of it. In the following poem, the divisions of the feeling are clearly separated:

I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon,
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?

The next six lines of this poem both answer the implications of these questions, and resolve the generalized similitude offered in the opening two lines, thus giving a developing structure to the poem:

I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.

“A meditative poem,” according to Martz, “will tend to open in any one of three ways: (1) with a vivid participation in some scene in the life of Christ or a saint; (2) with a ‘similitude, answerable to the matter,' that is, with some imaginary setting or metaphorical representation; (3) with a ‘simple proposal' of the issue to be considered.”²⁴ Although Thoreau does not use religious narrative directly as material for his poems, he does employ both of the other openings frequently. A number of “similitudes” have already been noted; these are his most popular way of beginning a longer poem. But he also employs a “simple proposal”; this may take the form of a direct question:

The respectable folks,—
Where dwell they?
My friends, why should we live?
What doth he ask?
Brother where dost thou dwell?

Or, the issue to be considered may be stated as a proposition which the rest of the poem will contemplate and develop:

My life more civil is and free
Than any civil polity.
I love to see the man, a long-lived child,
As yet uninjured by all worldly taint.
My love must be as free
As is the eagle's wing.

Some of Thoreau's opening lines are “metaphysical” because of an apparent paradox or attempt to startle:

Let such pure hate still underprop
Our love …
Tell me wise ones if ye can
Whither and whence the race of man.
Here lies the body of this world,
Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.
How little curious is man
He has not searched his mystery a span …
Last night as I lay gazing with shut eyes …

These Donnean echoes carry over to color many of his opening lines with a similar exaggeration and flamboyance:

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
I am the autumnal sun
My sincerity doth surpass
                    The pretence of optic glass
I seek the Present Time
The God of day rolls his car up the slopes.

The short poems of Thoreau often seem fragmentary, and the best explanation is that they are merely part of this longer meditative structure. On one hand, the vivid scene of the following poem requires an analysis and a colloquy to clarify its significance and see it in a wider context:

Between the traveller and the setting sun,
Upon some drifting sand heap of the shore,
A hound stands o'er the carcass of a man.

On the other hand, this poem is solely analysis, and requires the two end sections to give it completeness:

Methinks all things have travelled since you shined,
But only Time, and clouds, Time's team, have moved;
Again foul weather shall not change my mind,
But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.

These fragmentary poems seem to be conceived, if imperfectly, in the larger mould of the meditative tradition.

The characteristics noted in the poetry of Thoreau occur with sufficient frequency that it seems reasonable to talk of a particular structure in his poems. Naturally, not every poem is a perfect example of this structure; as in the works of Donne, of Herbert, of Yeats, and of the mystical writers themselves, the various sections of the threefold structure are sometimes blended and merged. Yet both the individual characteristics and the general structure suggest a recurring framework in which Thoreau tended to create.

The recognition of this framework is important because it has two implications. It means—as his prose writings about poetic theory suggest—that in practice Thoreau approached the writing of poetry with a careful craftmanship, that he did not dash off verses in the spirit of reckless private emotionalism. Indeed, the general critical evaluations of Thoreau's poetry have been unfortunate in their failure to perceive the underlying structure of the works. The recognition of this structure helps to explain some of the more superficial technical characteristics of the poetry, and seems reasonable because of the reading and general poetic theory of Thoreau. It also means that the poetry of meditation continues as a significant force after the death of Edward Taylor, and that it may be wise to talk of an American meditative tradition extending from the Bay Psalm Book and Anne Bradstreet²⁵ to more recent times—a tradition of which Thoreau's poetry is an important link.

Notes

1. Henry David Thoreau: Representative Selections (New York, 1934), li.

2. A Thoreau Handbook (New York, 1961), 79.

3. The Flowering of New England (New York, 1957), 303.

4. The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), 333.

5. Carl Bode, ed., Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau, enlarged edition (Baltimore, 1964), xi-xii.

6. Thoreau Handbook, 79.

7. Henry W. Wells, “An Evaluation of Thoreau's Poetry,” quoted in Sherman Paul, ed., Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), 132.

8. Frederic W. Lorch, “Thoreau and the Organic Principle in Poetry,” PMLA, LIII (1938), 286.

9. Thoreau Handbook, 80.

10. The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954), 21-22.

11. The Poetry of Meditation, 3.

12. Donald E. Standford, ed., The Poems of Edward Taylor (New Haven, 1960), xxxv.

13. Poems of Edward Taylor, xxxvi.

14. Poems of Edward Taylor, xxxvii.

15. Poetry of Meditation, 321.

16. Poems of Edward Taylor, xx.

17. Poetry of Meditation, 325. Material in the following paragraph is drawn principally from the “Introduction” to this book; see also the same author's “Introduction” to The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse (New York, 1963).

18. Poetry of Meditation, 38.

19. See in particular, Walter Harding, Thoreau's Library (Charlottesville, Va., 1957), and Ethel Seybold, Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics (New Haven, 1951).

20. Henry S. Canby, Thoreau (Boston, 1958), 189-191.

21. All poems are quoted from Bode's enlarged edition. The title given to the poem is that of the first line unless otherwise indicated.

22. Louis Martz, ed., The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse (New York, 1963), xvii.

23. Wells, “An Evaluation of Thoreau's Poetry,” 137.

24. The Meditative Poem, xxi.

25. See Josephine K. Piercy, Anne Bradstreet (New York, 1965), 79-82; 96-101.