Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Henry Van Dyke

Critical Essay by Henry Van Dyke

SOURCE: "A Puritan Plus Poetry," in Companionable Books, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922, pp. 335-55.

In the following excerpt, Van Dyke emphasizes Emerson's ability to describe the beauty of nature and to spark the reader's imagination.

… [Emerson's] prose is better known and more admired than his verse, for several reasons: first, because he took more pains to make the form of it as perfect as he could; second, because it has a wider range and an easier utterance; third, because it has more touches of wit and of familiarity with the daily doings of men; and finally, because the majority of readers probably prefer prose for silent reading, since the full charm of good verse is revealed only in reading aloud.

But for all that, with Emerson, (as with a writer so different as Matthew Arnold,) I find something in the poems which is not in the essays,—a more pure...
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