SOURCE: "The Poetry of Emerson," in Some Aspects of Modern Poetry, Hodder and Stoughton, N.D. pp. 55-68.

Noyes was a prolific, twentieth-century, British poet and the author of books about Tennyson and Voltaire. In the following excerpt, Noyes compares Emerson to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe with a focus on the poems, "Humble-Bee," "Give All to Love," and "Bacchus. " He also presents Emerson as a creative force in the development of modern poetry linking Emerson to Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.

Twelve years ago, during a first visit to America, I was surprised to find that the man whom I had always believed to be the greatest poet of that country, both in the depth of his thought and in the subtlety of his music, was hardly recognized as a poet at all. He was counted among the first of their prose-writers, very much...