SOURCE: "Poetry, England, and the War," in Emerson: A Study of the Poet as Seer, Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928, pp. 192-228.

Gay edited a collection of verse for college students. In the following excerpt, he criticizes Emerson's poetry for its lack of "smoothness" and links this poetic flaw to what he perceives as Emerson's theory of poetry with its emphasis on the poem as a philosophical statement rather than an aesthetically stylized work of art.

In September, 1844, Emerson purchased, on the shore of Walden Pond, a plot of eleven acres, to which, on the advice of friends, he added three or four more of pine woods adjoining. No purchase of his life gave him more pleasure than this. He nicknamed the plot his Garden, visited it almost daily, and composed many of his poems there. In the preceding year he first procured a copy of Saadi's Gulistan and...