SOURCE: “Making the Forest Poetic,” in Times Literary Supplement, 1963.

In the following review of Carl Bode's 1964 edition of Thoreau's Collected Poems, the reviewer notes the poems' literary indebtedness to the seventeenth-century English poets, particularly George Herbert.

Professor Carl Bode's edition of Henry Thoreau's poems was first published in 1943, and it was at once acknowledged that the editor had done his work very well indeed. He had searched widely and thoroughly to bring together all the verse he could find, in print and manuscript, and both his textual and general notes could hardly have been bettered. The edition has long been out of print, and the editor has now taken the chance of a new edition to add thirteen poems which have come to light since 1943. They have been printed as an appendix—an unsatisfactory and ungainly expedient, though it may have helped to keep down the cost of...