SOURCE: “Thoreau's Poetry and the Prose Works,” in ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance, No. 56, 1969, pp. 40-52.

In the following essay, Evans maintains that Thoreau's poetry and prose are linked, and so to consider the poems as individual entities diminishes Thoreau's stature as an artist.

Despite Carl Bode's critical edition of Thoreau's complete poetry, with a brief introduction (1943) and a critical article by Henry W. Wells, “An Evaluation of Thoreau's Poetry,” the following year, little has been added to our appreciation and understanding of Thoreau as a poet since the pronouncements of Emerson,¹ who at first thought highly of Thoreau's achievement. To Carlyle he explained that Thoreau's was “the purest strain, and the loftiest … that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest;” yet, by 1841, he had changed his mind. According to Bode, “his enthusiasm had begun to cool,”² and certainly Emerson and Margaret Fuller, who were then...