SOURCE: “Notes from ‘Chrysalis': Some Glimpses of Thoreau's Poetry,” in Studies In American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder, edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 183-93.

In the following essay, Srinath claims Thoreau's poetry reveals a “vehement originality” that ignores the existence of his predecessors and contemporaries and comes closer to the English Metaphysicals for its terse quality.

It may not be surprising for a student of American Transcendentalism to see how true to its spirit the writers were even in the choice of their medium, their chief medium being prose. There is perhaps a Yankee practicality in that choice but it would have been difficult to imagine a movement like the Transcendental not producing any poetry at all however intensely poetic their prose itself might have been. Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, to mention only the three most important writers...