SOURCE: “The Conditions for Poetry: A Study of Thoreau's Challenge to Transcendence,” in The American Benedictine Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, June 1977, pp. 188-200.

In the following essay, Hansen claims Thoreau's poetic philosophy reveals an artist engaged in the task of writing poetry and metapoetry simultaneously.

In many of his works, Thoreau expresses his concern with the poet. He uses the word poet in the sense of seer, the vates of the Romans, to write about himself, with poet providing a useful objective persona.

When Thoreau writes of the conditions in which the poet must live, the attitudes he must foster, or the results he must produce, he is giving less of prescription than description of his own inner life. “Poetry” is thus seen by him in its largest sense, as Maritain defines it, “not (as) the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process more general and...