SOURCE: “Henry Thoreau as a Versifier,” in The New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1943, p. 30.

In the following review of Carl Bode's 1943 edition of Thoreau's Collected Poems, Hellman says the volume does not establish Thoreau as a very important poet—despite the poems' “occasional sparks of divine fire.”

In collecting and editing well over 300 pieces of Thoreau's verse—some of them fragmentary, others of as many as twenty stanzas—Dr. Carl Bode has placed lovers and students of New England's most individualistic philosopher under a considerable debt. Not that the volume establishes Thoreau as a very important poet—and this, despite occasional sparks of the divine fire. The value of these verses lies foremost in the man himself, and as he was one of the greatest of Americans, here one naturally finds pearls of greatness of thought over which many ripples of wit and waves of wisdom flow...