Ralph Waldo Emerson once described Henry Thoreau's poetry as "the purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest." Not always thus esteemed, Thoreau's verses were by no means ignored. Bronson Alcott applauded them; James Russell Lowell asserted their rawness; Nathaniel Hawthorne grudgingly approved them. As author of Walden and Civil Disobedience, Thoreau the writer of prose is world-renowned, but Thoreau the poet has been all but forgotten. This collection has all of Thoreau's original verse the glowing lines and the quiet, the prosaic and the Transcendental. And all have at the very least the large, astringent force of young genius. Praise for Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau "Bode has placed lovers and students of New England's most individualistic philosopher under a considerable debt." New York Times "It is good to have Thoreau's poetry thus readily available once more in an edition that is both thoroughly annotated and includes all of the variants." Thoreau Society Bulletin "The admirer of Thoreau will gladly pay to own all of his poems, not because he believes that he gave more than a glimpse of his genius in verse, but for the sake of the insight they allow into his character and sensibility." Times Literary Supplement
Author
Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time." Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862. More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho... http://thoreau.eserver.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry\_Da... http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.... http://www.biography.com/people/henry...
