POEMS OF NATURE

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher.A leading transcendentalist,he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.The fifty poems here brought together under the title ‘Poems of Nature’are perhaps two-thirds of those which Thoreau preserved. Many of themwere printed by him, in whole or in part, among his early contributionsto Emerson’s Dial, or in his own two volumes, The Week and Walden,which were all that were issued in his lifetime. Others were given toMr. Sanborn for publication, by Sophia Thoreau, the year after herbrother’s death (several appeared in the Boston Commonwealth _in 1863);or have been furnished from time to time by Mr. Blake, his literaryexecutor.Most of Thoreau’s poems were composed early in his life, before histwenty-sixth year, ‘Just now’ he wrote in the autumn of 1841, ‘I am inthe mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle round me, as the leaveswould round the head of Autumnus himself, should he thrust it upthrough some vales which I know; but, alas! many of them are but crispedand yellow leaves like his, I fear, and will deserve no better fate thanto make mould for new harvests.’ After 1843 he seems to have written butfew poems, and had destroyed perhaps as many as he had retained, becausethey did not meet the exacting requirements of his friend Emerson, uponwhose opinion at that time he placed great reliance. This loss wasregretted by Thoreau in after years, when the poetical habit had left him, for he fancied that some of the verses were better than his friendhad supposed. But Emerson, who seldom changed his mind, adhered to hisverdict, and while praising some of the poems highly, perhapsextravagantly, would admit but a small number of them to the slightselection which he appended to the posthumous edition of Thoreau’s_Letters, _edited by him in 1865; and even these were printed, in someinstances, in an abbreviated and imperfect form.A few other In the present selection a return has been made, wherever possible,from the emendations introduced by Thoreau’s editors to the originaltext.) poems, with some translations from the Greek, have lately been includedby Thoreau’s Boston publishers in their volume of Miscellanies (vol.x. of the Riverside Edition, 1894).But no collection so full as thepresent one has ever been offered to the public.It has not been attempted to make this a complete collection ofThoreau’s poems, because, as has been well said, ‘many of them seem tobe merely pendants to his prose discourse, dropped in as forcibleepigrams where they are brief, and in other instances made ancillary tothe idea just expressed, or to perpetuate a distinct conception that hassome vital connection with the point from which it was poured forth. Itis, therefore, almost an injustice to treat them separately at all.’After the discontinuance of The Dial, Thoreau ceased to publish hisverses as separate poems, but interpolated them, in the manner described, in his prose essays, where they form a sort of accompanimentto the thought, and from which it is in many cases impossible to detachthem. That he himself set some value on them in this connection may begathered from a sentence in the last of his published letters, in whichhe writes to a correspondent: ‘I am pleased when you say that in TheWeek you like especially those little snatches of poetry interspersedthrough the book, for these I suppose are the least attractive to mostreaders.’READ MORE BY PURCHASE THIS BOOK.THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.