Minister, musician, poet, and painter, Christopher Pearse Cranch spent most of his long life eking out a modest living in a variety of professions. Many scholars of the period dismiss Cranch as merely a dabbler who pursued these professions with only meager levels of skill. Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, believed that Cranch's problem was that he was in fact too creative--that if the range of his expressive power had been more focused, it would have been stronger. Like his fellow Transcendentalists, Cranch published several essays on the intellectual climate of the day and translated a handful of foreign texts, but his most lasting literary contribution is his poetry. Published in such journals as The Western Messenger, The Dial, and The Atlantic Monthly, Cranch's verse places him along with Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Jones Very as important Transcendentalist poets.

Cranch was the tenth of thirteen children born to...