SOURCE: A review of collected poems in The New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters, Vol. 37, No. 3, September 1964, pp. 393-97.

In the following review of Carl Bode's enlarged 1964 edition of Thoreau's Collected Poems, Gozzi contends that Bode's first volume has done much to elevate the perception of Thoreau as a poet.

The Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau was the first variorum edition of an American poet when issued in 1943. This is a reprinting of that out-of-print 385-page 1943 edition, with some 25 new pages added at the end. Its title-page description of “Enlarged Edition” is therefore more proper than the ambiguous “New Enlarged Edition” of the dust jacket. The volume is actually an old edition, slightly enlarged. The reprinted part has not been reworked. Probably the publishers felt—correctly, I believe—that not enough changes were needed to justify resetting costs.

The new material consists...