SOURCE: “Thoreau's Rebellious Lyric,” in ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance, No 54, 1969, pp. 27-30.

In the following essay, Glazier offers a close reading of the poem “Light-winged Smoke,” discussing elements of rebellion evident in its free form, imagery, and central figure of the defiant lcarus of classical mythology.

It is true of Thoreau's small lyric, “Light-winged Smoke” as it is true of any poem which is unified and organic, that the proper avenue to the argument is through an analysis of its texture. When Emerson remarked, “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,” he was writing about the process of composition, not about the ritual of analysis, a distinction attested to by his quick injunction that “the thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.” Emerson...