SOURCE: “Finding a Voice: Thoreau's Pentameters,” in ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance, No. 60, Summer 1970, pp. 67-72.

In the following essay, Lane offers a close reading of two 1850 poems, “Tall Ambrosia” and “Among the Worst of Men.”

In the late summer of 1850, around August 31, Henry Thoreau copied or composed in his manuscript journal two poems in iambic pentameter verse.¹ These poems or parts of poems—for two journal pages are missing before the first, and after a paragraph of prose Thoreau tried to continue the second—are as they stand, Thoreau's most successful in this form. They also much resemble Robert Frost's narrative and meditative lyrics—so much so that one wonders if Frost's poetic development were not, somehow, directly nourished by these poems, which, in Bode's text but with normalized punctuation and orthography, are as follows:

Among the worst of men that           ever lived, However, we did...