SOURCE: “Thoreau's Watershed Season As A Poet: The Hidden Fruits of the Summer and Fall of 1841,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, edited by Joel Myerson, University of Virginia Press, 1990, pp. 49-68.

In the following essay, Witherell maintains that the group of interrelated poems Thoreau composed in the summer and fall of 1841 provide an important example of the role of poetry in his development as a writer.

The assessment of Thoreau's poetic talent as a minor one is so widely shared and so obviously correct that critics and biographers generally treat his poetry in relation to some larger issue in his life or work. Although many explications of individual poems have been published, Thoreau's career as a poet has attracted only scant attention, and only two editions have been devoted to the poetry: Henry S. Salt and Frank B. Sanborn's selected Poems of Nature in 1895 and Carl Bode's...