The Visionary Company

The American poets in the Emersonian line (including Thoreau, Whitman, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost) reach back to Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge but also, through Emerson, to Hafiz and Saadi.

We have in this visionary company an embarrassment of riches: poetry of the first order by which we receive what Frost called the "immortal wound" and from which--if we are lucky--we never recover.