Ellen Sturgis Hooper, a poet and a member of the Transcendental Club, was widely regarded as one of the most gifted poets among the New England Transcendentalists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson regularly solicited poetry from her and from her sister
Caroline Sturgis Tappan for the
Dial, and her poems appeared in
Elizabeth Peabody’s
Aesthetic Papers (1849) as well.
Henry David Thoreau included the last stanzas of Hooper’s “The Wood-Fire” in the chapter “House-Warming” in
Walden (1854).