Daniel Ricketson was a friend and admirer of the
Concord Transcendentalists
Amos Bronson Alcott,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, and, for a time,
W. Ellery Channing. A resident of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Ricketson purchased Thoreau’s
Walden the day after its publication and immediately dashed off a letter of praise to the author of this “prose poem,” whom he found “a kindred spirit.” He met Thoreau for the first time later that year, and afterwards others in the Transcendental circle, including
Theophilus Brown. His most stable friendship was with Alcott, with whom he visited and corresponded in the 1850s and 1860s and later. Ricketson published several poems about the Concord Transcendentalists in
The Autumn Sheaf (1869).