Other literary forms
Henry David Thoreau (thuh-ROH) published two books during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854). Three additional books edited by his sister Sophia and his friend William Ellery Channing were published soon after his death: a collection of his travel essays titled Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), and Cape Cod (1865). During his lifetime, Thoreau also published essays in various periodicals. They were generally of three kinds: travel essays such as “A Yankee in Canada,” nature essays such as “Walking,” and social and political essays such as “Life Without Principle” and “Civil Disobedience.” Those essays are collected in the standard “Walden” edition of Thoreau’s complete writings, and the best of them are generally available today in paperback collections. Thoreau also dabbled in translations and occasionally published in The Dial his translations of Greek and Roman poetry. Perhaps Thoreau’s greatest literary work, however, is his journal, which he kept throughout most of his adult life and most of which is available in the last fourteen volumes of the “Walden” edition of his collected writings. A portion of the journal from 1840 to 1841 was omitted from the collected writings but was later edited and published by Perry Miller in Consciousness in Concord (1958). Also not included in the collected writings were portions of the journal dealing with Thoreau’s first trip to Maine and portions that Thoreau himself cut out for use in his books. The Princeton University Press brought together Thoreau’s journals in a more unified way in Journal , a seven-volume edition published between 1981 and 2002.
Achievements
During his own lifetime, Henry David Thoreau met with only modest literary success. His early poems and essays published in The Dial were well known and appreciated in Transcendentalist circles but were generally unknown to popular audiences. As a lecturer, his talks were appreciated by the most liberal of his audiences but were generally found to be obscure or even dangerous by more conservative listeners. Thus, he had brief spurts of popularity as a lecturer, particularly in 1859 to 1860, but was not generally popular on the lecture circuit. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , was published in 1849 at his own expense in an edition of one thousand copies. It met with very little success; only 294 copies were sold or given away, while the remaining copies were finally shipped four years later to Thoreau himself, who sarcastically remarked in his journal, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself: Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor?” Although A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers carried an advertisement of the forthcoming publication of Walden , the failure of the first book prompted Thoreau to withhold publication of the later one until he could feel more certain of its success. After much revision, Thoreau published Walden in 1854. It met with generally favorable reviews and good sales, over seventeen hundred copies of an edition of two thousand being sold in the first year. By 1859, it was out of print, but it was reissued in a second edition shortly after Thoreau’s death. Walden won Thoreau some fame with general audiences and created a small but devoted number of disciples who would occasionally visit Thoreau in Concord or send him complimentary copies of books. After the success of Walden , Thoreau found it easier to publish his essays in the more popular periodicals, such as Putnam’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly . In his last years, he also acquired some notoriety as an abolitionist through his impassioned lectures and essays on John Brown.
Thoreau’s literary reputation has risen steadily since his death, his writings appealing primarily to two very different kinds of readers: those who see him as an escapist nature writer and those who see him as a political radical. As Michael Meyer suggests, his advice to people to simplify their lives and return to an appreciation of nature has had especially strong appeal in times of economic difficulty such as the 1920’s and 1930’s, and it has also served to cushion criticism of Thoreau in times such as the 1940’s, when his political views seemed unpatriotic. In the twenty-first century, it is probably still his nature writing that appeals to most readers. His social and political views, particularly his concept of passive resistance expressed in his essay “Civil Disobedience,” have periodically made their influence felt in the actions of major social and political reformers such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau’s popularity peaked in the 1960’s when his nature writing and his political views simultaneously found an audience of young American rebels advocating retreat from urban ugliness and materialism and passive resistance to an unpopular war. Since the 1960’s, his popularity has subsided somewhat, but he continues to be widely read, and his place among the great writers of American literature seems secure.
Biography
Henry David Thoreau (christened David Henry Thoreau) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817, the third of four children of John Thoreau and Cynthia Thoreau. His father was a quiet man whose seeming lack of ambition had led to a series of unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as a shopkeeper prior to his finally establishing a very successful pencil factory in Concord. His mother was an outgoing, talkative woman who took in boarders to supplement the family’s income. Both parents were fond of nature and could often be seen taking the children picnicking in the Concord woods.
Thoreau received a good grammar school education at the Concord Academy and seems to have had an essentially pleasant and typical boyhood. He attended Harvard College from 1833 to 1837, taking time out during his junior year to recuperate from a prolonged illness and to supplement his income by teaching for several months in Canton, Massachusetts. Upon being graduated near the top of his class, he took a teaching job in the Concord public schools, but after a few weeks he resigned in protest over the school board’s insistence that he use corporal punishment to discipline his students. Unable to find another position, Thoreau opened a private school of his own and was eventually joined by his older brother John. John’s cheerful disposition together with Henry’s high academic standards made the school very successful until it was closed in 1841 because of John’s prolonged illness.
During these years as a teacher, Thoreau traveled to Maine, took, with his brother, the famous excursion on the Concord and Merrimack rivers that eventually became the subject of his first book, delivered his first lecture, and published his first essay and his first poetry in The Dial . Through one of his students, Edmund Sewall (whom he praises in one of his best-known poems, “Lately, Alas, I Knew a Gentle Boy”) he met Ellen Sewall, the only woman to whom he seems to have been romantically attracted in any serious way. Ellen seems to have been the subject or recipient of a number of Thoreau’s poems of 1839 and 1840, but his brother John was the more forward of the two in courting Ellen, and it was after John’s proposal to Ellen had failed that Henry also proposed, only to be rejected as John had been.
After the closing of the school, Thoreau was invited to live with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family as a handyman; he stayed two years, during which time he continued to contribute to and occasionally help Emerson edit The Dial . In 1842, his brother John died suddenly of a tetanus infection, leaving Thoreau so devastated that he himself briefly exhibited psychosomatic symptoms of the disease. The following year, a brief stint as a tutor to William Emerson’s family on Staten Island confirmed his prejudice against cities, so he returned to Concord, where in 1844, he and a companion accidentally set fire to the Concord Woods, thus earning some rather long-lasting ill will from some of his neighbors and some long-lasting damage to his reputation as a woodsman.
For several years, Thoreau had contemplated buying a house and some land of his own, but in 1845, he settled for permission from Emerson to use some land near Walden Pond to build his own cabin. He built a one-room cabin and moved in on July 4, thus declaring his intention to be free to work on his writing and on a personal experiment in economic self-reliance. He continued to use the cabin as his main residence for two years, during which time he wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and much of Walden , raised beans, took a trip to the Maine Woods, and spent his famous night in the Concord jail for nonpayment of taxes. An invitation from Emerson to spend another year as a resident handyman finally prompted him to leave the pond in the fall of 1847, but he left with little regret, because, as he says in Walden , “I had several more lives to live, and I could not spare any more time for that one.” The fruits of his stay at the pond finally began to appear in 1849, when A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
and his essay on “Resistance to Civil Government” (later renamed “Civil Disobedience”) were both published.
Throughout the 1840’s, Thoreau had become increasingly interested in the natural sciences, and he began to spend much time gathering and measuring specimens, often at the expense of his writing, so that by 1851, he had reason to complain in his journal, “I feel that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s scope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope.” His scientific and mechanical abilities had benefits for the family’s pencil-making business, however, because in 1843 he had developed a more effective means of securing the graphite in the pencils and was later to improve the quality of pencils still further. Throughout his life he maintained of necessity an interest in the family business, although he seldom enjoyed having to take active part in it. His aversion to the routine of regular employment also applied to his surveying talents, which were called on by his neighbors increasingly after 1850. Although by 1851 Thoreau seems to have felt that life was passing him by without his having been able to achieve his goals, the publication of Walden in 1854 revived his self-esteem when the book sold well and brought a small but devoted group of admirers.
Throughout the 1850’s, Thoreau made several excursions to Canada, the Maine Woods, and Cape Cod, which culminated in travel essays in popular periodicals. He also traveled to New Jersey and to Brooklyn, where he met Walt Whitman , with whom he was favorably impressed. Thoreau’s admiration for Whitman’s raw genius was surpassed only by his admiration for Brown, the abolitionist, whom he first met in 1857 and whose cause he vigorously supported in lectures and published essays.
In 1860, Thoreau caught a bad cold and eventually was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Advised to seek a different climate, Thoreau took a trip to Minnesota in 1861, a trip that provided him with some brief glimpses of “uncivilized” Indians but with no relief from his illness. After returning to Concord, his health continued to deteriorate, and he died at home on May 6, 1862.
Analysis
For Henry David Thoreau, the value of poetry lay not primarily in the poem itself, but in the act of writing the poem and in that act’s influence on the poet’s life. The importance of poetry to the poet is, as he says in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , in “what he has become through his work.” Since for the Transcendentalists life was superior to art, Thoreau could assert that “My life has been the poem I would have writ,/ But I could not both live and utter it.” No art form could surpass God’s act of creating nature or a person’s act of shaping his or her own life. In his journal for 1840, Thoreau suggests that the best an artist can hope for is to equal nature, not to surpass it. The poet’s job is to publish nature’s truth accurately, and thus at times, verse seemed to him to be the best vehicle for publicizing nature because of its greater precision. By the mid-1840’s, however, he had mostly abandoned verse and concluded that “Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height. . . . The poet often only makes an irruption . . . but the prose writer has conquered . . . and settled colonies.” In 1851, he found it necessary to warn himself to beware “of youthful poetry, which is impotent.” Another problem with poetry was that it was too artificial. One could not capture in words the rhythms of the wind or the birds. He found that “the music now runs before and then behind the sense, but is never coincident with it.” One could make music, or one could make sense; Thoreau eventually preferred the latter.
Because of this ambiguous attitude toward the value of verse (he eventually came to speak of both good verse and good prose as “poetry”), Thoreau’s poetry is seldom first-rate, and even at its best, it does not rival that of such contemporaries as Emily Dickinson and Whitman. Nevertheless, it is of significance to the modern reader, first, because it demonstrates vividly the problems that American poets faced in freeing themselves artistically from European influences, and second, because it provides some fresh insights, not available as fully in his prose, into some of the deepest problems of Thoreau’s life, especially his attempts to cope with the problems of love and friendship and of his own role as an artist.
Thoreau could never quite free himself from imitating the great poets he admired to find a voice of his own. He mined his expert knowledge of Greek and Latin to write epigrams or odes (essentially Horatian in form) such as “Let Such Pure Hate Still Underprop,” which is also reminiscent of the seventeenth century Metaphysical poets in its use of paradox. Indeed, it is the Metaphysicals to whom Thoreau seems to have turned most often as muses for his own poetry: the paradoxes, introspection, and elaborate conceits of John Donne or Andrew Marvell. At other times, one can find in Thoreau’s verse the loose rhythms of John Skelton’s near-doggerel dimeter, as in “The Old Marlborough Road,” or the more graceful tetrameter couplets, which are Thoreau’s most frequently used form and which, as critic Henry Wells suggests, can also be traced to the Metaphysicals. Finally, Thoreau frequently employs the three-part structure and tight stanza form of George Herbert’s meditations. The stanza form of “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied,” for example, is clearly modeled on Herbert, while a poem such as “The Poet’s Delay” has, as H. Grant Sampson suggests, the three-part meditative structure that moves from a particular scene in nature to the poet’s awareness of the scene’s wider implications, and finally to the poet’s recognition of the scene’s specific spiritual meaning for him.
The influence of the Romantic poets
Although Thoreau most frequently looked to the past for poetic models, he did admire some of the Romantic poets of his own day, particularly William Wordsworth . Thoreau’s “I Knew a Man by Sight,” for example, portrays a typical Wordsworthian rustic wanderer, while in Thoreau’s unfortunate attempt at rhyme in the lines “Late in a wilderness/ I shared his mess” readers also see the glaring difference in poetic skill between the two poets. In “My Books I’d Fain Cast Off, I Cannot Read,” Thoreau expresses a view of the superiority of nature to books, very much like that in Wordsworth’s “Expostulation and Reply.” In several other poems, he seems to echo Wordsworth’s theories of human development. In “Manhood,” for example, Thoreau presents the same view of the child as father of the man that Wordsworth presents in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In “Music,” he also presents a view of a person’s loss of youthful faculties and of compensation for that loss with adult wisdom similar to that presented by Wordsworth in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” and in The Prelude: Or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850).
From this unlikely mixture of classical, Metaphysical, and Romantic influences, Thoreau apparently hoped to create a poetry that would express his own love of paradox, introspection, and nature, while creating a style both stately and rugged, at once elevated and natural. The task was, as Thoreau himself came to realize, impossible. It is also interesting to note, however, that Thoreau seems not to have looked to his own countrymen, except perhaps Emerson, for models. His diction and rhythms are most frequently traceable to European influence, and when he attempts to break free of that influence, he usually meets with only modest success or complete failure.
Because Thoreau’s prose is generally more effective than his poetry, when he deals with a topic in both genres, the poetry is generally valuable primarily as a gloss on the prose. In “Wait Not Till Slaves Pronounce the Word,” for example, Thoreau reminds the reader that slavery is as much a state of mind as an external condition: “Think not the tyrant sits afar/ In your own breasts ye have/ The District of Columbia/ And power to free the Slave.” His statement in Walden , however, makes the same point more powerfully: “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave driver of yourself.” Some of Thoreau’s nature poems do present some fresh minor insights into Thoreau’s view of nature, but those poems that are of most value and interest in their own right are those that shed autobiographical light on some of his personal dilemmas either unexpressed or not expressed as well in his prose, particularly his attempt to find an ideal friendship and his attempt to meet the artistic goals he set for himself.
The ideal of friendship
Thoreau’s ideal of friendship, expressed most fully in the “Wednesday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , is typically Transcendentalist in its insistence on paradox in human relationships. To Thoreau, friends were to be united with one another and yet separate. They were to love one another’s strengths while at the same time hating one another’s weaknesses, to be committed to one another and yet be free, to express their love and yet remain silent. They were to be equal, and yet he insists that only a friendship contracted with one’s superior is worthwhile. Friendship, as he suggests in a manuscript poem titled “ Friendship,” was to combine truth, beauty, and goodness in a platonic spiritual oneness, symbolized in the poem by two oak trees that barely touch above the ground but are inseparably intertwined in their roots. Although he tends to overintellectualize this concept of friendship, Thoreau was quite in earnest in seeking it in his friends, especially after his college years when he was trying to define his own identity through those he cared about. The person who perhaps came closest to being the soul mate whom Thoreau sought was his brother John. Unfortunately, as is often the case with affection for relatives, Thoreau found that he could seldom express his love for John adequately. When John died, his only outlet was to pour out his affection in his writings by dedicating his first book to him and by writing a gently moving poem, “Brother Where Dost Thou Dwell.”
Others who for a time seemed to realize his ideal were Edmund Sewall (one of his students) and Edmund’s sister, Ellen. To Edmund, Thoreau wrote one of his best poems, “ Lately, Alas, I Knew a Gentle Boy.” In this poem, Edmund is described as one who effortlessly wins the love of all around him by his quiet virtue. Mutual respect between the poet and the boy leads them both to keep their love unexpressed, however, and they paradoxically find themselves “less acquainted than when first we met.” The friendship thus slips away without being overtly expressed, and the poet is left to cherish only “that virtue which he is.” Although this poem certainly has androgynous qualities and is sometimes used to suggest a youthful homosexuality in Thoreau, it seems wiser to take it for what it more obviously is: one of the clearest and most moving of Thoreau’s expressions of the joys and frustrations of platonic love. His poems to Edmund’s sister, Ellen, are similarly platonic in tone. In one poem (“Love”), for example, he describes himself and Ellen as a “double star” revolving “about one center.” In “The Breeze’s Invitation,” he adds a pastoral touch, describing himself and Ellen as a carefree king and queen of a “peaceful little green.” In such poems, the reader sees a Thoreau who, beneath the platonic and pastoral conventions, is a young man earnestly seeking affection—a young man much more vulnerable than the didactic prose philosophizer of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers or the self-confident chanticleer in Walden .
Artistic hopes
That same human vulnerability is also the most striking quality of those poems that deal with Thoreau’s artistic goals. Aside from his journals, it is in his poems that Thoreau most fully reveals his artistic hopes and disappointments. Those hopes were a typically romantic mixture of active achievement and passive reception. On one hand, as he suggests in “The Hero,” a man must contribute something new to his world; he must, as he says in Walden , “affect the quality of the day.” On the other hand, he can achieve such results only if he is receptive to the inspiration of God through nature. Such inspiration at its most powerful culminates in the sort of mystical experience described by Thoreau in his poem “The Bluebirds,” in which he describes his feelings as if “the heavens were all around,/ And the earth was all below” and as if he were a “waking thought—/ A something I hardly knew.”
Inspiration
Such mystical experiences were the crucial source of the poet’s action, whether in writing or in deeds; thus, as Paul O. Williams has demonstrated, much of Thoreau’s poetry deals directly or indirectly with the subject of inspiration. The fullest and clearest treatment of the theme is in “Inspiration,” a poem in which he describes having occasionally felt a godlike sensitivity to the world so powerful that he felt thoroughly reborn and ready to “fathom hell or climb to heaven.” The poet’s predicament, however, was that such pure inspiration could seldom be translated untainted into action, and it is this predicament which is at the heart of several of his best poems. In “Light-Winged Smoke, Icarian Bird,” one of the most often reprinted and discussed of his poems, he cryptically describes himself as a flame and his poetry as the smoke that he sends heavenward to God. Unfortunately, as the smoke rises to God, it also blots out the truth of God’s sun and negates the poet’s purpose of clarifying that truth. Thoreau’s point here, as Eberhard Alsen convincingly argues, is that even the “clear flame” of the poet is not pure enough to avoid misrepresenting God’s truths. That sense of the human artist’s limitations in a world of infinite wonder sometimes led Thoreau to feel that his life was being wasted, as in “The Poet’s Delay,” in which he expresses his fear that while nature’s seasons progress into autumn and bear fruit, his own “spring does not begin.” Elsewhere, however, as in “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied,” he consoles himself with a sacrificial satisfaction that his own failures will allow others to be more fruitful. If he is a parcel of picked flowers unable to produce further beauty, at least the other flowers can bloom more beautifully because his have been thinned out of the garden.
In such poems as these, one realizes that Thoreau sensed early what is quite clear when one surveys the body of his poetry: that verse was not the best vehicle for his thoughts but that it freed him to make his prose more powerful. He would have to wait until the publication of Walden to feel that the slow-paced seasons of his artistic life had truly begun to bear fruit. Nevertheless, his poetry served him both as a valuable testing ground for his ideas and as an outlet for some of his deepest private problems. It is also worth the modern reader’s time because it provides an occasional peek behind the persona of his prose works and because it helps in understanding the dilemma of the Romantic artist, attempting to convey the ideal while being hindered by the very real limitations of human language—a problem that confronts many modern poets as well.
Bibliography
Cain, William E. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau . New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Historical and biographical context and treatment of Thoreau.
Hahn, Stephen. On Thoreau . Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2000. A concise study intended to assist a beginning student in understanding Thoreau’s philosophy and thinking. Includes bibliographical references.
Kerting, Verena. Henry David Thoreau’s Aesthetics: A Modern Approach to the World . New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Examines Thoreau’s writings for his worldview and aesthetics.
McSweeney, Kerry. The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson . Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. Compares and contrasts the senses in the poetry of Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.
Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau . 1995. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. A guide to the works and to the biographical, historical, and literary contexts. Includes a chronology and further readings.
Richardson, Robert D. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. This study focuses primarily on the development of Thoreau’s leading themes and the formulation of his working philosophy. Richardson offers clear accounts of some of the writer’s complex theories. Provides notes, a bibliography, and an index.
Smith, Larry. Thoreau’s Lost Journal: Poems . Toledo, Ohio: Westron Press, 2001. Smith concentrates on Thoreau’s poetry as found in his journal.
Sullivan, Robert. The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant . New York: Collins, 2009. Although this work examines Walden more than the poetry, it presents a different perspective on Thoreau, one that suggests that the work was meant to be a communal work, an inspiration, rather than a reclusive work.
Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Tauber shows how Thoreau’s metaphysics of self-knowing informed all that this multifaceted writer, thinker, and scientist did. A clear presentation of the man in the context of social and intellectual history.
Thoreau, Henry David. I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau . Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. This work offers selections from Thoreau’s journals from 1837-1861. Includes comprehensive annotations that uncover allusions, provide biographical information, and offer word definitions.