One of the most recognizable passages from Henry David Thoreau is from the earliest section of Walden, “Where I lived, and what I lived for”:

Most students of American literature recognize Thoreau’s “simplicity!” language, but it’s rare to focus on how that language is counter-posed to the nation’s “so-called internal improvements.” In this passage (and throughout Walden), Thoreau is proposing a counter-economy with its own version of “improvements,” exactly opposite the nation’s.

Beginning in the late 1810s and picking up in the 1820s, U.S. federal and state governments began undertaking an increasing amount of “internal improvement” projects. These provided a basic infrastructure for further growth, such as building better roads. The biggest and most visible project that cut across many states was the Eerie Canal (Fig. 1), completed in 1825. Today, it’s hard for us to appreciate the impact of the Eerie Canal on the public’s imagination. At the time, it was seen as a highly impressive feat of civil engineering that completely transformed the American economy–by first transforming “nature.”

Read in this light, many of Thoreau’s famous compositions can be seen as a response to national expansion in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) America. He did so within a network of intellectuals and artists that was primarily located in Concord, MA, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendentalist philosophy. Emerson’s transcendentalism journal, The Dial, provided Thoreau with an outlet for his early literary work.

He published a rather terrible poem, “Stanzas,” in 1841.

In 1842 he published “Natural History of Massachusetts,” which now showed off his talents in non-fiction prose. In these prose texts on “natural history” we can start to see his keen eye for natural, his familiarity with biological taxonomies and his sensitivity to the seasons and environmental effects on local flora/fauna. As a naturalist, he interweaves dense descriptions of nature with his own subjective impressions. This mix of observation and lyricism would become a hallmark of his work.

Before looking more closely at Walden, it will help to see how modern popular readers tend to respond to him now.

Here are some key points:

• In 1845, Thoreau decamped to a plot of land owned by Emerson, near Walden pond
• He spent 2 years in a cabin that he built there
• Walden was published in 1854
• Thoreau proposed that we need very little to live happily
• Like Emerson, he valued self-reliance and economic independence
• The task of life of is practice becoming a companion to oneself
• Changing the world begins with the self
• Nature is central to this project–it has spiritual significance for individuals
• We’re “nature looking into nature,” not a master of it
• Self-reliance involves introspection and self-discovery
• His project encourages individuals to push against immoral laws, especially those related to unjust wars and slavery
• “Civil Disobedience” has inspired protesters ranging from Ghandi to MLK

These points are mainly focused on the themes and major ideas of Walden. The rest of this lesson will offer more context for appreciating the genre and form of that work.

Walden as “environmental lit”

Thoreau’s Walden is considered one of–if not the first–explicitly environmental works of literature in the U.S. What counts as an environmental text has been greatly complicated by literary scholars, but Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism (2003) offers a few pointers.

Buell suggests that Emerson’s Nature essay, from 1836, was the “first canonical work of U.S. literature to unfold a theory of nature with special reference to poetics.” In other words, Emerson was the first to clearly link an appreciation for nature with the practice of poetry, literature, and art more generally. Eco-critics (including Buell himself) tend to focus on this link between poetics and nature; or, since “nature” is freighted with a lot of conceptual baggage, eco-critics tend to focus on the relationship between “text” and “world.” Of course, that relationship tends to always be latent in literary texts, but Buell and other eco-critics tend to focus on works that tend to draw attention to the “environmental ground,” the “landscape,” or other aspects of what literature usually terms the “setting.” Eco-critics point out that some authors and works transform environment as setting to environment/nature/ground as a central focus, even a character at times.

In his earlier book, The Environmental Imagination (1996), Buell dedicated major sections to focus on the legacy of Thoreau’s Walden in establishing an entire mode of “nature writing.” Texts that tend to fit this category are precisely those that consider nature/the environment as a central character rather than mere setting.

If Emerson’s Nature argued that nature was central to poetics, Thoreau’s Walden demonstrated how to do poetics “with” nature.

Walden as georgic

Readers tend to associate “nature writing” with the pastoral mode, but, keener readers differentiate between the georgic and the pastoral. As the chapter on William Cullen Bryant explains:

This pastoral/georgic distinction is important to keep in mind when reading Thoreau’s Walden because, contrary to the expectations of the pastoral, this “nature essay” does not attempt to idealize nature–at least not in the conventional sense. Thoreau is careful to present a more granular view of what’s happening around him; it’s not just a mirror for his own lyrical self. He’s also more than eager to work with the earth, to hoe and plant seeds, and to protect his small farm from intrusion. In fact, central to his poetics is a form of labor that experiences some level of resistance from what’s being labored upon. The georgic is more fitting for these explorations than the pastoral.

More than a “transparent eyeball”

Thoreau is clearly building on the conceptual framework laid down by Emerson’s Nature poetics. He’s presenting a nature full of “hieroglyphics” and “emblems” to be contemplated. It’s certainly useful for read this landmark nature writing after becoming familiar with Emerson.

However, Thoreau’s Walden doesn’t just confirm Emerson’s transcendentalism. If Emerson proposes that a transcendentalist become a “transparent eyeball” in Nature, this level of passivity quickly disappears in Thoreau. Why? Perhaps one way to think about the difference is between Emerson’s “pastoral” approach to nature poetics and Thoreau’s “georgic” approach. But the question would then be: why does Thoreau adopt a more georgic approach to uncovering meaning in nature?

This long nature essay offers a meditation on the kind of labor and careful observation that’s required for living a meaningful life, and it does so in a way that both critiques the “internal improvement projects” of the emerging industrial nation and also slightly corrects Emerson’s transcendentalist poetics.