Walden and Civil Disobedience (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

In the summer of 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he’d built near the shore of Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of his native village of Concord, Massachusetts. Although Thoreau’s experience over the next two years, two months, and two days could hardly be considered a wilderness adventure, it did nevertheless constitute a significant departure from the norm. Most of his neighbors, at least, thought he was a little bit crazy. As Thoreau suggests in the early chapters of Walden, he set out to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive, by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions? Besides building his own shelter and providing the fuel to heat it (that is, chopping his own firewood), he would grow and catch his own food, even provide his own entertainment. It was, as he delighted to point out, an experiment in basic home economics; but in truth, his aim was to investigate the larger moral and spiritual economy of such a life. If, as he notes in the book’s first chapter, the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” perhaps by leaving it all behind and starting over on the relatively isolated shores of Walden Pond he could restore some of life’s seemingly diminished vigor.

Indeed, there is plenty of undiminished vigor on display in these pages. Nathaniel Hawthorne in his journal described Henry as “a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him” (Hawthorne, The Heart of Hawthorne’s Journals, p. 105; see “For Further Reading”), and readers have often since regarded him—along with Walt Whitman—as something like the wild man of nineteenth-century American literature. Few readers ever forget the start of Walden’s “Higher Laws” chapter: “As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented” (p. 166). In many respects, Thoreau went to Walden in search of the raw, hoping that an infusion of “savage delight” would cure him and (by the example he would provide) his neighbors of what he regarded as over-civilization, which he linked to timidity and uncritical faith in the authority of others. Throughout Walden, and indeed throughout the greater part of his writing, the impulse to simplify conditions and cast off the debilitating and dispiriting obligations of a respectable life is bound up with this pursuit of uninhibited, unadulterated wildness. His admiration for wildness in nature was unbounded. “Life consists with wildness,” he comments in the popular talk now known to readers as “Walking.” “The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him” (Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, p. 240). “Hope and the future for me,” he adds, “are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (Thoreau, p. 241).

Of course, Thoreau was hardly an actual wild man, a point he acknowledges in another talk, “Wild Apples,” when he notes that “our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock” (Thoreau, p. 452). As this comment suggests, Thoreau recognized that he came to the woods as a highly developed product of civilized society. So too his approach to the Walden environs should be regarded not as a kind of wilderness adventure—Walden was hardly a wilderness, then as now—but rather as an effort to locate and give voice to the wildness that subsists with and within the cultivated and domesticated. Late in Walden, offering an analogy from nature for the kind of extravagance he emulates in his writing, he notes that the migrating buffalo seeking “new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time” (p. 254). It is telling, in ways that few readers have fully understood, that Thoreau should actually prefer this cow to the seemingly wilder buffalo. What appeals to him about the cow is that its wild instinct has survived domestication: The wildness Thoreau pursues is not found in complete isolation from civilized and domesticating influences but rather survives in a deep, if sometimes unacknowledged, layer of being underlying those influences. The experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to recover such wildness, as it survived on the margins of Concord village life and beneath the smooth and refined surface of even the most modern, educated, and enlightened men and women.

Thoreau went to Walden not only to hoe beans, fish in the region’s several ponds, and wander the countryside in pursuit of raw, physical sensation, but also, it turned out, to read and write. Though these would seem to be rather civilized activities, he imagined pursuing them for their wildness as well. Extravagance is Thoreau’s figure for this wildness in Walden: “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced” (p. 253). Thoreau invokes the word’s etymology in order to restore some of its original wildness to it. The background to this ambition is in Emerson, who famously claimed in his essay “The Poet” that all language is “fossil poetry,” by which he meant that words retain, in their etymological roots, traces of their early history and use, reminders of the physical pictures or actions that they originally brought to mind. Emerson argued in his first published work, Nature, that “the corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language,” and that “wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things” (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 223). The poet restores language to its primitive vigor, and so restores men and women to something like a prelapsarian state of unified physical and mental, worldly and spiritual well-being. What’s more, the poet, Emerson says in his essay of that title, “knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, ‘with the flower of the mind’” (p. 459).

Influenced by Emerson, as well as by the work of such contemporary linguists as Richard Trench and Charles Kraitsir, Thoreau would press this point to its limits, using language as an instrument to recover some of the same wildness he sought in swamps and abandoned fields. Only such language, extravagant to the root, has the power to awaken and reinvigorate a somnolent population: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression” (p. 254). Exaggeration takes many forms in Walden, from the depiction in “Brute Neighbors” of a warlike encounter of red and black ants rendered in mock-epic style to the description in “Spring” of the melting railroad embankment, replete with dozens of etymological word-plays that aim to show that “the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth” (pp. 240—241). In the very inventiveness of his prose, and especially in his effort to use words in ways that recapture forgotten aspects of their original meanings, Thoreau’s prose style thus aims to restore the attentive reader to what Emerson, in his introduction to Nature, calls an “original relation to the universe.”

There is, of course, considerable irony in Thoreau’s posture of radical independence and original expression. James Russell Lowell, one of the leading literary authorities of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, rightly pointed out that Thoreau’s “notion of an absolute originality ... is an absurdity” and that a man “cannot escape in thought, any more than he can in language, from the past and the present” (Lowell, Literary Essays, vol. 1, pp. 372—373). As Lowell memorably reminded his readers, Thoreau “squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all” (Lowell, vol. 1, p. 380). All of this is true enough, and Thoreau would have readily acknowledged as much. For all his occasional posturing, he knew rather well the extent of his dependence on others. If he forgot, those who attended his lectures and read his published work reminded him often enough: “In its narrative, this book is unique,” wrote one reviewer of Walden, “in its philosophy quite Emersonian.” “It is the latest effervescence of the peculiar school, at the head of which stands Ralph Waldo Emerson,” wrote another. Newspaper reviews of Thoreau’s lectures in and around New England are unrelenting in their description of Thoreau as a kind of minor Emerson. As ever, Lowell himself cut to the quick, damning Thoreau with faint praise: “Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable” (Lowell, vol. 1, p. 285).

It was indeed Emerson who encouraged Thoreau to begin a journal; Emerson who inspired Thoreau with his early lectures and addresses; Emerson who invited Thoreau into the family home after his experiment as a schoolteacher failed; Emerson who allowed Thoreau the temporary use of his property on Walden Pond. Thoreau had the great good fortune to meet and come under Emerson’s influence just as Emerson came into his own intellectually and artistically. Still, as extraordinary as this almost daily contact must have been, it could not have been easy for the young and ambitious Thoreau. Emerson was a phenomenon, and Thoreau knew him just as he began to achieve that reputation. Only twelve years older than Thoreau, Emerson had made a splash in his early to mid-thirties with the 1836 publication of Nature and the delivery of a series of electrifying and often controversial lectures, including “The American Scholar,” delivered to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard in 1837, and the Divinity School “Address,” also delivered at Harvard in 1838. Since the mid-1830s Emerson had been conducting popular Lyceum lecture series—a kind of early adult education system—on such topics as “English Literature,” “Philosophy of History,” “Human Life,” and “The Present Age.” Emerson published his first volume of collected essays in 1841, and a second volume followed in 1844. Thoreau moved into the Emerson household just as the first volume was being published; he moved in again, just a month after leaving the cabin at Walden Pond, when Emerson left to make his tour of England and France in 1847.

By then, while Emerson’s career was in full swing, Thoreau was adjusting to his own literary disappointments. He had written a great deal while living at Walden: In addition to his regular journal, he completed two drafts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and a preliminary draft of Walden itself. He was having no luck, however, securing a publisher for A Week, an account of a two-week river expedition he undertook in the summer of 1839 in a homemade boat with his older brother, John. Discovering little prospect of seeing the book into print, and already well advanced on what would become Walden, Thoreau finally agreed to pay the cost of publication from royalties received from the book’s sales. Published in 1849, A Week received mixed reviews and sold poorly, leaving Thoreau the then considerable debt of some $300, which it took him four and a half years to repay. After he took possession of 706 unsold copies of the original 1,000-volume print run, he quipped, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself” (Borst, The Thoreau Log, p. 266).

Thoreau was nearly thirty-two years old when his first book was published; he was thirty-six when he took possession of its unsold stock. He had by then been at work on Walden for eight years; indeed, he was by 1853 at work on the fifth of eight drafts of the ever-expanding Walden manuscript. He was a steady worker but had other responsibilities besides writing. Responding to a ten-year anniversary questionnaire from his Harvard class in 1847, he declared, “I am a Schoolmaster—a private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster” (Thoreau, pp. 650—651 ). Thoreau was indeed, at different times, all of these things. The family business was pencil-making, and Henry periodically threw himself into it with gusto, developing new techniques for improving the quality of the graphite that allowed the business, eventually, to shift from pencil-making to a more lucrative process for producing graphite to sell to other pencil manufacturers. Throughout the 1850s, he also relied increasingly on his skill as a surveyor to pay his—and his family’s —bills, including the notorious $300 debt for the publication costs of A Week. His arrangement for staying as the Emersons’ long-term houseguest included working at a number of odd jobs around the house and property. And on top of all of this activity, there was, of course, always the writing.

By the time Thoreau took possession of the unsold copies of A Week, Emerson was already a household name, both in the United States and abroad. Indeed, Emerson had gone to lecture in England and France in 1847 on the basis of his established reputation. As if occupying the shadow of that reputation were not enough, Thoreau had to contend as well with the substance of Emerson’s teaching, which was not kind to derivative success. Emerson, after all, was the apostle of self-reliance, and as such took a rather dim view of disciples. “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence,” Emerson had said in “The American Scholar” (Emerson, p. 58). And, “I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system” (p. 57). In the Divinity School “Address,” he had insisted, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing” (p. 79). Emerson revolutionized American literary culture by infusing into it this spirit of radical independence and originality.

Although this attitude of independence and originality was itself in some measure shaped by British and European Romantic influences, Emerson linked it to Americans’ sense of doing something radically new in the world; he cast self-reliance as an antidote to American cultural belatedness—the sense that for all its political independence and innovation, America remained a cultural backwater, dependent on Europe for its cultural standards and models. Emerson turned this condition on its head, declaring in the opening paragraph of “The American Scholar,” “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close” (Emerson, p. 53). For the first time, a sense of a distinctively American cultural mission took center stage. Americans were urged to cultivate freely their native creative powers, unburdened by the weight of cultural traditions. They would no longer achieve cultural recognition by importing and imitating acknowledged English and continental models, but would discover and promulgate their own unique cultural genius. The hallmark of this genius, according to Emerson, would be Americans’ heightened sense of self-reliance. Striking a note to which a young Henry David Thoreau clearly vibrated from head to toe, Emerson announced in “The American Scholar,” “Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare” (Emerson, p. 62).

Undoubtedly, Emerson overstates the radical independence of individuals, although he does so with an often acutely ironic sense of just how embedded even the most self-reliant individual is in the larger machinery of social and historical networks. He also exaggerates the rawness of the socio-cultural environment that nurtures and sustains such native genius. But such characteristic exaggeration nevertheless gave Americans a new sense of cultural vitality and authority. Thoreau’s writings, including the work written initially for public presentation on the lecture circuit, exude this spirit of bold and original creation.

Still, as buoyed as Thoreau must have been by his close contact with Emerson and others associated with this new American literature, he must have wondered where he himself fit in the larger scheme. His difficulties seeing A Week into print combined with the volume’s mixed reviews and 706 remaindered copies stored in his attic; the seeming indifference with which some of his lectures and magazine publications were being received, including parts of what would become Walden; the constant need for money; the sense of occupying Emerson’s long and much-admired shadow; and, over time, the added weight of increasingly strained relations with Emerson all must have contributed to some doubt, on Thoreau’s part, that he ever would amount to anything more than an exceptionally well-read jack-of-all-trades. Add to all of this the tragedy of losing his brother to lockjaw in 1842 and other personal disappointments, such as the rejection of his marriage proposal by Ellen Sewall—perhaps the only serious love of his life (with the possible exception of the eminently unmarriageable Lydian Emerson, Emerson’s wife).

Everybody who cared about him wondered what would become of so peculiarly gifted a man as Henry Thoreau. Hawthorne commented in his notebooks as early as 1842 that Thoreau “has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood” (Hawthorne, p. 106). Apart from the blatant racism of the comment—the all-too-pat opposition between civilization and savagery characteristic of the age—Hawthorne captured what many felt about Thoreau: His singular eccentricities and his almost religious dedication to his afternoon walks in the woods might ultimately get in the way of his making any lasting contribution to the great social and literary movement of the age. A few years later Hawthorne would write, “There is one chance in a thousand that he might write a most excellent and readable book,” though he did allow that such a book, if written, would be “a book of simple observation of nature, somewhat in the vein of White’s History of Selborne” (Borst, p. 42). Nobody seems to have had great faith in Thoreau’s potential. Emerson would write in his journal in 1851, even as Thoreau was writing and rewriting Walden, “Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party” (Porte, Emerson in His Journals, p. 426). Emerson maintained this objection to the end, incorporating it almost verbatim into his eulogy for Thoreau, along with the observation that “pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!” (Poirier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 488).

Still, for all his own and others’ doubts, Thoreau was, in fact, busy all along pounding out words. In addition to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and, eventually, Walden, he published a good many essays in the years before Walden appeared, in both popular magazines and more specialized literary journals. Many of these essays formed the basis of no fewer than five volumes of previously uncollected and unpublished material that appeared within four years of Thoreau’s untimely death in 1862: Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), Letters to Various Persons (1865), and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866). He had, as well, composed a journal, which ran more than two million words and fourteen volumes in the last published edition. He compiled some 3,000 manuscript pages in eleven volumes of what he called his “Indian books,” a record of his wide-ranging reading on the early history of Native Americans in North America. Nobody is quite sure what he meant to do with this material, but the notebooks constitute a treasure trove of information for anyone seeking to understand Thoreau’s imaginative response to Native Americans. In addition, Thoreau completed draft manuscripts of two major contributions to the emerging understanding of New England’s natural history, works that have been published only recently as Faith in a Seed (1993) and Wild Fruits (2000). Today, with almost all of this material readily available (including published excerpts from the “Indian books”), there is little reason to question Thoreau’s impressive productivity. But these questions haunted Thoreau and his friends during his lifetime, when so little of this literary and intellectual achievement was available.

Perhaps Emerson’s anxieties about Thoreau’s productivity have some ulterior explanation, one having less to do with Thoreau’s actual accomplishments than with Emerson’s sense of how little apparent effect his literary and spiritual revolution was having on the overwhelming dominance of purely material progress in the United States. The engineers were indeed winning the day, and Emerson had, after all, hoped that the American scholar would contribute to that world’s moral and spiritual regeneration. Emerson apparently did not fully understand the relationship between Thoreau’s daily excursions into the countryside and his lifework. Nor did he grasp the depth of Thoreau’s feeling about nature. Emerson had also been interested in natural history, but he never acquired the firsthand knowledge Thoreau acquired in his ramblings around Concord, throughout New England, and on trips as far afield as Canada and, near the end of his life, Minnesota. Though he began as something of an amateur, Thoreau trained himself to be an accomplished, even a semiprofessional naturalist, fully conversant with the most advanced literature of botanists and natural historians—including the emerging theory of evolution—and highly skilled at making, recording, and interpreting field observations. Thoreau may have looked to some like a wide-eyed enthusiast of the woods, but he was in fact something of an early field ecologist, exploring the natural environment with a distinctive combination of scientific inquiry and poetic reflection.

Given the ambivalence of even his closest contemporary friends and supporters, it is not surprising that Thoreau’s reputation has had its ups and downs over the years. At first, it was mainly as a nature enthusiast that he was admired. Despite the commercial failure of A Week, Walden was a moderate success when it was first published in 1854, receiving good reviews and selling well if not spectacularly well. Walden did not, however, immediately establish Thoreau’s place among major American writers. Though much of Thoreau’s work made its way into print soon after his death, none of it sold especially well. Excerpts from the journals first appeared in four volumes published in the 1880s and 1890s. These volumes, edited by Thoreau’s friend and correspondent Harrison Gray Otis Blake, were organized around seasonal motifs, which served to confirm Thoreau’s early reputation as an amateur naturalist. Even Thoreau’s ethical project was often considered secondary to his investigations of nature. When the last of these volumes, Autumn, appeared in 1892, a reviewer for the Yale Literary Magazine commented that “Thoreau’s communion with nature divorced himself from the study of mankind, and therefore it is as a naturalist that he had done most for the world, and not as a propounder of ethics” (Scharnhorst, Henry David Thoreau, p. 303). A reviewer for the New York Tribune wrote, “Thoreau’s books probably have no great body of readers, but those who care for them at all care for them deeply” (Scharnhorst, p. 301). While Thoreau is regularly mentioned in anthologies and surveys around the turn of the century, and while Walden is typically singled out as his major work, there was not yet any clear consensus about Thoreau’s importance or even any significant grasp of his distinctive accomplishment.

Eventually Thoreau emerged as a major figure in the “flowering of New England” or the “American renaissance,” which in many literary histories written in the first three quarters of the twentieth century became, misleadingly enough, synonymous with American literature itself. Often aligned with Emerson and Whitman and against such “darker” figures as Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Thoreau was increasingly admired for the masterful artistry of Walden. Central to the classic twentieth-century interpretations of Thoreau’s work is his often intense preoccupation with language and consciousness. Both are central to Emersonian Transcendentalism, emerging out of such famous passages as Emerson’s description of the “transparent eye-ball” in the first chapter of Nature and the extended discussion of language in the “Language” chapter of the same work. Language and consciousness were beginning to emerge as central preoccupations of such major twentieth-century writers as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. Many of the best-known nineteenth-century American writers in fact achieved their status as classic writers through interpretations advanced by twentieth-century critics and scholars who were themselves influenced by the chief writers of their own age. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence’s own Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) probably did more to cement the canon of “classic American literature” than any other single publication on the subject. F. O. Matthiessen’s highly influential study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)—a more scholarly volume with chapters on Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—has many echoes of his earlier study of the modernist poet T. S. Eliot. In part because of the influence of critics like Lawrence and Matthiessen, twentieth-century readers often regarded the literature of these classic nineteenth-century American writers as distinctively and even presciently modern. Thoreau’s allusiveness, his penchant for puns—especially those playing on the etymological roots of words—and his constant attention to his own running stream of thought link him in many ways more to a figure like James Joyce than to contemporaries like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Charles Dickens, born just six and five years, respectively, before Thoreau.

It is important to recognize the shift that occurred with Thoreau’s appropriation by his later critics to the modernist canon. In effect, Thoreau’s interest in the natural world, which had been the basis for his modest reputation for some fifty or sixty years after his death, was relegated to a secondary position. For Leo Marx, writing in his influential The Machine in the Garden (1964), Thoreau’s emphasis on the natural world is actually misleading, since nature only masks the true source of meaning and value for Thoreau: “In Walden, Thoreau is clear, as Emerson seldom was, about the location of meaning and value. He is saying that it does not reside in the natural facts or in social institutions or in anything ‘out there,’ but in consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the analogy-perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the human mind” (p. 264). Thoreau, Marx forcefully argues, “restores the pastoral hope to its traditional location. He removes it from history, where it is manifestly unrealizable, and relocates it in literature, which is to say, in his own consciousness, in his craft, in Walden” (p. 265).

Throughout Walden, and indeed throughout much of Thoreau’s journal and other published writings, the emphasis regularly shifts from whatever is being observed or described to the author’s very powers of observation and description. Thoreau suggests that he hoes beans “as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day” (p. 129). Thoreau everywhere records the effect of natural phenomena on his sensibility, as if the larger purpose of his project were to describe not Walden and its surroundings but the effects of Walden and its surroundings on his marvelously sensitive and responsive mind. In “Solitude,” he describes his experience of a gentle rain:

The passage highlights the impact of the rain on Thoreau’s own receptive sensibilities, which emerge as the great unifying force of the passage. Thoreau is himself frequently center stage in Walden as his sympathetic powers, his extraordinary imaginative resources, and his wonderfully inventive verbal prowess vie with the actual Walden environment for the reader’s attention.

Even the larger design of Walden underscores Thoreau’s mythopoeic intentions: his effort to situate this world in a deeper, more mythically and even morally resonant reality, to ground the temporal and contingent in the eternal and unchanging. The book’s emphasis on seasonal change—advancing from midsummer through fall, winter, and ultimately spring, a progress underscored in the book’s last few manuscript drafts—reinforces the awakening motif announced in the epigraph. Nature, as Emerson insists in the “Language” chapter of Nature, “is the symbol of spirit”: “By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause” (Emerson, pp. 20, 25). Thoreau’s changing seasons correspond to changing psychological and moral conditions, just as descriptive passages often modulate into moral and symbolic reflections. Moreover, Thoreau uses the seasonal motif to challenge his readers to awaken to realities that, for all their omnipresence, remain unacknowledged and even unsuspected. The book’s many references to Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts and traditions, with their frequent emphasis on the illusion that pervades most people’s commonsense perception of their world, further hints at its overarching design. As grounded as Walden is in its immediate circumstances and contexts, its mythic and symbolic design often has the effect of minimizing or marginalizing those circumstances and contexts. What’s more, the individual self—the figure of the participant-observer at the heart of so much of Thoreau’s writing—serves as the fulcrum for this mythopoeic experience, since it is to something deep within the individual self that the moral and symbolic realities in question typically correspond, what Coleridge aptly called “the one Life within us and abroad.”

More recent scholarship has shifted its emphasis from the mythopoeic and symbolic to the historical and discursive contexts of Thoreau’s work. This is in keeping with general trends in literary scholarship. What is unusual in the case of Thoreau is that Thoreau himself often—though by no means always—seems to downplay the role of such historical and discursive contexts. Indeed, following Emerson’s lead, he sometimes seems to dismiss history altogether. The irony is that Thoreau was in fact surprisingly well read in social and historical contexts and even quite regularly engaged in his writing with actual social issues and political conflicts. The consciousness at the heart of Walden is constantly encountering and reflecting on evidence of the social and historical world around Concord, whether in its repeated attempts to come to terms with the railroad tracks that cut across one end of the pond or in its consideration of the many abandoned homes encountered along the path to and from Concord (most of them once occupied by Concord’s African-American population). Thoreau’s emphatic concern with questions of household economy in the book’s opening chapter is also increasingly regarded in the context of other prevailing and emerging discourses of economy and domesticity. Ultimately, Thoreau frames Walden as a reflection on contemporary social and economic circumstances. Its early chapters represent one of the most important sustained critiques of the material and moral condition of life in the North in the decades before the Civil War. Although many have challenged and continue to challenge the apparent isolation of the reflecting consciousness at the heart of Walden, it has become increasingly clear that critics’ emphasis on the mythopoeic dimensions of Thoreau’s project must be balanced with greater attention to the discursive and historical contexts with which he is also preoccupied throughout his work.

One area where this change is most evident is in scholars’ approaches to Thoreau’s environmentalism. Where Thoreau’s late nineteenth-century reputation as a “poet-naturalist” was displaced by his twentieth-century reputation as a serious and sophisticated, almost cosmopolitan artist, more recent criticism has returned to Thoreau’s engagement with natural history, paying particular attention to his command of the various newly emerging scientific disciplines that were then transforming the study of natural history and to his highly accomplished skills as an observer and recorder of natural phenomena. Not long after Leo Marx had insisted that Thoreau’s real subject was not Walden Pond and its environs but his own consciousness, environmental historian Roderick Nash insisted in his Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) on Thoreau’s important contribution to an emerging and distinctively American wilderness sensibility. For a long time, these reputations occupied separate disciplinary compartments, with literary scholars paying more attention to matters of language and form and environmental historians, environmentalists, and other nature enthusiasts paying more attention to Thoreau’s inspirational practice as a naturalist and natural historian. More recently, however, literary scholars, equipped with the tools of an ecological literary criticism, have sought to understand the relationship between Thoreau’s literary and environmental projects. While there is still some disagreement about Walden’s place within Thoreau’s evolving project—some see him still struggling in Walden to free himself from classically Romantic narrative and figurative strategies—there is widespread agreement that Thoreau must be taken seriously for his study of environmental processes as well as for his concern with what are now called environmental history and ethics. Recent critics have also established Thoreau’s influence on later “literary ecologists,” including such recent environmental writers as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, and William Least Heat-Moon.

If the question of Thoreau’s environmentalism has only recently emerged in its full richness and complexity, Thoreau’s engagement with the politics of his day has always been central to readings of his work, even if critics have not always agreed how central this engagement is to his overall project. Indeed, many readers have complained that Walden’s preoccupation with language and consciousness compromises the forceful social commentary with which Thoreau opens the book. Such readers often regard Walden as the ultimate expression of New England elite culture: liberal in sentiment but hopelessly compromised by its entanglement with social institutions promoting the interests of the status quo. By contrast, Thoreau’s public lectures often address the social conflicts of the day, and they do so plainly and with straightforward moral urgency. In several of his lectures Thoreau takes on the problem of slavery and, more particularly, the North’s failure to respond to the various political maneuvers designed to protect the great compromise between North and South. Others have emphasized another shift in Thoreau’s writing after Walden, a shift in focus from the consciousness of the participant-observer to the actual social and natural world outside that consciousness. There is undoubtedly much truth to these claims, although criticisms of Walden are sometimes overstated in order to highlight shifts in Thoreau’s interests and techniques that emerged in his last decade of writing.

Walden and “Civil Disobedience” were first published together in 1948 and have since appeared together, as they do here, in at least ten different editions with countless reprintings. To some extent, this is a peculiarity of postwar book culture: Publishers sought to produce inexpensive editions of Walden, especially aimed at the high school and college markets, that included what was increasingly regarded as Thoreau’s most important work of social and political commentary, “Civil Disobedience.” Because “Civil Disobedience” is so short, the two works could and still can easily be combined in this way. Still, for all their obvious differences of design and rhetorical address, the two works form a natural pair, not least because the circumstances that led to Thoreau’s writing of “Civil Disobedience” are closely linked to his Walden experience. The story behind “Civil Disobedience” is well known, even if most of its specific details remain uncertain. Having made the mile-and-a-half walk from his cabin to the village of Concord, Thoreau was detained by the village sheriff for not having paid his poll tax. Some versions of the incident maintain that the sheriff offered to pay the tax for him, but Thoreau, acting on principle, refused. He refused to pay or to have someone else pay the tax because he would not support a government that supported slavery and that sought to extend its influence by waging war with Mexico in order to acquire its northern territories. Thoreau was arrested and jailed. He was released after just one night, his tax having been paid by someone (probably an aunt). One apparently apocryphal story that has circulated ever since has Emerson visiting Thoreau while he is still in jail. When asked by Emerson what he is doing in jail, Thoreau, assuming that principle was on his side of the jailhouse bars, is said to have responded, “What are you doing out there?”

Undoubtedly, Thoreau saw his principled stand in refusing to pay the poll tax as an enactment of the general moral and social attitudes articulated throughout Walden. It is true, however, that Walden is not shaped in response to any immediate social or political crisis, as are “Civil Disobedience,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “Life without Principle,” and, later, the series of talks delivered in support of the radical abolitionist John Brown, for whom Thoreau developed an intense, even worshipful admiration. New England was racked by the slavery crisis in the 1840s and ’50s, especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required that northerners return escaped slaves to their southern slave owners. Thoreau’s responses to these circumstances are sharp and impassioned. First delivered in January and February 1848, only a few months after Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond, “Civil Disobedience” precedes the Fugitive Slave Act and is in fact as preoccupied with the Mexican War as it is with slavery; it displays the same sense of moral outrage at his state’s and region’s complicity with slavery as with an imperial adventure that many worried would expand the reach of slavery and hence the influence of southern slave holders. The essay has proven to be enormously influential, despite being described as “crazy” by the Boston press when it first appeared under its original title, “Resistance to Civil Government.” It is remembered today less for its particular response to the crisis posed by the war than for its articulation of the more general logic of civil disobedience: staging nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to protest a government whose policies and actions are deemed by conscience both immoral and illegal. The essay’s impact on major twentieth-century advocates of nonviolent resistance, particularly Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., is no doubt in part responsible for its continuing popularity.

It is sometimes forgotten that Thoreau drew on early drafts of Walden to compose a series of lectures titled “Life in the Woods,” including one of his most popular talks, “Economy.” Thoreau probably did not draw much of a distinction between “Civil Disobedience” and talks like “Economy” or “Walking.” In any event, the same sense of moral outrage that shapes “Civil Disobedience” is evident throughout Walden. Indeed, for a work so suffused with mythopoeic ambitions, Walden is full of constant reminders of the specific social and historical challenges facing New Englanders. If Thoreau, in the few years he lived after the appearance of Walden, grew less likely to champion the virtues of social isolation, he never did imagine his isolation at Walden as anything more than an experiment; indeed, there is ample evidence, from both Walden and his journals, that he never really took seriously the idea that he could truly isolate himself from others. Rather, what Thoreau sought at Walden was a distance sufficient to allow him to take stock of his personal relations: to himself, to others, and to the world around him. Those who criticize Thoreau’s apparent embrace of redemptive isolation, or his championing of a timeless or ahistorical reality that only the isolated, unencumbered genius might acknowledge and harness, lose sight of his constant preoccupation with his social, historical, and natural environment.

If there is a side of Thoreau that is responsive to a mythopoeic reality, there is another side of him that recognizes that the impulse to discover such a reality can be cultivated only in a material and fully historical world. Although some critics still occasionally dismiss Thoreau and other Transcendentalists for their narrowness and relative isolation from the more turbulent currents of American history, such criticism rarely comes from readers steeped in their work. Thoreau is, of course, very much a creature of his time and place. His attitudes toward Irish immigrants, women (who are strikingly absent from Thoreau’s writing), and, at least before his extended research into their lives, Native Americans are evidence of this. Nevertheless, he was a frequent, ferocious, and altogether eloquent critic of many of his fellow northerners’ complacencies, especially regarding what he deemed their effective support of slavery.

Thoreau was attuned to other forms of social degradation besides slavery. While we may with good reason look back on Thoreau’s age as a quieter, less hectic time than our own, in fact this was the age in which the United States established the dynamic presence that would so thoroughly transform lives both on the North American continent and abroad. The age of industrialism was well under way in New England, and firsthand accounts of the workings of the textile and other mills attest to the profound and, to many, disturbing transformations that came with this new age. Thoreau and other major writers in New England at the time were acutely aware of these transformations; a significant part of their distinctive genius stems from their ability to recognize and address what were, at that time, the nascent stirrings of characteristically American energies and ambitions. Impressed by the dynamic vigor of the railroad, Thoreau nonetheless saw that “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (pp. 75—76). He also recognized that the pace of people’s lives was accelerating, and that such acceleration had its costs: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate” (p. 44). His sentiment has since become a familiar complaint.

It was not just advancing industrialization and technology, however, that drove Thoreau to the shores of Walden Pond. As Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” makes clear, Thoreau was responding to what he regarded as the decline of people’s sense of creative autonomy in the face of new social and economic conditions. Thoreau went to the woods, as he comments in that chapter, to live his life deliberately, because village and city life seemed to him to compromise any such reflective deliberation. “Let us settle ourselves,” he writes in Walden,

and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time (p. 80).

Though the comically extravagant prose is vintage and unmistakable Thoreau, this is a profoundly American sentiment. Thomas Jefferson, for example, comments in a well-known 1787 letter to his nephew Peter Carr: “Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear” (Jefferson, Writings, p. 902). While Jefferson more firmly emphasizes the stabilizing role of reason in guiding the pursuit of this truth than does Thoreau, both writers locate the primary responsibility for such a pursuit in the individual, someone who at once resists a weak and servile received wisdom and searches boldly for a more stable and dependable truth. One could also look to more specifically religious backgrounds to this attitude, especially the liberal Protestant movements that demonstrated a similar skepticism of prevailing theological doctrines and the institutional mechanisms that typically served to enforce them. Thoreau, unlike Emerson and most other Transcendentalists, was never especially religious, but the New England culture of the day was so saturated with religious attitudes and controversy that Thoreau often seems religious even when he isn’t. From all of these sources, Thoreau had imbibed a thoroughgoing skepticism toward received traditions and ideas and a corollary faith in the individual’s often lonely and always heroic pursuit of truth.

But once this background is acknowledged, one is left with what is uniquely Thoreauvian about a passage like the one quoted above. First, a reader might take note of Thoreau’s quirky humor, as when he refers to a place where one might found a wall, or a state, or perhaps a lamp-post. Our political institutions must, he is asserting, rest pragmatically on as firm a ground as our walls and lampposts, or, like the latter, they risk deterioration and collapse. But no sooner has the reader processed the understated humor of this than Thoreau suggests another comparative term, a gauge: not a Nilometer (which serves to measure the rise and fall of the river Nile), he suggests, but, somewhat fantastically, a Realometer, which would serve future ages to measure “how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” It can indeed be hard to recognize shams and appearances, at least before anyone has exposed them as such. Whether because of the pious sermonizing of the clergy, the obfuscating rhetoric of politicians, or the presumably expert advice of journalists, scholars, and other public figures who regularly explain the complex world to us, shams and appearances can come to seem all too convincing and real. Thoreau’s Realometer would help us distinguish appearance from reality, giving us a more dependable understanding of our world and by extension a more stable foundation from which to make moral and political decisions.

It is fair to say that such a Realometer is an invention of Thoreau’s imagination; you aren’t going to be able to pick one up at the local hardware store anytime soon. But such whimsicality hardly discredits the passage and indeed is precisely what accounts for its unusual power. The very real problems addressed here are obviously not easily resolved: the need to distinguish truth from falsehood, genuine knowledge from persuasive rhetoric or what has more recently been called “manufactured consent.” The perfect absurdity of the image of a Realometer serves itself as a kind of figurative Realometer, reminding readers, as it has from Thoreau’s day to our own, of what it would mean to be able to make such measurements, while at the same time suggesting that such measurements can only be a function of a vigorous, determined, even playful imagination. Deliberation, it turns out, is also a kind of measuring, being rooted in an etymology that traces back to the Latin de libra, the scale best known today from the astrological sign Libra. Thoreau, as attentive to the roots of words as he was to the roots of plants, would surely have known this when he claimed to want to live his life deliberately. As a professional surveyor, he knew the value of weights and measures and the knowledge they impart, of the close inspection and careful demarcation of the physical conditions of things; as a writer, he searched constantly for ways to connect material and mechanical processes to the deeper psychological and moral purposes of a life lived deliberately. The Realometer is another Thoreauvian extravagance, promising a solid foundation and yet doing so in a language and style that already exceed any imagined ground of stability.

Thoreau is everywhere extravagant in this way. It is the hallmark of his style. The simplicity and earnestness of his self-presentation are everywhere compromised, though some might also say given richness and depth, by the always strategic sense with which he develops his material. In effect, Thoreau uses extravagance as a means to deliver a shock to the reader’s system, hoping ultimately to jolt his reader into some kind of action. His position is really very simple: Americans are suffering a kind of moral and spiritual depression, brought on by new and increasingly pervasive social and economic conditions that undermine individuals’ sense of material and moral agency. These conditions require individuals to sacrifice their creativity and individuality in order to keep the social and economic mechanisms operating smoothly. The early chapters of Walden—much of the material that made up his popular lecture “Economy”—are filled with examples of how men and women are driven by trivial social expectations, and how these ultimately leave them alienated from their surroundings. The movement to Walden was intended to “simplify” Thoreau’s own living conditions and so to free him from all such externally imposed designs and expectations.

In the end, of course, nobody is ever entirely free of these designs and expectations. James Russell Lowell was right when he noted that “Thoreau’s experiment presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured” (Lowell, p. 380). But he utterly missed the point that sometimes individuals need to position themselves on the margins of social institutions in order to promote their transformation. Thoreau simply refused to be complacent about his relationship to the social environment that formed and supported him. He hoped that his reflections on his Walden experience, like his account of his night in jail, would help bring a new spirit of freedom and possibility to American social and political life. In this sense, for all the apparent isolation of the hero of Walden, and for all the apparent advocacy of such radically independent experience, Thoreau’s aims in Walden are always social. His is the constant reminder, so central to a democratic society where consensus necessarily rules the day, that individuals have an obligation to challenge the status quo when that status quo diminishes their lives and the lives of others. In Walden, Thoreau uses his retreat to the woods as a way of framing a reflection on both what ails men and women in their contemporary condition and what might provide relief. It cannot be said that the book resolves these issues, especially since so many of the social and psychological problems Thoreau addresses remain unresolved in the early twenty-first century. But Thoreau did as much as anyone to define the problem for Americans and to insist on the ultimate value of every individual’s vigorous and creative agency, even in the face of persistent dehumanization and despair.