thoreau collected essays and poems

Henry David Thoreau : Collected Essays & Poems

“Seldom does a single book contain so much wisdom. The 27 essays collected here include such seminal works as ‘Civil Disobedience,’ ‘Walking,’ ‘Slavery in Massachusetts,’ ‘Wild Apples,’ and ‘Life Without Principle.’ All are testaments to Thoreau’s continuing influence on our lives and our thoughts.”— The Dallas Morning News

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Henry David Thoreau : Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America)

by Thoreau, Henry David

About the book

America’s greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international renown, Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. The Library of America now brings together these indispensable works in one authoritative volume. Spanning his entire career, the twenty-seven essays gathered here chart the range of Thoreau’s interests and the evolution of his thinking, particularly on nature and politics. They vary in style from the ambling rhythm of “Natural History of Massachusetts” and “A Winter Walk” to the concentrated moral outrage of “Slavery in Massachusetts” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Included are “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau’s great exploration of the conflict between individual conscience and state power that continues to influence political thinkers and activists; “Walking,” a meditation on “wildness” and civilization; and “Life Without Principle,” a passionate critique of American materialism and conformity. Also here are literary essays, including pieces on Homer, Chaucer, and Carlyle; the travel essay “A Yankee in Canada”; speeches in defense of John Brown; and works on natural history written during the last years of Thoreau’s life, such as “The Succession of Forest Trees,” “Wild Apples,” and “Huckleberries.” Many of the poems are presented here in versions based on Thoreau’s journal and manuscripts. Poems he excerpted for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden appear in their entirety. Included are “Sic Vita,” with Thoreau’s searching characterization of himself as “a parcel of vain strivings,” and the visionary “Inspiration.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Corpus ID: 152612247

Collected essays and poems

Published 2001
History, Environmental Science

46 Citations

“might be going to have lived”: the west in the subjunctive mood, literature, ethics, morality: american studies perspectives, the work of friendship in nineteenth-century american friendship album verses, alienation revisited, herman melville and the politics of the inhuman, singing oneself or living deliberately: whitman and thoreau on individuality and democracy, the slaveries of sex, race, and mind:, toward a genealogy of americanist expressionism, extermination and democracy: o'sullivan, the democratic review, and empire, 1837-1840, stuttering conviction: commitment and hesitation in william james’ oration to robert gould shaw, related papers.

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Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau is recognized as an important contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement known as New England transcendentalism. His essays, books, and poems weave together two central themes over the course of his intellectual career: nature and the conduct of life. The continuing importance of these two themes is well illustrated by the fact that the last two essays Thoreau published during his lifetime were “The Last Days of John Brown” and “The Succession of Forest Trees” (both in 1860). In his moral and political work Thoreau aligned himself with the post-Socratic schools of Greek philosophy—in particular, the Cynics and Stoics—that used philosophy as a means of addressing ordinary human experience. His naturalistic writing integrated straightforward observation and cataloguing with transcendentalist interpretations of nature and the wilderness. In many of his works Thoreau brought these interpretations of nature to bear on how people live or ought to live.

Thoreau’s importance as a philosophical writer was little appreciated during his lifetime, but his two most noted works, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and “Civil Disobedience” (1849), gradually developed a following, and by the latter half of the 20th century, had become classic texts in American thought. Not only have these texts been used widely to address issues in political philosophy, moral theory, and, more recently, environmentalism, but they have also been of central importance to those who see philosophy as an engagement with ordinary experience and not as an abstract deductive exercise. In this vein, Thoreau’s work has been recognized as having foreshadowed central insights of later philosophical movements such as existentialism and pragmatism.

Toward the end of his life Thoreau’s naturalistic interests took a more scientific turn; he pursued a close examination of local fauna and kept detailed records of his observations. Nevertheless, he kept one eye on the moral and political developments of his time, often expressing his positions with rhetorical fire as in his “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1860). He achieved an elegant integration of his naturalism and his moral interests in several late essays that were published posthumously, among them “Walking” and “Wild Apples” (both in 1862).

David Henry Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. He had two older siblings, Helen and John, and a younger sister, Sophia. The family moved to Chelmsford in 1818, to Boston in 1821, and back to Concord in 1823. Thoreau had two educations in Concord. The first occurred through his explorations of the local environment, which were encouraged by his mother’s interest in nature. The second was his preparation at Concord Academy for study at Harvard University. He entered Harvard in 1833 and graduated in 1837. The year he graduated he began the journal that was a primary source for his lectures and published work throughout his life. At this time, too, he inverted his names and began to refer to himself as Henry David.

Thoreau’s working life began with a teaching job at Concord Center School that lasted only a few weeks because he was unwilling to use corporal punishment on his students. He and his brother, John, ran their own school from 1838 to 1841; their teaching techniques foreshadowed the pragmatic educational philosophy of John Dewey. During these years Thoreau developed a close relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson , who served as his friend and mentor. Traces of Emerson’s philosophical influence appear in all of Thoreau’s writings, even after their friendship cooled.

In 1839 Thoreau met Ellen Sewall, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. At least partly on her father’s advice, she rejected Thoreau’s proposal of marriage. Thoreau’s writing career was launched the following year when he began publishing essays and poems in Emerson and Margaret Fuller ’s new journal, The Dial , which became the home of much transcendentalist writing. In July 1842 Thoreau published in The Dial “Natural History of Massachusetts,” which established the basic direction and style of his naturalistic writings. The essay displays both his scientific interest and his transcendentalist vision of the meanings to be found in human encounters with nature. In two essays published in 1843, “A Winter Walk” and “A Walk to Wachusett,” Thoreau develops his naturalistic writing in the direction it later took in Walden . Although these early essays can be read as somewhat romantic literary descriptions, Thoreau has already begun to inject a philosophical edge into his writings. Walking becomes a metaphor for various other features of human existence. Also, nature’s presence is not merely accepted passively; Thoreau focuses on its agency as an analogue and inspiration for human agency. Like other transcendentalists, he was an idealist and believed divinity to be immanent in nature. This indwelling of the divine, he thought, allows nature to serve as a vehicle for human insight. Consequently, the central issue at stake in many of his early nature essays is the awakening of humans to their own powers and possibilities through encounters with nature.

Thoreau worked off and on at his father’s pencil-making business, and in 1843 he served for a short time as tutor for Emerson’s brother Edward’s children on Staten Island, New York. Then, in 1845, he built a small cabin near Walden Pond on land that Ralph Waldo Emerson had purchased to preserve its beauty. During his two-year stay at the pond Thoreau completed the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); it was based on a trip he had taken with his brother, John, in 1839 and was intended as a memorial to John, who had died of tetanus in 1842. Thoreau also, of course, had the experiences that became the basis for Walden , and he began writing this work while he was still living at the pond. Also during his sojourn at Walden Pond, Thoreau spent a night in jail for not having paid his poll tax in protest of slavery. This episode laid the foundation for “Civil Disobedience.”

After leaving Walden, Thoreau spent a year living in Emerson’s home, helping with handiwork and the children while Emerson was lecturing in Europe. In January 1848 he gave a two-part lecture at the Concord Lyceum titled “The Relation of the Individual to the State.” The lecture was published in revised form as “Resistance to Civil Government” in Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers in May 1849. Later retitled “Civil Disobedience,” it became his best-known and most influential essay.

In “Resistance to Civil Government” Thoreau works out his conception of the self-reliant individual’s relationship to the state. The essay begins with an idealistic transcendentalist hope for a government “which governs not at all.” But it quickly takes a practical turn, asking what one can do—and what one ought to do—when the state acts in a systematically immoral way. Thoreau’s immediate target is state-supported slavery in the United States. He chides his fellow citizens for directly and indirectly enabling slavery to continue in the Southern states, and he suggests that they find ways to act in resistance to the government on this score. He offers as one example of resistance the route that he and others had already taken of not paying taxes that might be used to sustain slavery. He also argues that economic support for slave states should be abandoned, even if it hurt commerce in the North. His suggestion that one can resist a government without resorting to violence gave the essay its notoriety; Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. cited it as an influence on their own acts of resistance. Thoreau’s argument in “Civil Disobedience” is sometimes read as a libertarian tract, like Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (1841). From this point of view it is considered a defense of rugged individualism, if not anarchy. But such interpretations miss the central transcendentalism of the piece. What both Thoreau and Emerson require is a careful turning to one’s moral intuition, or conscience, as a guide when confronted by issues of major consequence. The aim is not to be left alone by the state to do as one pleases but to get the state, as well as oneself, to act in concert with human and divine conscience. In the same year “Resistance to Civil Government” appeared, Thoreau published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Thoreau attempts in the work to bring together his observations of nature with his commentary on human existence, but the book lacks the integrity of his best essays as the transcendentalist commentary remains separate and abstracted from the sections of narrative description. The commercial failure of the book undoubtedly helped Thoreau in his preparation of Walden . After the cool reception of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , Thoreau traveled to Maine, Cape Cod, New Hampshire, and Canada. His excursions provided the material for future writing projects. He also continued to revise Walden ; it appeared in 1854, the second and last book Thoreau published during his lifetime. Walden is unquestionably Thoreau’s major work. He condenses the two years he had actually spent in the cabin into a single year, and, beginning with summer, takes the reader through the seasons at the pond. The central theme of the book is the cultivation of the self. Thoreau has in mind a specific audience: those who have become disenchanted with their everyday lives, “the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times.” His aim is not to have others imitate his move to Walden but to have them consider their own possibilities for improving their situations, for overcoming their “lives of quiet desperation.” To this extent the book is like a Stoic treatise on life. It is, however, replete with irony, humor, and a philosophical and literary integrity that make it much more than a straightforward enchiridion.

To bring readers to their own awakenings, Thoreau first raises the question of a life’s economy. He experiments with living “deliberately,” paying attention to what he owns and what owns him, as well as to how he spends his time. An explicit anti-materialism underwrites much of the first two chapters. Thoreau does not dogmatically endorse an economic minimalism, however; the experiment in poverty is an attempt to find out what is important in a life—it is, in other words, a way of testing one’s life. The post-Socratic theme is that simplifying one’s life frees one to see more clearly. One will better perceive the world around one, will see what constrains one’s life, and, most important, will be freer to explore one’s inner self for divine insight. Because Thoreau sees himself as having been engaged in an experiment in living, leaving Walden is not a problem for or a contradiction of his philosophical outlook. When the experiment comes to an end, he looks forward without concern: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.”

Thoreau seeks in Walden and many of his other writings to effect an awakening in a variety of ways. Nature plays a central role in most of these writings. On the one hand, it serves as a mirror and metaphor of human existence. It reflects the way one lives and provides exemplars of how one might live. In chapters such as “Brute Neighbors,” “Sounds,” and “Solitude,” Thoreau asks his reader to attend to what is immediately present in nature: the actions of birds and chipmunks, the sounds of night and morning, silences both inner and outer. The effect is twofold: the reader learns from this attentiveness what he or she has not before perceived, and, more important, in the process Thoreau slows down the reader’s world so that he or she might understand what it would be like to undertake his or her own experiment in attentiveness.

Nature also provides a metaphor for human growth. As many commentators have pointed out, the seasons of the text reveal the continuing possibilities for self-cultivation; one need not accept any routinized existence as final. Moreover, throughout the work Thoreau treats the reader to shifting focuses on morning, afternoon, and evening, revealing the possibilities of organic development even in short spans of existence. In attending to nature’s inner energies for self-recovery, one begins to notice one’s own possibilities for the same. This notion is good transcendentalist doctrine: nature is a vehicle for and catalyst of self-reliance. It is a source of intuitions of “higher laws.”

Finally, in a more practical vein, nature as wilderness provides an extreme against which one may measure one’s own aliveness. Thoreau sees his time at Walden as a “border” life between the numbing overcivilization of the town and a freer existence in the wilderness. The border life, he suggests, is fruitful precisely because it allows one to grow, to participate in the re-civilizing of one’s own life. As in his earlier essays, he focuses on championing human agency and creativity. This theme of the wilderness becomes even more explicit in later essays.

In philosophical terms—terms that Thoreau did not himself use—Thoreau’s transcendentalism is fundamentally idealistic, with “higher laws” serving as the measure of human endeavors. But it is at the same time a philosophy of nature, though not a reductive naturalism. For Thoreau, Emerson’s self-reliance needs nature’s inspiration, example, and effects. To undertake the task of self-cultivation one must, as Thoreau sees it, work with and through nature. Thoreau’s focus on nature brings him closer than most of his transcendentalist colleagues to the later philosophy of pragmatism. His idealism is not the remote operation of mind in the world but the working of higher laws into one’s own private thoughts and public practices. This position is his generic answer to lives of quiet desperation.

The return of the runaway Anthony Burns to slavery by the state of Massachusetts under the federal Fugitive Slave Law pushed Thoreau to take an even stronger stance than he had in “Civil Disobedience.” He expanded his ideas from that essay into “Slavery in Massachusetts,” which appeared in the abolitionist magazine The Liberator the same year Walden was published. His attack is now not merely on slavery in general but on his own state’s complicity with an immoral law. Thoreau retains his transcendentalist plea that one trust one’s inner conscience to judge the state’s actions, but he moves much closer to advocating the destruction of a state that engages in practices such as slavery. Though he does not openly propose violent action, he seems more amenable to it than he had in “Civil Disobedience.”

“Slavery in Massachusetts” was followed by three essays on the radical abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau presented the first, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Concord on October 30, 1859, after Brown’s raid on the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia). It is primarily offered as a response to the negative press that Brown received for his efforts. The argument behind the defense of Brown is, however, clearly transcendentalist. Thoreau lauds Brown as a man of principle, as one who resisted his government’s institution of slavery as a matter of conscience; he represents what Thoreau called “a majority of one” in “Civil Disobedience.” In “Martyrdom of John Brown” and “The Last Days of John Brown,” written for separate memorial services for Brown held on December 2, 1859, the day Brown was hanged, Thoreau develops his portrayal of Brown as a self-reliant man of principle. These essays exemplify Thoreau’s perennial claim that a philosopher is not merely a schoolteacher, a professor, a scholar, or a minister but an agent for practical good. In this respect Thoreau again foreshadows pragmatic philosophy, especially the political and social involvement of Dewey. This feature of Thoreau’s outlook needs to be emphasized, because many readers of Walden and Thoreau’s nature essays are tempted to see him as a recluse.

Thoreau’s nature study became more scientifically serious and less transcendentalist in his later works. “The Succession of Forest Trees,” which he delivered as a lecture to the Middlesex Agricultural Society on September 20, 1860 and published in the New York Weekly Tribune , marks this turn in Thoreau’s career. Like many others, he had purchased and read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life when it was published in 1859. This book, together with other readings in forestry and natural history, provided the basis for the new studies. “The Succession of Forest Trees” still bears the mark of Thoreau’s character; it is written with the usual irony and humor. Nevertheless, it deals seriously with seed dispersal and the growth of Northeastern forests. Its systematic philosophical import is to be found in Thoreau’s continued emphasis on a cosmos of growth, cultivation, and change. Nature again establishes the basis by which human beings must gauge their own lives.

During much of the last third of his life Thoreau earned his living by helping in the family business and by working as a surveyor. His surveying provided ample opportunity to continue his studies of nature. But these years were marred by recurring bouts of tuberculosis, a disease common to the time and to Thoreau’s family. In 1861 Thoreau suffered a difficult bout with the disease, and it was suggested that he travel as a treatment. He went west to Minnesota by boat and train. He returned home as sick as when he left.

By early 1862 Thoreau seemed to know that he was dying. He continued to work on his scientific studies, but with the help of his sister Sophia he also prepared several essays for publication in The Atlantic Monthly . They are among the best of his writings, and because they had been given as talks in the 1850s, they display a mature version of his transcendentalism. They include “Life without Principle,” “Walking,” and “Wild Apples,” all of which were published posthumously. In each, the self is treated as an agent in transition seeking ways to cultivate itself and learning to grow. There is no fixed Cartesian ego, only a questing “Walker, Errant,” as he puts it in “Walking.” The quest is itself motivated by a hope of discovering “higher laws” and of learning to live through them, of finding a practical wisdom. In “Life without Principle” Thoreau considers the Gold Rush and remarks that “a grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.”

In these late essays the themes of Walden return, but they are now expressed with the strength and poetic insight of a man facing death. Thoreau again focuses on how people might remain awake and alive when their daily “business” so often leads them toward sleep and living death—toward lives of quiet desperation. In each of the essays nature resides in the background as a measure of what humans do. Thoreau’s transcendentalist idealism is ever present, though seldom stated. The world is a world of truth and moral force; the individual’s task is to awaken to that truth and bring it to bear on people’s lives. This life of principle might be found in the moral energy of a John Brown, in the poetic insight of a Ralph Waldo Emerson, or in the living of a simple if unnoticed life. For Thoreau, any of these might be a philosophical life in his sense; philosophy, for him, is not a project of reclusive understanding and scholarship. His anti-materialism, his focus on nature’s wildness, his emphasis on transition and the novelty of each day and season are all instrumental in bringing people to themselves and in finding ways to live sincere lives. As he states in “Life without Principle,” there is no “such thing as wisdom not applied to life.”

That Thoreau took his own philosophical journey seriously was exemplified several days before he died. An old friend, knowing that Thoreau was close to death, asked if he had any sense of what was to come. Thoreau’s famous reply was, “One world at a time.” He died on May 6, 1862.

Thoreau was a philosophical provocateur. He had a sense of philosophical system derived from the transcendentalist movement and its various German and British influences. But he was neither an analytic philosopher nor an idealist system builder. He saw the practical import of the transcendentalist movement and staked his claim there. He was a harbinger of the social, political, and poetical dimensions of American pragmatism, and his work did, indeed, become practically useful in the 20th century. The influence of “Civil Disobedience” on Gandhi and King are the most notable instances, but they are not the only ones. Selective reading of Walden and of various of the nature essays has identified a dimension of Thoreau’s thinking that helps underwrite environmentalism; for Thoreau the importance of wilderness was both metaphorical and actual. Moreover, in his responses to overreliance on technology and wealth as cures for the human condition, one sees hints of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and other existentialists. Thoreau’s place in American philosophy is only now being given serious consideration; it seems likely that his influence will continue to flourish.

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Bibliography

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Bernadette Mayer writes through the pandemic.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston & Cambridge: James Munroe, 1849; London: Walter Scott, 1889).
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854); republished as Walden (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1862; Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884).
Excursions (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863).
The Maine Woods (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864).
Cape Cod (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1865; London: Sampson Low, 1865).
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866).
Early Spring in Massachusetts , edited by H. G. O. Blake (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1881).
Summer: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau , edited by Blake (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884; London: Unwin, 1884).
Winter: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau , edited by Blake (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888).
Autumn: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau , edited by Blake (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892).
Miscellanies (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894).
Poems of Nature , edited by H. S. Salt and F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin / London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1895).
The Service , edited by Sanborn (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902).
The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau , 2 volumes, edited by Sanborn (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1905).
Sir Walter Raleigh (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1905).
Journal , edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, volumes 7-20 of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906); republished as The Journals of Henry David Thoreau , 2 volumes (New York: Dover, 1962).
The Moon (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).
The Transmigration of the Seven Brahmas (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1931).
Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau , edited by Carl Bode (Chicago: Packard, 1943; enlarged edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964).
Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto "Lost Journal" (1840-1841) , edited by Perry Miller (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
Thoreau's Literary Notebooks in the Library of Congress , edited by Kenneth Walter Cameron (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1964).
Thoreau's Fact Book in the Harry Elkins Widener Collection in the Harvard College Library , 3 volumes, edited by Kenneth Walter Cameron (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1966-1987).
Huckleberries , edited by Leo Stoller (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1970).
Reform Papers , edited by Wendell Glick, volume 3 of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks , edited by Richard F. Fleck (Albuquerque, N.M.: Hummingbird Press, 1974).
Early Essays and Miscellanies , edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander Kern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Natural History Essays , edited by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1980).
Translations , edited by K. P. van Anglen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings , edited by Bradley P. Dean (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).
Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript , edited by Bradley P. Dean (New York: Norton, 1999).

Editions and Collections

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau , Riverside Edition, 10 volumes, edited by H. D. Blake, F. B. Sanborn, and Horace Scudder (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894).
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau , Manuscript Edition, 20 volumes, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906).
The Variorum Walden , edited by Walter Harding (New York: Twayne, 1962; revised edition, New York: Washington Square Press, 1963).
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau , new edition, 12 volumes to date, edited by Walter Harding and others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971- ).
"A Plea for Captain John Brown," in Echoes of Harper's Ferry , edited by James Redpath (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), pp. 17-42.
Letters to Various Persons (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1865).
Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau , edited by F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894).
The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau , edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York: New York University Press, 1958).

" Henry David Thoreau's manuscripts, arranged in meticulous order at his death, were in the following decades widely dispersed. For details, see William Howarth, The Literary Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974). Various manuscript versions of Walden and other manuscripts, letters, poems, and journal materials are housed at the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the largest collection of letters is housed at the Berg Collection and Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library; many letters and some essay drafts are held in Harvard University 's Houghton Library; most of Thoreau's journals, as well as his Indian and Canadian notebooks, are housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Other important collections are the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois; the Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts; the John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library at the University of Texas, Austin; the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and the Abernathy Library at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont.

Henry David Thoreau online

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All Things Are Current Found »
Away! Away! Away! Away! »
Conscience »
Epitaph On The World »
Free Love »
Friendship »
I Am A Parcel Of Vain Striving Tied »
I Am The Autumnal Sun »
I Knew A Man By Sight »
Indeed, indeed, I cannot tell »
Inspiration »
Let such pure hate still underprop »
Low Anchored Cloud Mist »
Pray to What Earth »
Rumors from an Aeolian Harp »
The Inward Morning »
The Poets Delay »
The Summer Rain »
They Who Prepare my Evening Meal Below »
Though All the Fates »
Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life »

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Walden, the Maine woods, and collected essays & poems

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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817– May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and “Yankee” love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"—the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: “'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Richard T. Drinnon reproaches Thoreau for his ambiguity when writing on governance, noting that Thoreau’s “sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience’.”

Name pronunciation and physical appearance

Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau’s aunt each wrote that “Thoreau” is pronounced like the word “thorough” (pronounced THUR-oh—/ˈθʌroʊ/—in General American, but more precisely THOR-oh—/ˈθɔːroʊ/—in 19th-century New England). Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced “Thó-row”, with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable. Among modern-day American speakers, it is perhaps more commonly pronounced thə-ROH—/θəˈroʊ/—with stress on the second syllable.

In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called “my most prominent feature.” Of his face and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote: “His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings.”

Early life and education, 1817–1836

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the “modest New England family” of John Thoreau (a pencil maker) and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was born in Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard’s 1766 student “Butter Rebellion”, the first recorded student protest in the Colonies. David Henry was named after a recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become “Henry David” until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. Thoreau’s birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord. The house has recently been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public.

He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club). A legend proposes that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master’s degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates “who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.” His comment was: “Let every sheep keep its own skin”, a reference to the tradition of diplomas being written on sheepskin vellum.

Return to Concord, 1836–1842

The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—failed to interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838 called Concord Academy. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in his brother Henry’s arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay published there was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the playwright of the same name, published in The Dial in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson’s suggestion. The first journal entry on October 22, 1837, reads, “'What are you doing now?' he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the “radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts”, as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house. There, from 1841–1844, he served as the children’s tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, and tutored the family sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family’s pencil factory, which he continued to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire and bought in 1821 by relative Charles Dunbar. (The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, was patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795). His other source had been Tantiusques, an Indian operated mine in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), which was used in the electrotyping process.

Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres (1.2 km2) of Walden Woods.

Civil Disobedience and the Walden years, 1845–1849

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau needed to concentrate and get himself working more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in “a pretty pasture and woodlot” of 14 acres (57,000 m2) that Emerson had bought, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home.

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely his aunt, paid the tax against his wishes. The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government” explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:

Heard Thoreau’s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State– an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley’s principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819), that Shelley begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time—and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold. Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson’s own publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in “Ktaadn”, the first part of The Maine Woods.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson’s request, he immediately moved back into the Emerson house to help Lidian manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, “In one book... he surpasses everything we have had in America.”

American author John Updike said of the book: “A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”

Thoreau moved out of Emerson’s house in July 1848 and stayed at a home on Belknap Street nearby. In 1850, he and his family moved into a home at 255 Main Street; he stayed there until his death.

Later years, 1851–1862

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord’s nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to “anticipate” the seasons of nature, in his words.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 square miles (67 km2) town in his journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau’s late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

Until the 1970s, literary critics dismissed Thoreau’s late pursuits as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, “The Succession of Forest Trees”, shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.

He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his “excursion” books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. Although provincial in his physical travels, he was extraordinarily well-read. He obsessively devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook, the arctic explorers Franklin, Mackenzie and Parry, David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa, Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of global reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world, and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to “live at home like a traveler.”

After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a speech—A Plea for Captain John Brown—which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau’s speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown’s praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: “If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact.”

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1859, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

Aware he was dying, Thoreau’s last words were “Now comes good sailing”, followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian”. He died on May 6, 1862 at age 44. Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau’s works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (N42° 27' 53.7" W71° 20' 33") in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau’s journals, which he often mined for his published works but which remained largely unpublished at his death, were first published in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new, expanded edition of the journals is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society and his legacy honored by the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, established in 1998 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Nature and human existence

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden: “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.”

Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitration between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of North American humanity. He decried the latter endlessly but felt the teachers need to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred “partially cultivated country.” His idea of being “far in the recesses of the wilderness” of Maine was to “travel the logger’s path and the Indian trail”, but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay “Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher” Roderick Nash writes: "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance." On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: “I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?”

Thoreau strove to portray himself as an ascetic puritan. However, his sexuality has long been the subject of speculation, including by his contemporaries. Critics have called him heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual. There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone, man or woman. Some scholars suggest that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings, and conclude that he was homosexual. The elegy Sympathy was inspired by the eleven-year-old Edmund Sewell, with whom he hiked for five days in 1839. One scholar has suggested that he wrote the poem to Edmund because he could not bring himself to write it to Edmund’s sister, and another that Thoreau’s “emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns”, but other scholars dismiss this. It has argued that the long paean in Walden to the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, is an expression of conflicted desire. In some of Thoreau’s writing there is the sense of a secret self. In 1840 he writes in his journal: “My friend is the apology for my life. In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses”. Thoreau was strongly influenced by the moral reformers of his time, and this may have instilled anxiety and guilt over sexual desire.

Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement. He participated in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition with the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party. Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown’s execution, Thoreau regularly delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown’s execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:

“Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

In The Last Days of John Brown, Thoreau described the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism. In addition, he lamented the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown and his scheme as “crazy”.

Thoreau was a proponent of limited government and individualism. Although he was hopeful that mankind could potentially have, through self-betterment, the kind of government which “governs not at all”, he distanced himself from contemporary “no-government men” (anarchists), writing: “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as “a progress toward true respect for the individual” and theorized about further improvements “towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man.” Echoing this belief, he went on to write: “There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

Although Thoreau believed resistance to unjustly exercised authority could be both violent (exemplified in his support for John Brown) and nonviolent (his own example of tax resistance displayed in Resistance to Civil Government), he regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity, writing: “Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp.” Furthermore, in a formal lyceum debate in 1841, he debated the subject “Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?”, arguing the affirmative.

Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico “unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army” as a means to expand the slave territory.

Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as “unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied” and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing:

I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer.

On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system:

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.

Thoreau also favored bioregionalism, the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.

Intellectual interests, influences, and affinities

Indian sacred texts and philosophy.

Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In Walden, there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. For example, in the first chapter ("Economy"), he writes: “How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!” American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world”, also a characteristic of Hinduism.

Furthermore, in “The Pond in Winter”, he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river, writing:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahmaand Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

Additionally, Thoreau followed various Hindu customs, including following a diet of rice ("It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India."), flute playing (reminiscent of the favorite musical pastime of Krishna), and yoga.

In an 1849 letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, he wrote about yoga and its meaning to him:

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works. Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.

Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology, including the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray (Charles Darwin’s staunchest American ally). Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt, especially his work Kosmos.

In 1859, Thoreau purchased and read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature, Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it, stating:

The development theory implies a greater vital force in Nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation. (A quote from On the Origin of Species follows this sentence.)

“Thoreau’s careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time, becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced... Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. Today, Thoreau’s words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.”

Thoreau’s political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as "his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical, viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including Civil Disobedience. The only two complete books (as opposed to essays) published in his lifetime, Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he loved to wander." His obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s writings went on to influence many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mohandas Gandhi, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau’s work, particularly Civil Disobedience, as did "right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov [who] devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau.”

Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, E. B. White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey and Gustav Stickley. Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower and Loren Eiseley, whom Publishers Weekly called “the modern Thoreau.” English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau’s ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt’s advocacy. Mohandas Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first read Civil Disobedience “while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal. The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau’s argument, calling its 'incisive logic... unanswerable’ and referring to Thoreau as 'one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced’.” He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau’s] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau’s essay ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,’ written about 80 years ago.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading “On Civil Disobedience” in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was, “Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.”

American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau’s Walden with him in his youth. and, in 1945, wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau. Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau’s instrument) is a character picture and he also set Thoreau’s words.

In the early 1960s Allan Sherman referred to Thoreau in his song parody “Here’s To Crabgrass” about the suburban housing boom of that era with the line “Come let us go there and live like Thoreau there.”

Actor Ron Thompson did a dramatic portrayal of Henry David Thoreau on the 1976 NBC television series The Rebels.

Thoreau’s ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as “the greatest American anarchist.” Green anarchism and Anarcho-primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points-of-view from the writings of Thoreau. John Zerzan included Thoreau’s text “Excursions” (1863) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled Against civilization: Readings and reflections. Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the “great intellectual heroes” of his movement. Thoreau was also an important influence on late-19th-century anarchist naturism. Globally, Thoreau’s concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, and Portugal.

Although his writings would receive widespread acclaim, Thoreau’s ideas were not universally applauded. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau’s endorsement of living alone and apart from modern society in natural simplicity to be a mark of “unmanly” effeminacy and “womanish solitude”, while deeming him a self-indulgent “skulker.” Nathaniel Hawthorne was also critical of Thoreau, writing that he “repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men.” In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the “wicked” and “heathenish” message of Walden, claiming that Thoreau wanted man to “lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs.”

In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:

People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man’s life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.

Thoreau himself also responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work “Walden” (1854), by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries:

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. [...] Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; [...] I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

Recent criticism has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy and being sanctimonious, based on his writings in Walden, although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.

Aulus Persius Flaccus (1840) The Service (1840) A Walk to Wachusett (1842) Paradise (to be) Regained (1843) The Landlord (1843) Sir Walter Raleigh (1844) Herald of Freedom (1844) Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845) Reform and the Reformers (1846–48) Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849) An Excursion to Canada (1853) Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) Walden (1854) A Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, ed., Yale University Press, 2004 A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859) The Last Days of John Brown (1860) Walking (1861) Autumnal Tints (1862) Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862) The Fall of the Leaf (1863) Excursions (1863) Life Without Principle (1863) Night and Moonlight (1863) The Highland Light (1864) The Maine Woods (1864) Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, ed., Yale University Press, 2009 Cape Cod (1865) Letters to Various Persons (1865) A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866) Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881) Summer (1884) Winter (1888) Autumn (1892) Miscellanies (1894) Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894) Poems of Nature (1895) Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898) The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905) Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906) The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958) Poets of the English Language (Viking Press, 1950) I Was Made Erect and Lone The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back (Stanyan, 1970) The Dispersion of Seeds (1993) The Indian Notebooks (1847-1861) selections by Richard F. Fleck

Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

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8+ Henry David Thoreau Poems

Henry David Thoreau is one of the most important writers of the transcendentalist movement. He wrote essays , poems, and philosophical works. His best-known work is Walden. His works are known for their close observations of nature, symbolism , and history. He published Poems of Nature in 1895.

Henry David Thoreau

I was made erect and lone.

‘I Was Made Erect and Lone’ by Henry David Thoreau is a poem about trusting in your own individual autonomy.

I was made erect and lone, And within me is the bone; Still my vision will be clear, Still my life will not be drear,

‘Friendship’ is about the love Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson had for one another. This poem describes the nature of true devotion and how two souls are tied in a bond of love, goodness, and truthfulness.

I think awhile of Love, and while I think, Love is to me a world, Sole meat and sweetest drink, And close connecting link

Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell

Thoreau’s ‘Indeed, Indeed I cannot Tell’ was written about Ellen Sewall. This piece manages to relate with almost every living human being and communicates a feeling that is familiar for many.

Indeed, indeed, I cannot tell, Though I ponder on it well, Which were easier to state, All my love or all my hate.

My life has been the poem I would have writ

‘My life has been the poem I would have writ’ is a simple two-line work, but within those two lines, contains many subtle grammar.

My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it.

‘My Prayer’ by Henry David Thoreau reflects on striving for spiritual truth while accepting human imperfection.

Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself; That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye.

Tall Ambrosia

‘Tall Ambrosia’ by Henry David Thoreau depicts the joy one can take from the natural world, specifically the field of Ambrosia.

Of those well dressed ones who no morning dew Nor Roman wormwood ever have been through, Who never walk but are transported rather— For what old crime of theirs I do not gather.

The Inward Morning

‘The Inward Morning’ by Henry David Thoreau is a complex poem that taps into many of the traditional beliefs of the transcendental poets.

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes Which outward nature wears, And in its fashion’s hourly change It all things else repairs.

‘The Thaw’ by Henry David Thoreau describes a speaker’s desire to be an integral part of an ecosystem, and his acceptance that he has to remain “silent.”

But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume, One jot to forward the great work of Time, ‘Tis mine to hearken while these ply the loom, So shall my silence with their music chime.

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In the answers which follow, full bibliographic information is given the first time a work is cited in FAQs. Subsequently, a short title is used.

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On September 6, 1847, Thoreau left the house which he himself had built and in which he had lived for two years, two months, and two days. Emerson then bought the house from Thoreau and resold it to his gardener, Hugh Whelan, who intended to convert it into a cottage for his family. Whelan's drinking problems, however, prevented him from completing the necessary modifications and the house remained empty until 1849, when it was purchased by James Clark, who then moved it across town to his own farm and used it for grain storage. The roof was removed in 1868 and used as part of a pigsty, and in 1875 the floor and remaining timbers were made into a stable shed. Later, timbers from the collapsed shed were used to patch up the Clark barn. One replica of the house has been erected across Route 126 from Walden Pond, and another was built at the Thoreau Institute in 2001. Contact the Thoreau Institute for information about visiting the reconstruction. Source: Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 222-224.

Dunshee Ambrotype

Thoreau is known to have sat for two photographers. On June 18, 1856, in response to a request by an admirer named Calvin Greene, Thoreau sat for a daguerreotype image at the Benjamin D. Maxham studio in Worcester, MA. In addition to Greene's daguerreotype, Thoreau had two other images made for friends H.G.O. Blake and Theophilus Brown. Today, Blake's copy is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library . The Greene copy is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The third image is owned by the Thoreau Society and exhibited at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, MA. In 1861 Thoreau sat for another photographic image, this time for friend Daniel Ricketson, at the establishment of E. S. Dunshee in New Bedford, MA. Two ambrotypes were made at that time, one of which is owned by the Concord Museum . The other has not surfaced since it was sold at auction in 1924. A daguerreotype which could be a sixth image of Thoreau was discovered in an antique shop in Newport, RI, in 1993. Although there are similarities between this image and those known to be of Thoreau, much research and testing remain to be done before it can be declared to be Thoreau's. All of the known likenesses of Thoreau are reproduced in "A Thoreau Iconography," by Thomas Blanding and Walter Harding, published in Studies in the American Renaissance , ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 1-35.

The most extensive time line of Thoreau's life is Ray Borst's The Thoreau Log: A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), over six hundred pages of information about day-by-day events in Thoreau's life. Shorter chronologies can be found in Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 645-656; The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau , ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xv-xvi; and The New Thoreau Handbook , ed. Walter Harding and Michael Meyer (New York: New York University Press, 1980), xiii-xv.

Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44. He had contracted a bad cold while counting tree rings in December of 1860; he died of tuberculosis. Funeral services were held in the First Parish Church in Concord, MA, and he was buried in the New Burying Ground, at the foot of Bedford Street, where his brother John, his sister Helen, and his father were also buried. Later the graves of all of the members of the immediate family, Henry's included, were moved to "Author's Ridge" in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Sources: Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 385-389, and Raymond Adams, "Thoreau's Burials," in American Literature 12 (March 1940): 105-107. Thanks to Leslie Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library for tracking down the latter reference.

runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,-- "O Christian, will you send me back?"

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the northstar. ( Walden , ed. J. Lyndon Shanley [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971], 152)

The Thoreau family home in Concord was also part of the Underground Railroad . Thoreau's mother--and all of the relatives who resided at the house--were active in the local antislavery movement. In his Journal, Thoreau gives several accounts of assisting fugitive slaves on their way north. He hid them, drove them to the train station, bought their tickets, and sometimes even accompanied them to the next station. To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, explores the history and ramifications of Thoreau's involvement in the antislavery movement.

A good place to begin is the collection of Thoreau's letters to Harrison Gray Otis Blake in Letters to a Spiritual Seeker , edited by Bradley P. Dean (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004). The New Thoreau Handbook by Walter Harding and Michael Meyer offers many insights into this topic, particularly chapter 4, "Thoreau's Ideas." Robert D. Richardson's Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , is helpful as well. Two more recent sources have addressed this issue: Alan D. Hodder's Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001) and David M. Robinson's Natural Life: Thoreau's Wordly Transcendentalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Older sources include: David Lyttle, Studies in Religion in Early American Literature: Edwards, Poe, Channing, Emerson, Some Minor Transcendentalists, Hawthorne and Thoreau (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983); Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson and Thoreau as Mythologists, or Building One's Spiritual World (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1997); Catherine Albanese, ed., The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry Thoreau (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988); Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

I thought that the sun of our love should have risen as noiselessly as the sun out of the sea, and we sailors have found ourselves steering between the tropics as if the broad day had lasted forever. You know how the sun comes up from the sea when you stand on the cliff, and does'nt startle you, but every thing, and you too are helping it. ( Journal 1 , 193).

Thoreau's daily Journal from July 1839 to November 1840 includes many entries related to his feelings of love for Ellen Sewall. Following her father's wishes, Sewall turned down Thoreau's proposal, but Harding reports that Thoreau carried her memory with him to the end. In 1862, shortly before he died, Thoreau is reported to have said to his sister, Sophia: "I have always loved her" (Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau , 104). As to whether Thoreau fell in love more than once, a good source of information is Harding's Days ; he deals with this topic in chapter 6. Harding discusses others for whom Thoreau developed great affection, including Lucy Jackson Brown and Mary Russell. Henry Seidel Canby also wrote of the Sewall episode and others in his Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 110-128. There has been speculation as to whether Thoreau was homosexual. The best discussion of this is found in Walter Harding, "Thoreau's Sexuality," in Journal of Homosexuality , 21.3 (1991): 23-45. See "Was Thoreau gay?" in these FAQs.

Yes, Thoreau did accidentally set a fire that he says burned over a hundred acres. It was on April 30, 1844; he was 26 at the time. Thoreau and Edward Hoar, son of Concord's leading lawyer and wealthiest citizen, were cooking a dinner of fish they had caught. They made their fire by the shore of Fair Haven Pond, and the surrounding grass caught and spread the fire, which was quickly out of control. For more information, see Journal 3: 1848-1851 , ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson, and William Rossi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 75-78 and Annotation 75.16-78.19; see also Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau , 159-162. Thoreau's description in Walden of the inhabitants of Concord following the fire bell owes something to his Journal account of his own experience ( Walden , 93).

If you go to Concord today, you can hear people pronounce Thoreau's name as he and his family almost certainly did--they put the accent on the first syllable, and the "o" is short, so it sounds like "thorough." The current pronunciation in Thoreau's hometown is significant: the community has remained essentially residential since Thoreau's time, and the longtime residents are likely to have learned their pronunciation from those who learned it from those who knew the family. Another piece of evidence is the fact that one of Thoreau's correspondents, Daniel Ricketson, sometimes addressed him in letters as "Mr. Thorough" or "Mr. Thoroughly Good," apparently playing on the pronunciation as an indication of character.

Thoreau was quite fluent in French and Latin, and read them almost as easily as he read English. He also read Greek, German, Italian, and Spanish. The level of his ability in speaking these languages is not known. Source: F. B. Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917), 260.

According to Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau , Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that most of the branches of learning were taught at Harvard, to which Thoreau replied: "Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots" (51).

In an April 10, 1856, Journal entry, Thoreau refers to ball games played on the fields around Concord:

Fast day-- Some fields are dried sufficiently for the games of ball--with which this season is commonly ushered in. I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of base-ball played over behind the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow where the snow was just melted & dried up.--& also with the uncertainty I always experienced whether the shops would be shut--whether we should have an ordinary dinner an extraordinary one--or none at all--and whether there would be more than one service at the meeting house--this last uncertainty old folks share with me.-- This is a windy day drying up the fields--the first we have had for a long time

Whether the ball game that Thoreau remembers is what is today called "baseball" is a point open to debate. Thanks to Timothy Trask (Brockton, MA) and Donald Ross (Univ. of Minnesota)

Yes . . . and no. Thoreau was christened "David Henry" on October 12, 1817, three months after his birth on July 12. Between his birth and christening, his paternal uncle David died, and the newest member of the family was named after him. Thoreau reversed the order of his names after graduating from Harvard in 1837. Although he never filed the legal petitions to make the change formal, he persisted in signing himself "Henry David" until his death--often to the amusement of his neighbors. Source: Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau , 11, 54.

Thoreau's sexuality has long been a subject of speculation; even his contemporaries commented on his apparent lack of interest in conventional romance. The most exhaustive examination of the evidence on both sides of this question is Walter Harding's article, "Thoreau's Sexuality," published in the Journal of Homosexuality , 21.3 (1991): 23-45. Basing his conclusions mostly on evidence from Thoreau's Journal, Harding suggests that Thoreau's affectional orientation was probably homosexual, though there is no evidence that he was physically intimate with either men or women. Although Thoreau proposed marriage to one woman (and was proposed to by another), Harding concludes that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that he had a fundamental attraction to other men, an attraction sublimated through his writing and his passion for nature.

Thoreau's first job after graduating from Harvard was as a teacher in the Concord Center School. After two weeks, a visiting member of the school committee questioned his standard of discipline and recommended corporal punishment; Thoreau arbitrarily chose several students and feruled them, and later that day he resigned his position. For almost a year he worked in the family pencil factory while he looked for another teaching position. In September 1838 he began his own school, the Concord Academy; by the end of the first term, he had enough pupils to hire another teacher, and his brother John left his teaching job in Roxbury and joined Henry. The Concord Academy closed in April 1841 due to John's failing health, and Thoreau lived in the Emerson household for two years, exchanging room and board for work in the garden and around the house. In 1843, Thoreau spent several months on Staten Island, tutoring William Emerson's oldest son and trying, with little success, to make connections with New York publishers. He returned to his family and to the pencil factory, and contributed several innovations. The business changed focus in the early 1850s to supply finely ground graphite in quantity for electrotyping, a printing process that had emerged in 1849. After their father's death on February 3, 1859, Thoreau and his sister Sophia assumed control of the enterprise. In the early 1850s, Thoreau's skill as a land surveyor became widely known and surveying became another important source of income for him. In addition, he saw surveying as an opportunity to pursue his real interest: observing the natural world around him. Describing his sighting of a brown thrasher while surveying, he writes in the Journal: "Surveying seemed a noble employment which brought me within hearing of this bird" (April 30, 1856). Thoreau published two books in his lifetime and gave a number of lectures, but he did not earn enough from these activities to support himself. In 1847, Thoreau responded to a questionnaire from the secretary of his Harvard class with this description of his pursuits: "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" ( The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau , ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode [New York: New York University Press, 1958], 186). Source: Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau.

Revised July 2017

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Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau Paperback – April 1, 2010

Ralph Waldo Emerson once described Henry Thoreau's poetry as "the purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest." Not always thus esteemed, Thoreau's verses were by no means ignored. Bronson Alcott applauded them; James Russell Lowell asserted their rawness; Nathaniel Hawthorne grudgingly approved them. As author of Walden and Civil Disobedience, Thoreau the writer of prose is world-renowned, but Thoreau the poet has been all but forgotten.

This collection has all of Thoreau’s original verse―the glowing lines and the quiet, the prosaic and the Transcendental. And all have at the very least the large, astringent force of young genius.

Print length 432 pages
Language English
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date April 1, 2010
Dimensions 5.3 x 1.1 x 7.9 inches
ISBN-10 0801895707
ISBN-13 978-0801895708
See all details

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The Poet and the Soldier: A Book of Poetry and Prose Collected from a Memory

Editorial Reviews

Bode has placed lovers and students of New England's most individualistic philosopher under a considerable debt.

It is good to have Thoreau's poetry thus readily available once more in an edition that is both thoroughly annotated and includes all of the variants.

The admirer of Thoreau will gladly pay to own all of his poems, not because he believes that he gave more than a glimpse of his genius in verse, but for the sake of the insight they allow into his character and sensibility.

"Bode has placed lovers and students of New England's most individualistic philosopher under a considerable debt."

"It is good to have Thoreau's poetry thus readily available once more in an edition that is both thoroughly annotated and includes all of the variants."

"The admirer of Thoreau will gladly pay to own all of his poems, not because he believes that he gave more than a glimpse of his genius in verse, but for the sake of the insight they allow into his character and sensibility."

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Product details.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; enlarged edition (April 1, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0801895707
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0801895708
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1.1 x 7.9 inches
#25,459 in American Poetry (Books)
#59,978 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
#744,680 in Genre Literature & Fiction

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In an outdoor scene, a woman in a white short-sleeved blouse gazes ahead with a rapt expression, seemingly watching a show; a little girl with wavy red hair and glasses leans into her.

By Alissa Wilkinson

Kids are supposed to love summer, but I can’t be alone in remembering it as the most vexing season. It’s hot, and there are mosquitoes and spasms of allergic sneezes, and the predictable, sociable structure of the school year vanishes for what feels like an interminable stretch. When Lacy, the 11-year-old in the playwright Annie Baker ’s brilliant “Janet Planet,” calls home from camp to tell her mother, Janet, that if she doesn’t come pick her up, she’ll kill herself — I got that, in all its hyperbolic provocation. Sometimes summer is just the worst.

But being 11 is also the worst. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks Janet (Julianne Nicholson) a few weeks later, when she’s been brought back to the home the two share in western Massachusetts: “Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet doesn’t want to laugh, and gently corrects her. But she’s also in the throes of her own turmoil, so she gets it. “I don’t think it will last, though,” Lacy continues, acknowledging with tween stoicism her spells of hell and happiness.

Lacy’s life is not hell, no matter her solemn belief. Her mother has built a good life for the two of them, even if it’s invaded at times by friends who need help and boyfriends who Lacy knows are bad news. But every day is long and every occurrence is amplified when you’re Lacy’s age. The genius of “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut as a feature writer-director, is how flawlessly it renders what it’s like to spend the summer being 11 at your home in the woods, when your mother is your whole world and you wish you could just have her to yourself. You can hear the buzzing bug zapper, feel the sunburn on your skin, scratch your knees on the freshly cut grass and sink into the hazy evening ennui.

Baker, who grew up in Amherst, knows the texture of those Massachusetts summers by heart. She also knows the kinds of people who populate the area, sending Janet and Lacy at one point to a midsummer mystical theatrical presentation, complete with larger-than-life puppetry, after which everyone is implored to take home all the extra zucchini the group grew by accident. “Janet Planet” is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.

The film is divided into three big sections, centering on three adults who show up in Janet’s life, and thus Lacy’s, in the summer of 1991. First there’s Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s boyfriend, who was expecting to have the summer alone with her. Later, there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who needs a place to stay after leaving a group that’s part commune, part theater troupe and maybe part cult. Finally, there’s the leader of that group, Avi (Elias Koteas), who takes an interest in Janet and her spiritual development.

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Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau
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Collected essays and poems : Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 : Free
Collected essays and poems ... Chaucer : extracts from a lecture on poetry read before the Concord Lyceum, November 29, 1843 by Henry D. Thoreau -- Herald of freedom -- Wendell Phillips before Concord Lyceum -- Thomas Carlyle and his works -- Civil disobedience -- Walking -- A Yankee in Canada -- Love -- Chastity & sensuality -- Slavery in ...
Henry David Thoreau : Collected... by Thoreau, Henry David
Henry David Thoreau. David Thoreau, better known as Henry David Thoreau, was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, and naturalist. He was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, and was the third of four children. Thoreau grew up in a family of modest means but received a good education, attending Harvard University from 1833 to 1837.
Collected Essays & Poems
Henry David Thoreau. : Collected Essays & Poems. "Seldom does a single book contain so much wisdom. The 27 essays collected here include such seminal works as 'Civil Disobedience,' 'Walking,' 'Slavery in Massachusetts,' 'Wild Apples,' and 'Life Without Principle.'. All are testaments to Thoreau's continuing influence on ...
Henry David Thoreau: Walden, The Maine Woods, Collected Essays and
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott.
Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (LOA #124)
Henry David Thoreau. Library of America, Apr 23, 2001 - Nature - 703 pages. America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international renown, Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain ...
Collected Essays and Poems by Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts.
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau
The letters that will be included in the Princeton Edition of Correspondence are listed at Thoreau's Correspondence. Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems, selected by Elizabeth Witherell (New York: The Library of America, 2001). All of the essays and poems, with each genre presented in chronological order.
Henry David Thoreau : Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America
David Thoreau, better known as Henry David Thoreau, was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, and naturalist. He was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, and was the third of four children. Thoreau grew up in a family of modest means but received a good education, attending Harvard University from 1833 to 1837.
Henry David Thoreau : Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America
America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international renown, Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech.
[PDF] Collected essays and poems
Collected essays and poems. H. Thoreau. Published 2001. History, Environmental Science. America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of worldwide impact, Henry David Thoreau's remarkable essays reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the ...
Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems
America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international renown, Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. The Library of America now brings together these ...
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau is recognized as an important contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement known as New England transcendentalism. His essays, books, and poems weave together two central themes over the course of his intellectual career: nature and the conduct of life. The continuing importance of these two themes is well illustrated by the fact that the last two essays ...
Poems by Henry David Thoreau
The Inward Morning ». The Moon ». The Poets Delay ». The Summer Rain ». They Who Prepare my Evening Meal Below ». Though All the Fates ». Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life ». A selection of poems by Henry D. Thoreau. Many of them were published in The Dial (1840-1844), a transcendentalist magazine.
Collected poems : Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862
Appendix A (p. 249-265) contains 2 poems, transcribed from the Huntington Library MSS. (HM13201 and HM13182) with titles: The fall of the leaf and A winter... Skip to main content. ... Collected poems by Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862; Bode, Carl, 1911- , ed. Publication date 1964 Publisher Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press
Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (LOA #124) (Library of
America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international renown, Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. The Library of America now brings together these ...
Walden, the Maine woods, and collected essays & poems
Walden, the Maine woods, and collected essays & poems Bookreader Item Preview ... Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862. Walden; Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862. Maine woods Autocrop_version ..14_books-20220331-.2 Boxid IA40606116 Camera USB PTP Class Camera ...
Henry David Thoreau: poems, essays, and short stories
Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817- May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as ...
Henry David Thoreau : Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America)
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Henry David Thoreau : Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America) at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.
8 Henry David Thoreau Poems
Henry David Thoreau is one of the most important writers of the transcendentalist movement. He wrote essays, poems, and philosophical works. His best-known work is Walden. His works are known for their close observations of nature, symbolism, and history. He published Poems of Nature in 1895.
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau
During his lifetime Thoreau published two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, a number of essays and poems, and a few translations.Selections from his Journal were published first in four seasonal volumes prepared by H. G. O. Blake: Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), and Autumn (1892). In 1906 Houghton Mifflin published a fourteen ...
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau
Shorter chronologies can be found in Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 645-656; ... What poem did Thoreau write in jail? Thoreau was jailed on July 23 and 24, 1846, for refusing to pay his poll tax. There is no documentary evidence that he wrote a poem (or anything else) during the one night he spent in ...
Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau Paperback
Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau Paperback - April 1, 2010. by Carl Bode (Editor) 4.9 6 ratings. See all formats and editions. Ralph Waldo Emerson once described Henry Thoreau's poetry as "the purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest." Not always thus esteemed, Thoreau's verses were by ...
Interview With the Poet Frederick Seidel, the Author of "So What"
"The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz" made me furious, the thought of his tragic life. The first poems are marvelous, and how much trouble there is with the enormous rest of the book. Such ...
'Janet Planet' Review: A Sticky Summer Full of Small Dramas
The poem's lines don't explain "Janet Planet" — it is not a movie to be explained — but they push on its edges a bit, opening out space for fresh contemplation. A childhood summer is ...

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