From Revolution to Reconstruction: Outlines: Outline of American Literature: Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)</HEAD>  <form name=info> <input type=hidden name="author" value=''> <input type=hidden name="counter" value='Htel'> <input type=hidden name="level" value=2> </form>    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="../java/nheader.js"></SCRIPT>    <font class=trail><a href=../index.htm>FRtR</a> > <a href=../H/index.htm>Outlines</a> > <a href=index.htm>American Literature</a> > <b>Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820: Writers of fiction: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)</b></font> <p> <h1 class=pres-head>An Outline of American Literature</h1><br> <h2 class=pres-head><i>by Kathryn VanSpanckeren</i></h2> <P> <h2 class=pres-head>Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)</h2> <P align="justify"> <P><font class=small color=red>*** <a href=ch2_p1.htm>Index</a> ***</font><p> <IMG SRC="../images/thoreau.jpg" WIDTH=141 HEIGHT=226 HSPACE=5 VSPACE=5 ALIGN=left>Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like <A HREF="emerson.htm">Emerson</A>, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings. <P align="justify"> Thoreau's masterpiece, <I>Walden</I>, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In <I>Walden</I>, Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called "Economy," he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars. <P align="justify"> In <I>Walden</I>, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: "I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind." <P align="justify"> Thoreau's method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance. <P align="justify"> In <I>Walden</I>, Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he re-enacts the collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851: <P align="justify"> <I><blockquote> English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America. </blockquote></I> <P align="justify"> <I>Walden</I> inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," while Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience," with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century. <P align="justify"> Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern. <P><font class=small color=red>*** <a href=ch2_p1.htm>Index</a> ***</font><p>  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="../java/footer.js"></SCRIPT>  </body> </html>