Abstract
One young New Englander who enthusiastically emulated Wordsworth’s persona and poetics was Henry David Thoreau. The central focus of scholarship on the relation between Wordsworth and Thoreau has always been on their habits of thought about the relationship between humans and nature. For decades, debate centered on whether Wordsworth saw Imagination (or Mind or Man) as shaping Nature or vice versa, and on whether Thoreau maintained the same position. But the terms of the debate have shifted with the rise of ecocriticism. Ecocritics give an environmentalist edge to the question by asking whether Wordsworth and Thoreau were anthropocentric or ecocentric. James McKusick provides the culminating statement of this position, arguing that the British Romantics founded a tradition of organicist, localist, ecocentric writing that the New England Transcendentalists cultivated and extended in order to found the American environmental tradition. In any case, it has never been seriously questioned that there are extensive ideological parallels between Wordsworth and Thoreau, and sequence has been taken rightly to imply a strong vector of influence.1
And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfill,
Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion mill,
Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war with wrong,
Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough,
That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow.
—John Greenleaf Whittier
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Notes
John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), 243. For ecocritical accounts of the relationship between Wordsworth and Thoreau, see James McCusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 27–33;
Greg Garrard, “Wordsworth and Thoreau: Two Versions of Pastoral,” in Richard J. Schneider, ed., Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). The best summaries of early scholarship on the relationship are
Carl Dennis, “Correspondence in Thoreau’s Nature Poetry,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 58 (1970): 101–109,
and Laraine Fergenson, “Wordsworth and Thoreau: The Relationship between Man and Nature,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 11, no. 2 (1979): 3–10. For overviews of Thoreau’s place in the international tradition of Romanticism, see Miller, Nature’s Nation, 175–183; and
Frederick Garber, “Thoreau and Anglo-European Romanticism,” in Richard J. Schneider, ed., Approaches to Teaching Thoreau’s Walden and Other Works (New York: Modern Language Association, 1996), 39–47.
Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 133–150.
Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 103–104.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Joseph Slater, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 246. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, 230–231.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau,” Atlantic Monthly, 10 (August 1862): 24. The best discussions of Thoreau’s poetic decade are
Elizabeth Hall Witherell, “Thoreau as Poet,” in Joel Myerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 57–70, and Sattelmeyer, Thoreaus Reading, 3–24.
Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 294. Henry David Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies, Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 122.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, John C. Broderick, ed., vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 200–201. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, eds., vol. 7 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 140.
Thoreau, Journal, vol. 2, 223. Thoreau, Early Essays, 169, 165. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, Michael Mason, ed. (London: Longman, 1992), 59, 79.
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Carl F. Hovde et al., eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 91–92. Thoreau, Journal, vol. 1, 338.
Thoreau, Journal vol. 2, 44. Thoreau, Journal, vol. 1, 338. Of course, Thoreau shared many of his habits of thought about the poet and poetry with most of the Transcendentalist circle. For surveys of these ideas in the context of histories of the central Transcendentalist organ, The Dial, see Helen Hennesy, “The Dial: Its Poetry,” New England Quarterly, 31 (1958): 66–87, and Joel Myerson, New England Transcendentalism and The Dial (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980).
There are substantial continuities between Emerson’s notion of the poet’s use of natural language and the ideas of rhetorical power dominant during the Revolutionary period as reconstructed in Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Thoreau, Journal, vol. 1, 69. Thoreau, A Week, 375. Scholarship on Thoreau’s poetry is scarce. The best two essays are Elizabeth Hall Witherell, “Thoreau’s Watershed Season as a Poet: The Hidden Fruits of the Summer and Fall of 1841,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 49–106, which reconstructs the composition of what she regards as Thoreau’s crowning poetic achievement, a sequence of five related poems exploring the place of man in nature; and Arthur L. Ford, “The Poetry of Henry David Thoreau,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 56 (1969): 40–52, which close reads much of the verse, focusing on Thoreau’s desire to capture in poetry the experience of self-transcendence through total immersion in nature. Ford also provides an annotated bibliography of sources on Thoreau’s poetry through 1970. Since then, critical work on the subject has been quite sparse and was mostly produced in a burst of activity during the early 1970s: Betsy Feagan Colquitt, “Thoreau’s Poetics,” ATQ, 11 (1971): 74–81;
Robert O. Evans “Thoreau’s Poetry and the Prose Works,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 56 (1969): 40–52;
Mary I. Kaiser, “‘Conversing with the Sky’: The Imagery of Celestial Bodies in Thoreau’s Poetry,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 9, no. 3 (1977): 15–28;
Carla Mazzini, “Epiphany in Two Poems by Thoreau,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 5, no. 2 (1973): 23–25;
Kenneth Silverman, “The Sluggard Knight in Thoreau’s Poetry,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 5, no. 2 (1973): 6–9;
Paul O. Williams, “Thoreau’s Growth as a Transcendentalist Poet,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 19 (1973): 189–198.
Laraine Fergenson, “Was Thoreau Re-Reading Wordsworth in 1851” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 5, no. 3 (1973): 20–23.
J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 18–33, 55–73.
Karen Kalinevitch, “Apparelled in Celestial Light/Bathed in So Pure a Light: Verbal Echoes in Wordsworth’s and Thoreau’s Works,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 12, no. 2 (1980): 27–30, documents Walden’s many allusions to the great odes.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and the Poetry of Nature. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_8
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