Thoreau admired direct, vigorous, succinct, economical prose. For him, the importance of content far outweighed that of style. He avoided overemphasis on form at the expense of content. Romantic writer that he was, he cared little for observing the formalities of established literary genre. He wanted every word to be useful, to convey meaning, and he had no interest in the purely decorative. "As all things are significant," he wrote, "so all words should be significant." Thoreau felt that the very act of genuine expression elevated the written word: "A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance." Although Thoreau avoided obvious artifice, his highly crafted writing is anything but artless.
Thoreau's writing is full of mythological references and of illustrative passages from earlier authors with whom modern readers may not be familiar. Nevertheless, despite the obscurity of such allusions, it is hard even for those reading his work for the first time not to experience flashes of inspired understanding of his message. This is a tribute to Thoreau's effective use of language. He wrote carefully for an intelligent and thoughtful reader. His work appeals at least as much to such a reader today as it did in the nineteenth century. The lasting appeal of his work is due, too, to the breadth and timelessness of the major themes developed throughout his writings.
Thoreau put millions of words to paper over the course of his lifetime. He vacillated in the way he viewed and presented some of his themes in this massive body of his work. The reader of Thoreau must simply accept some degree of intellectual contradiction as evidence that the author was a complex man, constantly thinking and weighing ideas, open to a variety of interpretations, capable of accepting inconsistency. If Thoreau's thoughts on a subject did not always remain constant, at least there is coherence in his repeated exploration of certain basic themes throughout his writings.
The most central of Thoreau's themes is the idea that beyond reality — beyond nature and human existence — there is a higher truth operating in the universe. Reality — nature, in particular — symbolizes this higher truth, and, from its particulars, universal law may, to some degree, be comprehended. This idealism is consistent with the Transcendental concept of the ultimate connectedness of God, man, and nature in the great oneness of the Oversoul, and with the optimistic Transcendental sense that the absolutes and the workings of the universe can be grasped by the human mind. Intuitive understanding rather than reason provides the means to such cosmic comprehension.
