Henry David Thoreau was an exacting practitioner of the art of writing. Although he exulted in the intuitive, creative genius that he felt within himself, throughout his life he was a disciplined craftsman who worked hard to revise and refine his material. As a writer, he drew strength from an understanding of the inseparability of his life and his art. Thoreau wrote of this unity in his journal (February 28, 1841), “Nothing goes by luck in composition. . . . The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author’s character is read from title-page to end.” Thoreau intended his writing to be a fit expression of a life lived according to high ideals and aspirations, guided by integrity and morality, spent in pursuit of spiritual development, of the universal truth that lay behind the particular and the personal. He strove to convey transcendent meaning, the “oracular and fateful,” in all that he wrote.
Thoreau saw his writing as a confluence of all his powers—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. He wrote in his journal entry for September 2, 1851:
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular.
He constantly revised his work not out of a fussy sense of perfectionism but because of the tremendous value that he placed on his writing as an embodiment of all that he was.
Thoreau was a versatile writer, capable of expressing stark reality in strong language and of conveying delicate detail and subtle nuance. His work is characterized both by directness of style and by the suggestion of far more than appears on the surface. He effectively employed a variety of techniques—paradox, exaggeration, and irony, for example—to create a penetrating prose. He brought considerable abilities and resources to his art—breadth of vision, closely examined personal experience, wide and deep reading, imagination, originality, a strong vocabulary and a facility for manipulating words (and even sometimes for minting new words to suit his purposes), an alertness to symbolic correspondences, and an aptitude for the figurative (simile, metaphor, allegory). He applied himself to translating what he observed of nature and humanity into words (“As you see, so at length will you say,” he wrote in his journal on November 1, 1851). His writing, consequently, possesses immediacy.
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.
