Inspiration and Writing
Thoreau's reading and his conscious consideration of writing are evident throughout A Week. The book includes quotations from a variety of authors, particularly ancient classical authors and archaic English writers, and poems and essays by Thoreau himself (some previously published). Moreover, many passages in A Week convey Thoreau's thoughts on the definition of powerful writing.
It is clear in A Week that Thoreau classes himself among poets. He did, in fact, write poetry, and published some of it in The Dial in the early 1840s. Some of his poetry remained in manuscript form, in his journal. Therefore, even though he is known primarily as a prose author, there is some literal truth to his defining himself as a poet. However, the word "poet" is used more broadly than in the literal sense of a writer of verse in A Week, as it is in the journal and elsewhere in Thoreau's writings. For Thoreau, the poet is an inspired writer with the ability to convey his life, the reality and significance of nature, and universal meaning. The poet is more than ordinarily susceptible to nature in all its forms, and preternaturally capable of expressing truth about the divine and the universal order. Thoreau respects myth, fable, and other primal forms that express the universal more than the narrowly cultural. As the "mysticism of mankind," poetry is close to myth and scripture. Thoreau also admires certain writers who possess vision and who treat broad and basic subjects. He writes in praise of Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, for example. He describes Alexander Henry's Travels and Adventures in Canada as natural, direct, rich in natural fact, lacking pretense and exaggeration. Although far from the standard definition of poetry, Henry's work transcends the narrowness of straight travel narrative and expresses "perennials."
Thoreau distinguishes between two types of poets. The writer of genius and inspiration cultivates life and possesses God within. The writer of intellect and taste, more derivative than original, cultivates art. Thoreau states that true artistic greatness lies in the degree to which art expresses life. It is clear that he identifies his own efforts with the work of those poets who cultivate life. Interestingly, at the end of "Thursday," he writes of the difficulty of keeping a journal — the written record of life — while engaged in living the life that forms the subject matter of this record. Life and the art that reflects it may ideally be one, but in reality there is some distance between life and the written word.
