Thoreau applies river imagery to writing as well as to life and the lapse of time in A Week. He likens writing to the flow of the river, thus endowing it with an organic, natural quality. He identifies homeliness, simplicity, vigor, and directness as virtues in poetry. Writing should be truthful, should describe things as they are. These fundamental qualities produce vital, fresh writing even when the subject matter is common. Originality rests in the treatment, not in the theme. Thoreau writes often of perception and perspective, of seeing things in a new light.
Poetry is appreciated in its irreducible integrity by "those for whom it was matured." But even early in his literary career, Thoreau understood that this audience was small. He indicates in "Friday" an awareness that there is not necessarily any connection between genius and appreciation. In "Sunday" and elsewhere, he disdains the approach to writing as a commodity. The actualities of the publishing world in the 1840s did not foster the sustained idealism necessary to create A Week.
Thoreau associates roughness and strength, even a certain violence, with meaningful writing. Just as nature possesses a savage and frightening aspect, so does composition. He writes in "Thursday": "The talent of composition is very dangerous, — the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it." And, as he perceives a loss of wildness to civilization over human history, so he observes a decline of poetry from a more natural age to the present.
Art and nature may exist in a kind of symbiosis. Thoreau writes in "Thursday":
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. Man tames Nature only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded.
The poet hopes to capture and transmit, and even enhance, the vitality of nature, his subject matter and his inspiration.
As he draws his book to a close in "Friday," Thoreau hopes for an audience sympathetic to his creative idealism, to his sense of writing as a medium for universal truth. He sees his proper audience as consisting of seekers after revelation and understanding such as he himself seeks: "A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck." He offers A Week as one of those good books that strike chords within the reader.
