The narrator's celebration of life and his call for all men to recognize the potential magnificence of life form the core idea, or unifying theme, of Walden. This point cannot be stressed too strongly because, for over a century, many individuals — sometimes very intelligent ones — have tended to ignore this centrally significant fact and have chosen to view Walden in other ways. While one considers the different aspects of Walden, these aspects should not obscure the essential core of the book: the process by which the narrator moves toward spiritual fulfillment.
The way in which the reader can keep this core foremost in his mind is to approach Walden as what it primarily is: a carefully contrived, closely-knit work of art with a poetic structure designed to support and restate the core idea. This may easily be done if the reader predisposes himself to two facts. The first is that, before anything else, Thoreau was an artist — an artist above and beyond being a devotee of nature, a naturalist, an economist, an anarchist, an abolitionist, or a philosopher. Since the 1930s, this is the key fact about Thoreau that has been established by scholars, and it has been the key factor in Thoreau's rise to prominence in American letters. Walden is the product of a man possessed with the idea of creating a great book. The second fact is that Walden was Thoreau's most successful attempt at creating art, to the degree that Walden exhibits the qualities of a great poem. If one traces the process by which Thoreau transformed his first version of Walden into the final version (this may be done by consulting J. Lyndon Shanley's The Making of Walden), he can see the work being changed from a rough report on pond-side living to a highly compressed, complex, and symbolic work of art.
