To realize the influence that Lowell's opinion carried in literary circles, one should note that as late as 1916, Mark Van Doren reiterated a similar misconception in his Henry David Thoreau. Van Doren wrote that "Thoreau is a specific Emerson" and that, philosophically, Thoreau's position was "almost identical with Emerson's."
To those familiar with Emerson's and Thoreau's writings, such a view of an "Emersonian Thoreau" is a gross misconception. Philosophically and aesthetically, they were often at odds, and one need only read Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden to note the differences in personality and, most important, the differences in their art. Yet, the "Emersonian" tag hindered the recognition of Thoreau's unique greatness for over half a century, as did the popular conceptions of the effete "nature lover" and the cranky hermit. One finds, for example, Oliver Wendell Holmes treating Thoreau as a joke: "Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization . . . insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end." And Robert Louis Stevenson echoed Lowell by terming Thoreau "dry, priggish, and selfish," adding that "it was not inappropriate, surely, that he had much close relations with the fish."
The ill-founded jokes began to come to an end during the 1890s when serious scholars began to take a closer look at the basis of Thoreau's small reputation. The portraits of Thoreau by Emerson and Lowell were re-examined and most critics came to the conclusion that, as Charles C. Abbot wrote in 1895, "neither Emerson nor Lowell was fitted to the task they undertook." Emerson's journals revealed a basic misunderstanding of Thoreau's aims and accomplishments; Lowell, the "in-door, kid-glove critic," was obviously out of touch with the thorny world that Thoreau inhabited. Between the 1890s and the mid-twentieth century, the old misconceptions about Thoreau withered away, and as critics began examining Thoreau on his own ground — that is, his writings — his reputation grew rapidly. Today, his reputation as an artist is greater than Emerson's, and, ironically, virtually no one except specialists in American literature reads either Lowell's poetry or his literary criticism. As Wendell Glick has noted: "One of the most conspicuous nails in the coffin of Lowell's reputation is his maligning of Thoreau's genius." By the unanimous consent of literary critics, "genius" is the only word to describe the once unappreciated artist of a small town in Massachusetts.
