Nature into Art: Thoreau's Use of his Journals in a Week

Abstract

T HOREAU THE MAN has been of such enduring fascination that most of the writing about him has understandably dealt with his and ideas. One does not wish for less of this, for the investigation continues to be most productive, but Thoreau also deserves to be examined as an artist more often than has been the case, as F. 0. Matthiessen pointed out some time ago.' There are many ways in which this can be done, but for certain characteristics of Thoreau's art perhaps the most revealing is to study the use made of his Journal entries, the raw material of which he built the great bulk of his finished works. The Journal presented him with special problems, and the solutions he worked out throw not a little light on his literary craftsmanship. The work under consideration here is A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in I849. It is an apposite example since one can watch Thoreau working out his difficulties for the first time in a full length book, and the technique is to a large degree typical of his method at any later period. A Week has special characteristics of its own, of course, but it is used here only as the basis for a stylistic study.2 For A Week, as for most of his works, Thoreau began with his Journals, the daily record of his thoughts. One might say life and thought, except that here the two approach being the same; his long Journal, larger than Emerson's, is remarkably lean in autobiographical detail, and concentrates on the working out of the mind's relationship to the landscape it inhabits. Like all the Transcendentalists, Thoreau wished to be true to himself, and the isolated,