Henry David Thoreau (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition PDF
Preview Henry David Thoreau (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition
Bloom's Modern Critical Views African American Fyodor Dostoevsky Toni Morrison Poets: Wheatley– W.E.B. DuBois Joyce Carol Oates Tolson George Eliot Flannery O’Connor African American T.S. Eliot George Orwell Poets: Hayden–Dove Ralph Ellison Octavio Paz Dante Alighieri Ralph Waldo Emerson Sylvia Plath Isabel Allende William Faulkner Edgar Allan Poe American Women F. Scott Fitzgerald Katherine Anne Porter Poets, 1650–1950 Robert Frost Marcel Proust Hans Christian William Gaddis Thomas Pynchon Andersen Thomas Hardy Philip Roth Maya Angelou Nathaniel Hawthorne Salman Rushdie Asian-American Writers Robert Hayden J. D. Salinger Margaret Atwood Ernest Hemingway José Saramago Jane Austen Hermann Hesse Jean-Paul Sartre Paul Auster Hispanic-American William Shakespeare James Baldwin Writers Mary Wollstonecraft Honoré de Balzac Homer Shelley The Bible Langston Hughes John Steinbeck William Blake Zora Neale Hurston Amy Tan Ray Bradbury Aldous Huxley Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Brontës John Irving Henry David Thoreau Gwendolyn Brooks James Joyce J.R.R. Tolkien Elizabeth Barrett Franz Kafka Leo Tolstoy Browning John Keats Ivan Turgenev Robert Browning Jamaica Kincaid Mark Twain Albert Camus Stephen King Kurt Vonnegut Truman Capote Milan Kundera Derek Walcott Miguel de Cervantes Tony Kushner Alice Walker Geoffrey Chaucer Doris Lessing H.G. Wells G.K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis Eudora Welty Kate Chopin Sinclair Lewis Walt Whitman Joseph Conrad Norman Mailer Tennessee Williams Contemporary Poets David Mamet Tom Wolfe Julio Cortázar Christopher Marlowe William Wordsworth Stephen Crane Gabriel García Jay Wright Don DeLillo Márquez Richard Wright Charles Dickens Carson McCullers William Butler Yeats Emily Dickinson Herman Melville Émile Zola John Donne and the Arthur Miller 17th-Century Poets John Milton Bloom’s Modern Critical Views HENRY DAVID THOREAu Updated Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale university Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Henry David Thoreau—Updated Edition Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 ISBN-10: 0-7910-9348-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9348-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henry David Thoreau / Harold Bloom, editor. — updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Thoreau: the quest and the classics / Ethel Seybold — Naturalizing Eden: sci- ence and sainthood in Walden / John Hildebidle — From a week to Walden / Robert Sattelmeyer — Revolution and renewal: The genres of Walden / Gordon V. Boudreau — Paradise (to be) regained / David M. Robinson — Thoreau, Homer and community / Robert Oscar Lopez — Thoreau, crystallography, and the science of the transparent / Eric G. Wilson —“The life excited”: faces of Thoreau in Walden / Steven Hartman.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9348-4 1. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PS3054.H38 2007 818’.309—dc22 2006034841 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © The Granger Collection, New York Printed in the united States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics 13 Ethel Seybold Naturalizing Eden: Science and Sainthood in Walden 35 John Hildebidle From A Week to Walden 63 Robert Sattelmeyer Springs to Remember 87 Gordon V. Boudreau “Patron of the World”: Henry Thoreau as Wordsworthian Poet 107 Lance Newman Living Poetry 127 David M. Robinson Thoreau, Homer, and Community 153 Robert Oscar López Thoreau, Crystallography, and the Science of the Transparent 177 Eric G. Wilson vi Contents “The life excited”: Faces of Thoreau in Walden 197 Steven Hartman Chronology 219 Contributors 225 Bibliography 227 Acknowledgments 233 Index 235 Editor’s Note My Introduction suggests that Thoreau remains one of Emerson’s major works. Ethel Seybold traces the literary foregrounding of Thoreau’s career, while John Hildebidle seeks the balance between the transcendental and the naturalistic in Walden. Thoreau’s movement from his earlier A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to Walden is charted by Robert Sattelmeyer as a progress through reading, after which Gordon V. Boudreau sees the mythology of nature as the heart of Walden. Thoreau’s Wordsworthian, over-influenced poetry is studied by Lance Newman, while David M. Robinson proposes Walden’s prose as its author’s truest poetry. Homeric thematic influence upon Thoreau is stressed by Robert Oscar López, after which Eric G. Wilson exalts Thoreau’s metamorphic mastery of the image of the crystal. In this volume’s final essay, Steven Hartman analyzes Thoreau’s many roles in Walden. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction I All of us, however idiosyncratic, begin by living in a generation that overdetermines more of our stances and judgments than we can hope to know, until we are far along in the revisionary processes that can bring us to a Second Birth. I myself read Walden while I was very young, and “Civil Disobedience” and “Life without Principle” soon afterwards. But I read little or no Emerson until I was an undergraduate, and achieved only a limited awareness of him then. I began to read Emerson obsessively just before the middle of the journey, when in crisis, and have never stopped reading him since. More even than Freud, Emerson helped change my mind about most things, in life and in literature, myself included. Going back to Thoreau, when one has been steeped in Emerson for more than twenty years, is a curious experience. A distinguished American philosopher, my contemporary, has written that he underwent the reverse process, coming to Emerson only after a profound knowing of Thoreau, and has confessed that Emerson seemed to him at first a “second-rate Thoreau.” I am not tempted to call Thoreau a second-rate Emerson, because Thoreau, at his rare best, was a strong writer, and revised Emerson with passion and with cunning. But Emerson was for Thoreau even more massively what he was for Walt Whitman and all Americans of 1
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