Criticism > Poetry > Thoreau, Henry David - Richard Bridgman (essay date 1982)

Thoreau, Henry David - Richard Bridgman (essay date 1982)

Richard Bridgman (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: “Rags and Meanness: Journals, Early Essays, Translations, and Poems,” in Dark Thoreau, University of Nebraska Press, 1982, pp. 1-26.

[In the following excerpt from his study of Thoreau's works, Bridgman claims Thoreau's early essays, translations, and poems are highly personal.]

Much of what Thoreau felt in his early years is concentrated in his poems and journals. They initiate the terms of his confusions and they help to explain both the violence and the evasions present in his writing. On the positive side, he idealized friendship and exulted in the diversity of nature. On the negative, he discovered little that was attractive in himself or in the social realities around him, and so dwelt obsessively on viciousness, destruction, and dissolution. Given these strained conditions, absorption in nature was a relief from quotidian irritations, not to say from himself. He once testified...

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