In many of his works, Thoreau expresses his concern with the poet. He uses the word poet in the sense of seer, the vates of the Romans, to write about himself, with poet providing a useful objective persona.

When Thoreau writes of the conditions in which the poet must live, the attitudes he must foster, or the results he must produce, he is giving less of prescription than description of his own inner life. “Poetry” is thus seen by him in its largest sense, as Maritain defines it, “not (as) the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination.”¹

By extracting passages on the poet and poetry from Thoreau's works, one discovers focal ideas which imply two levels of engagement: first, while Thoreau did not supply his readers with an orderly theory of poetry as literature, he worked continuously at defining the conditions in which a written poetry might be expected to originate and flourish. Second, these conditions, he implies throughout his writings, are applicable analogously to the conditions in which the ideal life might be attained by any man whose vision is clear enough and whose strength is equal to the task. The didactic tone in which Thoreau proposes these focal ideas may be attributed to the personal conviction and the sincerity which underlie his most characteristic writing.

Thoreau's perception of the conditions and sources from which poetry comes is similar to Emerson's when the latter writes that “the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.”² To Thoreau, these “common influences” were to be discovered in the world and the people around him. “Nature” to the poet meant those things perceived through his senses, and with an almost primitive passion, Thoreau tried to put himself into contact with his physical surroundings. Any page of his journal attests to the high degree of sensitivity with which he perceived and responded to those surroundings.

Of course, what mattered was not so much where the poet found himself, as how sensitive to life he could be. He must be “alive to the extremities,” and he must report what he felt. Thoreau devoted himself to being tuned to a “low key” by simplicity of life-style, practicing an eremitical asceticism by which to keep his senses alert and responsive. True, his asceticism was not altogether consistent, but his enduring enthusiasm is evident in such statements as this: “I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.”³ His documented penchant for icy swims in the pond, long hours of exposure to the weather, Spartan exercises in tramping and nature-watching may be traced to his effort to get in touch with the reality of the physical world. There is much of the sensual about him, but it is of the order which recognizes physical pleasure (and pain) as a kind of natural beatitude, to be accepted and enjoyed with temperate responsibility.

Thoreau's stay at Walden, he states in his book, was an attempt to confront nature and life in its commonest reality. As Sherman Paul says, “in order to front the fact and recover reality, he had to reduce the problem of perception to its simplest terms—self and Nature.”⁴ On this level, Nature to him subsumed all trivial forms, and became more than an appendage to the human psyche: “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? When the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of ‘the Heavens,' but the seer will in the same sense speak of ‘the Earths,' and his Father who is in them.”⁵ Thoreau's insistence on out-door living and the “autochthonous” occupations is grounded in his notion that the source of moral health as well as poetic inspiration is in man's communion with Nature. Hence the farmer, the Indian, the lock-tender, the wood-chopper, the hunter, the fisherman become symbols of a high order of natural moral integrity.

While Nature supplies objects for the poet's sensual perception, enjoyment and edification, she also demands a mode of spiritual perception by which the poet receives an authentic truth from which to create his poem. If he is to be a good observer and reporter of the real world, the poet must also be “something more than natural,—even supernatural.” While he may identify with Nature, he still retains his own identity, with its mission to express Nature as he knows it: “Nature will not speak through but along with him. His voice will not proceed from her midst, but breathing on her, will make her the expression of his thought. He then poetizes when he takes a fact out of nature into spirit. He speaks without reference to time or place. Her thought is one world, his another. He is another Nature,—Nature's brother. Kindly offices do they perform for one another. Each publishes the other's truth.”⁶ Thoreau was insistent that the poet must be conditioned for proper reception of Nature's truth on the nonmaterial level. For him, this posed a problem. He worried that he could not easily distinguish between “fact” and “poetry.” At the outset, “to distinguish” apparently meant for him “to separate.” The synthesis between these two modes of perception he finally achieves by “transmutation”:

I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant,—and perhaps transmuted more into the subjects of the human mind,—I would need but one book of poetry to contain them all.⁷

In order to be able to make his own “transmutations,” the poet's mind needs to be disciplined or formed. There are conditions for poetry.

SEPARATION FROM SOCIETY

One of the conditions for poetic readiness, Thoreau says, is a separation from society. Disengagement amounting at times to alienation is a necessary condition, if the poet is to perceive rightly those truths which are fundamental to his being and his art. The social conditions which Thoreau prescribes are regulated for detachment: “The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird. …”⁸ Of Chaucer, whom he much admired, Thoreau says: “The muse of the most universal poet retires into some familiar nook, whence it spies out the land as the eagle from his eyrie, for he who sees so far over plain and forest is perched in a narrow cleft of the crag.”⁹ Thoreau finds precedent for such solitude in the past: “The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.”¹⁰

Thoreau sees physical solitude for himself as a condition for the apprehension of metaphysical reality: “Ah! I need solitude. I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon,—to behold and commune with something grander than man. … It is with infinite yearning and aspiration that I seek solitude. …”¹¹

Images of separation, dissociation and alienation abound in Thoreau's writing. In Week, for example, the river becomes a symbol of detachment, cutting the voyager off, at least for a time, from the society of Concord and the mundane concerns of men, enabling him to get a clearer view, not only of the terrain, but of the basic verities. Mountains too provide the isolation, height and distance needed to put life into its proper perspective.¹² Thoreau's cabin at Walden pond, while very real in substance, is also a metaphor for detachment, forming a “crystallization” around him against the world, and establishing the inner concentration in which he can live and work.¹³ The boat and the islands in Week provide the same kind of physio-metaphorical aloofness. The fogs which occur on the river each morning make detachment possible, operating to enclose the traveller in his self-contained world, while placing realities at a distance and surrounding them with a diffused light which renders them “sublime.”

If physical detachment is important to Thoreau, it is because it makes possible the intellectual detachment necessary if he is to confront and come to grips with ideal truth. Solitude insulates him against society, but more importantly it frees him for contemplation by enabling him to get a true focus on himself. This focus requires him further to become detached even from himself, in a way which makes possible the critical observation of self as object. Such detachment requires a cool awareness, with two “selves” existing in balanced tension. The resulting double consciousness requires of him a constant effort at separation; contemplation, the next step, implies a special way of looking at everything:

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. … I only know myself as a human entity; the scene so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.¹⁴

Thoreau's occasional attempts to reinforce his contacts with the people of Concord were followed by expressions of deep dissatisfaction that he had let himself be betrayed into surrendering his valued aloofness. He was not misanthropic; he was rather engaged in a peculiarly absorbing kind of inner pursuit, and if he left it momentarily, he was forced to compunction:

As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all the week, and dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus, its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed. My Pegasus has lost his wings; he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life.

The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of Imagination's provinces, the realms of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagination are so boundless, the limits of towns are so petty.¹⁵

He needed to keep even himself at a distance, as he says in another passage: “… I have lived ill for the most part because too near myself. I have tripped myself up, so that there was no progress for my own narrowness. I cannot walk conveniently and pleasantly but when I hold myself far off in the horizon.”¹⁶ If, on the other hand, he has been successful in setting up all the conditions for solitude and detachment, leaving father and mother, and brother and sister, and having paid his debts and made his will (to paraphrase Thoreau's preparations for taking a walk, his image for contemplation),¹⁷ he hopes thereby to arrive at a true perception of reality.

The intellectual detachment which hopefully results from physical and social isolation enables the poet to see in a way which makes the seer both subject and object of his thought. This is a critical clue, I believe, in trying to understand the strategy of Thoreau's major works. With this clue, it becomes apparent that what appears at first to be moral imperatives in Thoreau's philosophy are really dramatic imperatives for his poetry. From a literal interpretation of his writings as autobiographical, the reader can move into interpretation of the metaphors in which Thoreau expresses his concepts.

The locus of poetry for Thoreau, then, is in the consciousness of the poet, and the quality of his consciousness becomes the quality of the poem. It follows, therefore, that the poet whose work is of preeminent worth will be the one whose life and spirit are most capable of receiving and exerting the poetic impulse. As Thoreau puts it, “The poet must bring to Nature the smooth mirror in which she is to be reflected. He must be something superior to her, something more than natural. He must furnish equanimity. No genius will excuse himself from importing the ivory which is to be his material.”¹⁸ The equanimity of which Thoreau speaks postulates an absolute control over all his warring natural faculties, if the poet is ever to realize the ideal poem. Thoreau's Platonic bias is apparent when he says that the “poet is he who generates poems. By continence he rises to creation on a higher level, a supernatural level.”¹⁹ Once the poet has experienced his “consciousness,” he has his poem, which, Thoreau says, “is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper. Coincident with the production of this, which is stereotyped in the poet's life, is what he has become through his work.”²⁰

INSPIRATION

Beyond the poet's own efforts, there is the operation of some other power in creating poetry. Thoreau makes much of the role of inspiration in the poet's life. “The poet,” he says, “speaks only those thoughts that come unbidden, like the wind that stirs the trees. …”²¹ Not only the direct effort of confronting Nature, in whatever form, was responsible for poetry, but things seen with the “side of the eye,” or apprehended intuitively could also be counted on to make the poem.²² Thoreau's identification of himself as “a mystic, a Transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot”²³ reinforces the importance he places on those insights which were the result of some mysterious operation of genius rather than of empirical processes. He is, as Mattheissen points out, fully in accord with the organic theory of poetry which “impelled him to minute inspections of his own existence and of the intuitions that rose from it.”²⁴ If poetry lay anywhere, it lay in the conscious or subconscious mind of the poet, and by concentrated attention to the least of his thoughts, Thoreau worked continually to discover it. He tells again and again of being outwardly busy with his hands, as he made the earth “say beans,” or with his eyes, as he surveyed farmsteads around Concord, while he was interiorly observing the essential reality with which his mind was always engaged. Laurence Stapleton quotes the statement, “It is from out of the shadow of my toil that I look into the light,” and comments: “Here, as respects the glance from one space of sense and feeling into another, Thoreau expresses an essential principle of his habits of observing, as he might read a level of his inner life. In his philosophy of seeing, no law of the excluded middle impedes his intuitionist logic. The observer is required to be wholly respectful of the outward fact, while aware that his presence and the state of his belief impart identity to what he sees.”²⁵ Thoreau attaches primary importance to those intuitions which arise from the simple fact of being human, making subjectivity the touchstone of significance. The interior world of his thoughts deserves the same respect as the exterior phenomena which evoke them, and Thoreau provides telling images to describe the poet's vigilance to this inner world: “The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind, as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise? The humblest observer would see some stars shoot.”²⁶ And again:

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

I omit the unusual—the hurricanes and earthquakes—and describe the common. This has the greatest charms and is the true theme of poetry. You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you will let me have the ordinary. Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which possess.²⁷

Such vigilance over moods and themes is by its incessant nature taxing to even the strongest mind, and as Thoreau's journal reveals, it sometimes caused him to undergo periods in which his poetic faculties responded feebly or not all.²⁸ To Thoreau, however, it would seem that even the dark periods were necessary, providing for the aesthetic distance and maturity of experience which would eventually issue in new impressions, perhaps even in poems.²⁹ Depression is a kind of negative ecstasy to the true poet, as Thoreau analyzes:

Our ecstatic states, which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least: though in the seasons when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression, yet, in calmer seasons, when our talent is active, the memory of those rarer moods comes to color our picture and is the permanent paint-pot, as it were, into which we dip our brush. Thus no life or experience goes unreported at last; but if it be not solid gold, it is gold-leaf, which gilds the furniture of the mind. It is an experience of infinite beauty on which we unfailingly draw, which enables us to exaggerate ever truly. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them. Their truth subsides, and in cooler moments we can use them as paint to gild and adorn our prose. When I despair to sing them, I will remember that they will furnish me with paint with which to adorn and preserve the works of talent one day. They are like a pot of pure ether. They lend the writer when the moment comes a certain superfluity of wealth, making his expression to overrun and float itself. It is the difference between our river, now parched and dried up, exposing its unsightly and weedy bottom, and the same when, in the spring, it covers all the meads with a chain of placid lakes, reflecting the forests and the skies.³⁰

That inspiration was to Thoreau part of the organic reality of poetry, giving it materials, “truth” and images upon which to sustain itself, seems apparent from this passage. The same mind which looked for tropes and symbols in nature could find them also within itself, because it was stored from experience. The easy ambivalence which borrows from both inner and outer life to express ideas from either is evidence of how completely Thoreau had learned to control both external and internal sources of poetry.

Thoreau seems to distinguish between the poet as conscious artist and as “genius.” The genius, one infers, is he who becomes the medium for the expression of “Truth,” operating as a “conductor of the whole river of electricity,” to use Emerson's phrase.³¹ The source of poetry, Thoreau says, is the same for all poets of every age: “It is the stream of inspiration, which bubbles out, now here, now there, now in this man, now in that. It matters not through what ice-crystals it is seen, now a fountain, now the ocean stream running underground. It is in Shakespeare, Alpheus, in Burns, Arethuse; but ever the same.”³² The poet provides a passage for the Truth which thus expresses itself through him. In one rather inelegant metaphor, Thoreau describes the poet's role as one of passivity, but still he insists that the higher faculties of man are involved: “So the poet's creative moment is when the frost is coming out in the spring, but as in the case of some too easy poets, if the weather is too warm and rainy or long continued it becomes mere diarrhoea, mud and clay relaxed. The poet must not have something pass his bowels merely; that is women's poetry. He must have something pass his brain and heart and bowels, too, it may be, all together. So he gets delivered.”³³ He speaks of inspiration as illumination, “perturbations in our orbits produced by the influences or outlying spheres” which cause his vision to expand from the “common-sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe them.”³⁴ Such a view is a necessary condition to poetry, as it raises the poet to his proper place as “genius, or the inspired.”³⁵

If we were to consider the growth of the poet or seer in mystical terms, we might say that the purgation of solitude and simplicity is followed by the illumination provided by his contact with Nature, and finally united with the ultimate source of poetry, inspiration. Such a progression may be implied in Thoreau's gnomic definition of poetry as the “mysticism of mankind.”³⁶

The significance of Thoreau's statements on the conditions for poetry lies, I believe, in their relation to his entire body of writing, insofar as these statements reveal an author engaged in a complex task—that of writing poetry and metapoetry simultaneously.

Notes

1. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Cleveland 1954) p. 3.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Reginald L. Cook (NY 1950) p. 332. Emerson was to say of Thoreau in his funeral oration that “there was an excellent wisdom in him … which showed him the material world as a means and symbol … he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.”

3. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Sherman Paul (Boston 1960) p. 147. This work is hereafter referred to as Walden.

   A further light on Thoreau's rationale for asceticism is found in an undated entry in his 1837-47 Journal: “The complete subjugation of the body to the mind prophesies the sovereignty of the latter over the whole of nature. The instincts are to a certain extent a sort of independent nobility, of equal date with the mind, or crown—ancient dukes and princes of the regal blood. They are perhaps the mind of our ancestors subsided in us, the experience of the race.” The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (NY 1962). This work is hereafter referred to as Journal.

4. Sherman Paul “A Fable of the Renewal of Life” Thoreau, ed. Sherman Paul (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1962) p. 103.

5. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston 1961) p. 408. This work is hereafter referred to as Week.

6. Journal, 2 March 1839.

7. Ibid., 18 February 1852.

8. Ibid., 11 May 1854.

9. Ibid., 23 February 1842.

10. Ibid., 29 January 1840.

11. Ibid., 14 August 1854.

12. Week, pp. 197, 271, 321.

13. Walden, p. 93. In the chapter entitled “The Village,” Thoreau again says of separation as a condition for self-discovery: “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” p. 118.

14. Walden, p. 93. A. D. Van Nostrand's chapter on Thoreau in Everyman His Own Poet (NY 1968) is entitled “Thoreau Beside Himself.” The chapter is a helpful discussion of what the author calls Thoreau's “ruminating consciousness.”

15. Journal, 20 September 1851. In another entry, on 4 January 1857, Thoreau writes: “After spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan incessantly, I especially feel the necessity of putting myself in communication with nature again, to recover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs. The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. Having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, I would now bathe my temples in eternity. I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods. I thus from time to time break off my connection with eternal truths and go with the shallow stream of human affairs, grinding at the mill of the Philistines; but when my task is done, with never-failing confidence I devote myself to the infinite again. It would be sweet to deal with men more, I can imagine, but where dwell they? Not in the fields which I traverse.”

16. Journal, 21 February 1842.

17. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (NY 1950) p. 598.

18. Journal, 23 May 1852. The same idea appears in metaphor in Week: “All the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it around the falls.” p. 338.

19. Journal, 15 January 1852.

20. Ibid., 1 July 1840. Contiguity on the physical plane is not sufficient; man must have and does have that peculiar response which mirrors and expands his experience into meaningful affects. Melville says something similar in this passage: “From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. Wonder interlocks with wonder; and then the confounding feeling comes. No cause have we to fancy that a horse, a dog, a fowl, ever stand transfixed beneath yon skyey load of majesty. But our soul's arches underfit into its; and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness. ‘Explain ye my deeper mystery,' said the shepherd Chaldean king, smiting his breast, lying on his back upon the plain; ‘and then, I will bestow all my wonderings upon ye, ye stately stars!'” Herman Melville, Pierre, ed. Henry A. Murphy (NY 1949) p. 59.

21. Journal, 9 May 1841. In Week, Thoreau says: “The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God. … There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.” p. 351.

22. “Sometimes I would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting to it. … The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that. That is a mere reflecting surface.” Journal, 30 June 1852.

23. Journal, 5 March 1853.

24. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (NY 1968) p. 174.

25. Laurence Stapleton, “Introduction,” Thoreau, ed. Sherman Paul, p. 163.

26. Journal, 19 August 1851.

27. Ibid., 28 August 1851.

28. Two Thoreau scholars (there are probably others too) infer from the return to simple observations on nature objects—“facts”—in his late journals that Thoreau recognized the danger inherent in too prolonged effort to capture sidewise glimpses of the ideal. Ethel Seybold suggests in Thoreau: the Quest and the Classics (New Haven 1951) p. 7n. that Thoreau's acceptance of the conditions of his quest—“solitude, poverty, and the public opprobrium of failure”—have led to some reluctance among his readers to admit what she calls the “truth” about Thoreau, because such an admission “seems to us the equivalent of calling him ‘insane.'”

    John Aldrich Christie puts it more mildly: “Does not the noble doubt constantly suggest itself to the reader of the Journal that the Thoreau who at times so riveted his eye to the material minutiae of the scene before him was the poet at war with his imagination rather than, as he would have us believe, satiating it? The visionary valiantly and at times compulsively maintaining his hold on the real world, compelled by a sober recognition and perhaps even the Yankee's instinctive distrust of his imaginative strengths?” Thoreau as World Traveller (NY 1965) pp. 97-98.

29. Journal, 23 July 1851. “—Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression—waits till the seed germinates naturally.”

30. Journal, 7 September 1851.

31. Emerson, p. 338.

32. Week, p. 401.

33. Journal, 31 December 1851.

34. Week, p. 413.

35. Ibid., p. 401.

36. Ibid., p. 350.