Walden Criticism

Walden, is by Henry David Thoreau, a well known Romanticism poet and writer. Thoreau was very interested by nature, and he tried to become a new person through nature, something common to the Romanticism Literary Period. Walden is basically a journal of Henry David Thoreau's stay in nature and his observations. During his stay, Henry David Thoreau looks at individual parts of nature and finds ways to connect to nature through that. In a criticism of Henry David Thoreau, by Bradford Torrey, Torrey praises Thoreau on his writing and connection of nature. I agree with Bradford Torrey on this aspect, because Thoreau is an excellent writer, especially when he writes of nature. This is obviously apparent in Walden, one of Henry David Thoreau's most famous works.

Bradford Torrey says, "Thoreau's love for the wild--not to be confounded with a liking for natural history or an appreciation of scenery--was as natural and unaffected as a child's love of sweets. It belonged to no one part of his life" (Torrey). I agree with this statement. Henry David Thoreau really did have a love of nature. It was almost as if it was his life. One can see this in an excerpt from Walden. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary" (Thoreau, 214). Thoreau tells why he made this solitary trip into nature. He wished to see how nature lived, how it operated, how it survived. From his observations Henry David Thoreau wished to live his own life according to nature. This proves Torrey's statement that "it [nature] belonged to no one part of his life" (Torrey). Henry David Thoreau did not want to live like nature only in spiritual aspects or only in work aspects. He wanted to learn from it, and then Thoreau wanted to apply that to all of his life, like Torrey stated.

There is one more main point that I found interesting in Torrey's criticism, and it pertains to Henry David Thoreau himself, not just Walden. Bradford Torrey says this, "He did his work, and with it enriched the world. In the strictest sense it was his own work. If his ideal escaped him, he did better than most in that he still pursued it" (Torrey). I agree with this point also, in that Thoreau added extra small details into his stories or poems or journals that make one think, "Is that really necessary to have that in there?" He did this with Walden even more so, because he was observing the small little details along with the obvious ones to see how those could affect his life. "Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the suffer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite" (Thoreau, 218). Even though some may have thought these details over the top therefore taking away from his journal, Thoreau includes them deeming them necessary for his own work, very similar to Bradford Torrey's criticism of him.


Works Cited

Torrey, Bradford. "Thoreau's Attitude toward Nature." Atlantic (November 1899): 706–710. Quoted as "Thoreau's Attitude toward Nature" in Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry David Thoreau, Classic Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2008. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CCVHDT010&SingleRecord=True (accessed November 21, 2010).

Thoreau, Henry David. "Walden." American Literature. Columbus, Ohio: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 214-218. Print.