No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Literary Materials in Thoreau's A Week
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contains a great many quotations, and these have been criticized as disturbing by those who find the work not much more than an interesting journal gone wrong. Even to those fond of the book it is clear that A Week has too many of them, and that occasionally so many are bunched together that the reader loses the sense of Thoreau's personality, which is always unfortunate. But the quotations with which A Week is studded, while certainly bothersome now and then, are usually pleasurable if one reads slowly, watching for the special powers and idiosyncrasies of the older styles which Thoreau loved. The contrast between his examples and the timbre of his own prose is satisfying in itself and contributes to the major concern of the whole work—the mind's proper fluidity, its rich diversity of attention when most in harmony with the spiritual laws governing insight and inspiration.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965
References
1 Particularly rich in such material is the notebook “Miscellaneous extracts,” in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the commonplace book in the Library of Congress—hereafter referred to as the LC notebook. For permission to examine and to quote from these notebooks, I wish to thank the directors and curators of manuscripts of these libraries. In the identification of the poetic quotations in A Week I have relied heavily on Ernest E. Leisy's “Sources of Thoreau's Borrowings in A Week,” AL, xviii (March 1946), 37–44. See also his “Thoreau and Ossian,” NEQ, xviii (March 1945), 96–98, and “Francis Quarles and Henry D. Thoreau,” MLN, lx (May 1945), 335–336.
2 Vol. i of the Writings (Walden Edition), 20 vols. (Boston, 1906). All references are to this edition.
3 The Works of the English Poets, ... ed. Alexander Chalmers, 21 vols. (London, 1810), vi, 71 b. This is the collection which Thoreau, by his own testimony, read “straight through.” I use it largely for convenience, although a great number of the quotations must come from it.
4 P. 121. Here, and in the LC notebook, the line is incorrectly identified as from Brittania's Pastorals.
5 The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford, 1910), p. 494.
6 The records of Thoreau's readings in Eastern literature are scattered. The notebooks mentioned above contain Eastern materials as well as poetry, and there is more in a notebook entitled “Paragraphs & c Mostly Original,” in the collection of the Morgan Library. The latter notebook, like a book of Journal extracts also in the Morgan collection, is not primarily a record of readings, but is a literary workbook in which Thoreau experimented with his materials and started to develop them into publishable form. Most of this found its way into A Week.
7 Sir William Jones, Works, 13 vols. (London, 1807), vii, 99–100. It is in the first chap.: “On the Creation; with a Summary of the Contents.”
8 Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life ... tr. Thomas Taylor (London, 1818), p. 198.
9 His reading in this literature is carefully discussed by Lawrence S. Willson, “The Influence of Early North American History and Legend on the Writings of Henry David Thoreau” (unpub. diss., Yale, 1944).
10 Sixth ed., Concord, N.H., and Boston, 1839.
11 Boston and Concord, 1835.
12 Three vols., Philadelphia, 1784–92.
13 Raymond Adams treats excellently the temper of Thoreau's classical references in “Thoreau's Mock-Heroics and the American Natural History Writers,” SP, lii (Jan. 1955), 86–97.
14 On the themes of A Week, see Sherman Paul, Shores of America (Urbana, Ill., 1958), esp. p. 197.