UNIT IV :
chapter 1. biography and main works 93
chapter 2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree 95
chapter 3. From The Golden Day 95
chapter 4. Civil Disobedience 100
91
ATTENTION! NOTICE ABOUT COPYRIGHT
The texts that comprise this unit have been extracted from a selected bibliography. You MUST quote those sources – and not this booklet (“apostila”) - any time you use the texts to write an academic essay. You will find the page numbers of the original passages within square brackets, [ ], so that you can provide the correct bibliographical references. For more information on How to write an academic essay check the Professor’s website: www.letras.ufrj.br/veralima
UNIT III- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 1 & 4
MCMICHAEL, George [Editor]. Concise Anthology of American Literature. 2 a edição. New York: Macmillan, 1986
CHAPTER 2 & 3
YEATS, William Butler. The Lake Isle of Innisfree - SHERMAN, Paul . Thoreau: a collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. p. 8.
MUMFORD, William. From the Golden Day - SHERMAN, Paul . Thoreau: a collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. p. 13-19
91
91
UNIT IV – THOREAU
book cover; image available at
http://therumpus.net/2009/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-robert-sullivan/
Henry David Thoreau , 1817-1862
chapter 1. biography and main works
George McMICHAEL
[682] During his lifetime, Henry David Thoreau published only two books, Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Both sold poorly. In eight years Walden sold fewer than 2,000 copies. Sale of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers totaled little more than 200, and so many unsold volumes were returned to Thoreau (who had paid for their publication) that he was moved to write in his Journal, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."
Thoreau's failures confirmed the views of many of his neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts, who considered him a loafer and a. cranky eccentric. Yet Thoreau considered Concord, where he was born and spent most of his life, "the most estimable place in all the world." Thoreau's grandfather, a successful merchant, had moved his family to Concord from Boston in 1800, but his descendants failed to prosper. Thoreau's father, an unsuccessful storekeeper and later a maker of pencils, was amiable and meek, a passive little man who cherished peace and ease and had little in common with his strong-willed son Henry. Thoreau's mother was large and dynamic, a reform-minded woman who dominated her family. She encouraged her children to share her own deep interest in nature and stirred in them ambitions to learn. In school, her son Henry was judged to be "an odd stick, not very studious," but his mother was determined that he would go to college, and when he was eleven he was enrolled in Concord Academy, a college preparatory school. Five years later he entered Harvard College.
In the 18jos, student life and the curriculum at Harvard were narrowly restricted, but [683] Thoreau maintained his independent ways and his critical judgment: College regulation required students to wear black coats. Thoreau wore green. When later told by Emerson that Harvard taught most of the branches of learning, Thoreau replied, "all the branch and none of the roots." And of the parchment diplomas earned by Harvard graduates once observed, "Let every sheep keep but his own skin, I say."
Thoreau was remembered as a student who displayed such "oddity in literary matters that his writings will never probably do him any justice." Many of his classmates thong him smug and filled with "Concord conceit," for Thoreau much preferred Concord Cambridge or the busy world of Boston. And after graduating from Harvard in 1837 , returned to Concord, where he worked with his father in making and peddling pencils. From 183 8 to 1841 he ran a private school, and he developed a friendship with Concord most famous resident, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau readily absorbed Emerson's transcendentalist doctrines, becoming a member of the informal Transcendentalist Club that met in Emerson's home. For two years (1841—184'}) he lived with the Emerson family earning his room and board by working as a handyman.
In 1844 Emerson purchased some land on the shore of Walden Pond, just south Concord Village. There, with Emerson's agreement, Thoreau began to build a cabin ; March 1845. Four months later, on July 4, Independence Day, he moved in and "commenced housekeeping." For two years and two months Thoreau remained at Walden with, the intention of living simply and cheaply while writing the description of a trip he lie taken in 1839 on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
Thoreau left his cabin at Walden in September 1847, recalling later "I had seven more lives to live and could not spare any more for that one," but it was at Walden Port that he had begun his greatest work, Walden. Portions of the manuscript were completed by early 1847. Thoreau hoped to publish it in 1849, but his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, had appeared and had failed, and no publisher would accept the new one. Thoreau then turned to revising Walden. He polished an expanded it for five more years, until it was finally published in 1854. It was also during Thoreau's stay at Walden that he was arrested arid jailed for his refusal to pay his poll lax of $1.50. His imprisonment lasted only one night, but it inspired the writing of his most famous single essay, "Civil Disobedience."
Much of Thoreau's work appeared in the transcendentalist journal, The Dial, which he helped edit. Many of his essays were originally designed for delivery as lectures. Since 1838 he had frequently spoken before the Concord Lyceum, and he had traveled as far north as Portland, Maine and as far south as Philadelphia to speak to similar group: But he achieved little success on the lecture platform, for he was a poor speaker and often. more interested in the sound of his own words than in the reactions of his audience. I. Walden Thoreau announced, "I have traveled a good deal in Concord." He had also traveled as far west as Minnesota, but he remained a New Englander and spent most o his life within a few miles of Concord, where he was born and where he died when he was forty-five.
For half a century after his death, Thoreau was largely consigned to obscurity as an insignificant eccentric among American writers. He was thought to be a "pale shadow" o Emerson, a mere woodsman and hermit whose nature writing was frequently marred b tedious moralizing. Lowell thought that Thoreau was provincial, lacked humor, and displayed "perversity of thought." Holmes called him a "nullifier of civilization," and Whittier thought that Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, was "wicked and heathenish." But since his death, Thoreau's reputation has steadily and, in recent years, dramatically risen His writings, most of them gathered and published posthumously, have appeared in hundreds of editions and translations. He is now more widely read and vastly more influential than any other transcendentalist, including Emerson, whose lesser disciple Thoreau was once thought to be.
[684] Thoreau's appeal to modern generations springs not only from his power with words but from the relevance of his ideas. His celebration of nature and his call to "simplify" have stirred countless readers who yearn to escape a society that is glutted with gadgetry and that ruins nature in the name of progress. He has become a patron saint to those who feel that cause of conscience is more important than the laws devised by man. His "Civil Disobedience" has provided a philosophy and a handbook for movements of passive resistance throughout the world.
Thoreau himself objected to organized resistance as much as to organized institutions. He argued not for a change of governments but a change of individual lives. He was seldom a member of any formal group. He opposed slavery but was not an abolitionist, and with few exceptions he despised meddling reformers. Thoreau saw the futility at the core of most human endeavors; he had a poor opinion of his fellow men and avoided them when he could, which has inspired his detractors to judge him an eccentric collector of grievances against humanity and humanity's fabrications—civilization, religion, art. Walden has been considered the work of an arrogant preacher, a pantheistic egotist, an antic stranger opposed to stability and order. Yet it remains a literary masterpiece, a great document of social dissent, and a spiritual testament that each year "seems to gain a little headway, as the world loses ground."
chapter 2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler YEATS
[8]
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
chapter 3. From The Golden Day
Lewis MUMFORD
[13] The pioneer who broke the trail westward left scarcely a trace of his adventure in the mind: what remains are the tags of pioneer customs, and mere souvenirs of the past, like the Pittsburg stogy, which is our living connection to-day with the Conestoga wagon, whose drivers used to roll cigars as the first covered wagons plodded over the Alleghenies.
What the pioneer felt, if he felt anything, in the midst of these new solitudes; what he dreamt, if he dreamt anything; all these things we must surmise from a few snatches of song, from the commonplace reports issued as the trail was nearing its end, by the generation of Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland, or by the reflections of their sons and daughters, romantically eager, like John G. Neihardt's, critically reflective, like Susan Glaspell's, or wistfully sordid, like Edgar Lee Masters' Anthology. Those who really faced the wilderness, and sought to make something out of it, remained in the East; in their reflection, one sees the reality that might have been. Henry David Thoreau was perhaps the only man who paused to give a report of the full experience. In a period when men were on the move, he remained still; when men were on the make, he remained poor; when civil disobedience broke out in the lawlessness. of the cattle thief and the mining town rowdy, by sheer neglect, Thoreau practiced civil disobedience as a principle, in protest against the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Law, and slavery itself. Thoreau in his life and letters shows what the pioneer movement might have come to if this great migration had sought culture rather than material conquest, and an intensity of life, rather than mere extension over the continent.
Born in Concord about half a generation after Emerson, Thoreau[14] found himself without the preliminary searchings and Teachings of the young clerygman. He started from the point that his fellow-townsman, Emerson, had reached; and where he first cleared out of his mind every idea that made no direct connections with his personal experience, Thoreau cleared out of his life itself every custom or physical apparatus, to boot, which could not stand up and justify its existence. "A native of the United States," De Tocqueville had observed, "clings to the world's goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty at grasping at all within his reach, that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications." Thoreau completely reversed this process: it was because he wanted to live fully that he turned away from everything that did not serve towards this end. He prized the minutes for what they brought, and would not exercise his citizenship at the town meeting, if a spring day by Walden Pond had greater promise; nor would he fill his hours with gainful practices, as a maker of pencils or a surveyor, beyond what was needed for the bare business of keeping his bodily self warm and active.
Thoreau seized the opportunity to consider what in its essentials a truly human life was; he sought, in Walden, to find out what degree of food, clothing, shelter, labor was necessary to sustain it. It was not animal hardihood or a merely tough physical regimen he was after; nor did he fancy, for all that he wrote in contempt of current civilization, that the condition of the woodcutter, the hunter, or the American Indian was in itself to be preferred. What he discovered was that people are so eager to get the ostentatious "necessaries" of a civil life that they lose the opportunity to profit by civilization itself: while their physical wants are complicated, their lives, culturally, are not enriched in proportion, but are rather pauperized and bleached.