Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 123sought a communal life, at Fruitlands or Brook Farm, if they tried to live according
to their principles. Characteristically, Thoreau chose to live alone, in a hut he built
for himself. It was this sojourn in the woods that, several years later, Thoreau was to
recreate in Walden, using the journals that, as a matter of habit now, he kept while he
was there. Robert Frost was to call Walden his “favorite poem.” Many other descrip-
tions or generic titles have been applied to it: it has been called, among other things,
an autobiography, a philosophical narrative, an ecological journal, a spiritual diary.
It is, in a way, sui generis; it creates its own genre; it is unique. It is also typically
American in its intense focus on the first person singular, the “I” of the narrator and
author (and, in fact, its elision of narrator and author); its blend of fact and fiction,
personal experience and broader reflection; and its intimacy and immediacy, the
sense of a confessional raised to the level of art. Walden, in short, is one of the many
great American books to which Walt Whitman’s remark, “Who touches this book,
touches a man,” could act as an epigraph: because, like them, it is the utterly unre-
peatable expression of the author, in a particular place and at a particular point in
time. Its uniqueness, in the American context, is its typicality. It is, in other words,
the expression of a culture committed to the idea that every person is being truly
representative in being truly singular. And it belongs to a tradition of experiment, the
pursuit of the personally unique and new: a tradition for which the cardinal sin is to
sound like others – to imitate rather than innovate, and embrace conventional forms.
It was Alexis de Tocqueville who, in his Democracy in America (1835–1840),
observed that, in a democratic society, what the poet takes as his subject is the
representative man he knows best: that is, “himself alone.” He has no need to dwell
on gods or princes, “on legends or on traditions and memories of old days,” since
these neither embody nor express his culture. In a democracy, everyone does that.
Every member of a democratic society enacts its ideals of individualism and equality,
or rather should do so; and the poet simply attends to the hero, and the enactment
of democratic ideas, with which he is most familiar. He announces the simple and
seminal discovery, Tocqueville says, “I have only to contemplate myself.” That is, of
course, the discovery Thoreau makes in Walden. As Thoreau puts it, very early on in
the book: “I brag for humanity rather than for myself.” He pursues a universal,
democratic possibility in trying to be true to the needs and dictates of his own being.
The pursuit is essentially a dramatic one: he does not so much “brag,” in fact, as
enact. The style and approach of Walden are both energetic and exploratory; the
reader is challenged here, as elsewhere in Thoreau’s work, by a language that is fluid,
witty, vigorous – constantly testing propositions against the evidence and experience,
with the help of metaphor, rhythm, and pun. At one point, for instance, Thoreau
describes the auctioning of the “effects” or property of a church deacon after his
death, “for his life had not been ineffectual.” “The evil that men do lives after them,”
he declares, playing on a famous quotation from the Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar.
And, in this case, we infer, the “evil” happened to be the deacon’s possessions, and
the materialism, the thirst for acquisition they clearly express. Among those
possessions was “a dried tapeworm:” a perfect image for suggesting how, devoted to
material objects, commodities, a man may measure out his days and suck the blood,GGray_c02.indd 123ray_c 02 .indd 123 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM