Living Poems in Thoreau’s Prose

Abstract

Thoreau’s career started with poetry: some of his earliest publications were poems, and his first major literary project was a comprehensive anthology of English poetry that he worked on from 1841 until 1844. He abandoned the project in order to begin writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which, like a palimpsest, bears evidence of its predecessor even as it builds from it. A Week’s debt to Thoreau’s early work on poetry has been well documented by critics on all counts except with regard to the influence of Thoreau’s own embedded poetry. I argue that reading the dialogue between Thoreau’s poems and prose yields a depiction of poetry’s existence as something akin to a biological process, albeit one that exceeds the rules of nature and especially the inevitability of death. The book posits “life” stories of Thoreau’s poems, tracing poems from inspiration and inception, to printed words, to reprinted and recalled words, forces that outlast their author. In a book about significant loss – specifically, the loss of Thoreau’s brother, John, to whom the book is dedicated – a poem’s immortality matters even more in concept than it does in fact. The narrative of the journey – with its beginning, middle, and end – employs plot structure to commemorate the course of a life, John’s life, now ended, but the poems try to elude that temporality. Even as these poems escape the Week narrative’s portrayal of time’s inevitable losses, they function as a consoling force in the face of that loss within the narrative. Narrating the lives of poems may paradoxically fix them in the teleology of the excursion, but these lyrics nevertheless effect a more supple narration, a story that troubles notions of death and ending, life, and representation.