‘Wild Apples’ and Thoreau’s Commitment to Wildness in the Last Decade of His Life

Abstract

The focus of this essay is on Thoreau’s newly developed capability of overcoming the poignancy of existence in the last years of his life through making an art of the most refined poetic elegance as in the late essays (or through humor and extensive ‘wild’ narration as in Cape Cod). The first section deals explicitly with Thoreau’s preoccupation with wildness, establishing how environmental awareness was already a contemporary context for Thoreau and how it appears across his late work. The second section focuses on literary wildness, outlining the overall argument that in his last years Thoreau was engaging all the powers of verbal expression in order to sustain life, or that he was pleading the cause of nature preservation for both its sake and for the human sake while at the same time writing itself was becoming for him something much more than a profession and an art.