Walden and the Georgic Mode

Abstract

Believes Walden has strong ties to the georgic tradition that stretches from classical antiquity through eighteenth-century England and antebellum America into the present day. Claims that under the influence of agricultural works – Virgil’s Georgics, Roman agriculture writings, seventeenth- century American natural resource surveys, eighteenth-century georgic poetry, and nineteenth-century technical agricultural works – Thoreau turns to the georgic mode in Walden to integrate creative artistic work and the natural environment in a way unavailable to the more familiar pastoral tradition. Concludes the georgic critical approach requires the significant revision or reordering of pastoral interpretations of Walden’s engagements with questions of time, history, nature, labor, and language.