DONALD
ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota
with Stephen Adams, "The Endings of Walden and Stages of
its Composition," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 84
(1981), 451-69.
Walden changed radically over the eight years of its development. Only
in the sense that the seasonal structure and the rhetoric of defending his experiment
in subsistence farming (Ch. 1-8) are still present in the final version can we
agree with Professor Shanley that "the essential nature of Walden did not
change from first to last." Attention to the evolution of the manuscript help
us to appreciate the second half of Walden, especially. We see how that
latter part of the book grew from an appendix of "Economy" into a quest for unity
in the world-for one principle that would illustrate and make significant all
of Nature. With his discovery of the organic principle, Thoreau, the persona of
Walden, could leave the Pond and return to the human community with his
life-reviving message, the complete Walden.
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