Thoreau and Whitman
...e the individual. But he saw conformity to the rules and routines made by others as the main threat to the independent search for the truth. And he saw political life as a constant spur to conformity, because it is always a matter of coercion. Yet Thoreau did not blame political leaders. When they impose their will on the masses, he said, the fault lies with the masses who let themselves be coerced (Chernus). “He also argues against any form of state involvement with religion. No one can make another person religious by coercion or threat of punishment. Shared religious or moral values will enhance communities only if they are adopted voluntarily” (Abbot). For Thoreau, the human mind is our access to infinite reality. He urged everyone to make their mind ‘a quarter of heaven itself- an hypethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods’ (Bennet 171). For Thoreau, nature is more than a symbol of freedom. It is the very source of freedom. Only by leaving human society, he argued, could he gain direct access to God’s cosmic laws simplify his life, and escape the pressures of conformity. Direct contact with nature made him conscious of his own unique relationship with nature, he said (Chernus). “Thoreau felt it necessary to be in constant contact with wilderness for personal re-creation. But he did not expect to merge into nature. He understood that he remained always a conscious human being, unable to live permanently in wilderness” (Abbot). “He wanted, without doubt, to strip his life of nonessentials- to become self-sufficient, to live a purposeful life- but to just what end he initially could not and finally preferred not to state precisely” (Buell). “His struggle for identity gave him great powers of concentration and diligence. He was not born a writer, but he taught himself by imitation to carpenter solid verbal structures and give them rhythm and proportion” (Unger 169). According to Bengtsson, Some believe [Thoreau] went to live at Walden Pond because he was a hermit or a recluse or because he hated his fellow man, but this is not the case. [He] had a very special and sincere reason to go to Walden Pond; to honor his brother. On January 11, 1842, [Thoreau’s] brother, John Jr., died of lockjaw. It was his brother's death which prompted him to decide to go to Walden Pond. Ralph Waldo Emerson owned land adjacent to Walden Pond and allowed [him] to live [there]. He left his nearby town of Concord to live at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, Independence Day, [and] stayed [there] for two years, two months, and two days. He wanted to live his life deliberately, so he went and built a simple cabin at Walden Pond. As he explains in Walden: ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’” (www.americanpoems.com). According to Chernus, “his way of experiencing ultimate reality directly and living ‘a glorious existence’ was to live in immediate contact with nature, directly under its laws” (www.colorado.edu). Before long, Thoreau had settled into a casual, unorthodox routine: a little farming, a little day labor… a great deal of reading and meditating and roaming (including a two-week trip to the Maine Woods); frequent returns to town for supplies, meals, socializing, and (on one occasion) the one-night stint in jail for tax resistance that led him to write ‘Resistance to Civil Government’; and, eventually, some local lecturing as Thoreau discovered that audiences were interested in hearing about his practical application of Emersonian self-reliance (Buell ). Out of such activity and thought came Walden, a series of 18 essays describing his experiment in basic living and his effort to set his time free for leisure. Several of the essays provide Thoreau's original perspective on the meaning of work and leisure and describe his experiment in living as simply and self-sufficiently as possible, while in others Thoreau describes the various realities of life at Walden Pond: his intimacy with the small animals he came in contact with; the sounds, smells, and look of woods and water at various seasons; the music of wind in telegraph wires—in short, the felicities of learning how to fulfill his desire to live as simply and self-sufficiently as possible. The physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond is what gives the book authority, while Thoreau's command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic (Henry David Thoreau). According to Unger, “Walden is not a document, nor even the record of a calculated experiment. It is a work of art pretending to be a documentary” (180). Walden portrays the author’s desire to define his individuality as an uncommon man different from conventional beings. Thoreau expresses his discrimination toward aristocrats and the affluent, adding to the satire and irony by identifying himself as a gentleman of leisure who sets his own criteria of exclusiveness. He chooses to live a simple life, uses practical clothing and shuns animal food, coffee, tea, and wine. Thoreau considers nature his religion and universal medicine and recognizes Walden Pond as his heaven (Abbot). Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills, Long Island. “He was the second of nine children, several of whom turned out to be of unsound mental and physical constitution. His father was a not too successful carpenter and his mother was the mainstay of the family” (Chase). Whitman had a significant attachment to his “nearly illiterate mother which is one of the remarkable and ennobling facts of his life” (Chase). After a certain amount of desultory schooling, [Whitman] worked in various capacities for newspapers and printers. He even tried his hand at teaching school. But it was newspaper work that he was drawn to, and by 1846 the somewhat indolent young man had worked hard enough at it to become the editor, for two years, of the Brooklyn Eagle, a flourishing paper which expressed the opinions of the Democratic Party and made Whitman something of a public figure in the rapidly growing town (Chase). One who knew him intimately has said that he never saw upon Whitman’s features any trace of mean or evil passions. The man was thoroughly wholesome. Meaning no harm, he suspected none. In this respect he belonged to a less self-conscious antiquity, when nothing pertaining to man was common or unclean, and even the worship of the powers of generation was not without dignity and solemnity (Foote). According to Chase, “Whitman was in his way an intellectual as well as a highly unorthodox poet. He had his neurotic side- covert, bisexual, quirky, elusive, power-seeking, bohemian, libidinous, indolent. Which is to say that Whitman’s poses were not mere play-acting but arose from a deep maladjustment to the nineteenth-century America he lived in” (www.galenet.galegroup.com). Foote states that “Whitman appealed to the brotherhood of all and the dignity of each. He declared he would have nothing which every other man might not have on equal terms” (www.freethought.vze.com). For example, in Leaves of Grass he states, “welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, not an inch, nor a particle of an inch, is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest” (Whitman 26). As stated by Mallis, “Walt [Whitman] was a firm believer in democracy and much in Leaves of Grass gives us a clear vision of his belief that American ideals serve as an example to the world” (www.liglobal.com). “America has need of Whitman’s teaching as the poet of Democracy. He derided ‘the mania of owning things,’ he scorned distinction of caste and class, he sang the divineness of comradeship- and, what is more, he practiced it” (Foote). He rejects no fact of life from his poems; yet he is not a ‘realist’: his poetry ‘is to be transcendent and new; it is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic.’ As for the form of poems, they are to be ‘organic,’ evolving free metrical patterns ‘as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush.’ And it is significant that Whitman uses the phrase ‘poems or music or oration or recitation,’ because his poems often have a musical structure- so much that sometimes we can follow the patterns of aria and recitative in his poetry as Whitman has learned them from the Italian operas he loved so well (Unger 336-337). Whitman’s poet does not ‘stop for regulation- he is the president of regulation.’ Writers should not trouble themselves to conform to laws; ‘a great poet is followed by laws- they conform t...