Chapter 14. Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

[Thomas Hood]

Summary

Former Inhabitants:

Cato Ingraham

Zilpha

Brister Freeman

the Stratton family

(John) Breed

the burning of Breed's hut

narcolepsy and fire department

the smoldering cellar

Wyman the potter

Hugh Quoil

cellar dents

a new Village of Walden

Winter Visitors:

winter isolation

paths through the snow

counting steps

continuity of walks

the barred owl

the woodchopper

a long-headed farmer

the poet

the Connecticut philosopher

the one other

the Visitor who never comes

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/walden/cha pter14.html
Walden Study Text

[Saffron]

DW, forgive my jumping ahead, but August is running out. Which reminds me, what is the book for September?

In several posts, DWill has alluded to the poetry in HDT's prose. I think Thoreau's paragraph describing his moving about in deep snow could easily be turned into a poem; in fact it begs.

Here are Thoreau's lines:

[Saffron]

This chapter has has Thoreau's description of what it means to be a poet. I think he got it just right.

[DWill]

Saffron,

There is what I would call poetry in many of his sentences, largely because they are so full of figurative language. It's interesting to speculate on what he would have thought of the idea that his prose could be presented as poetry. My suspicion--only that--is that for him poetry was a kind of gnomic utterance, with a bit of the quality of the spell, and in a slightly different, more elevated register than prose. The rhyming of traditional verse would have set it apart as well. This reminds me to look up his poetry. I'm not sure how much of it there is. Emerson said in the eulogy that Thoreau was not so fine a poet as a prose writer.

The poet you refer to in the 2nd post is William Ellery Channing, I think. He was supposedly regarded then as the finest transcendental poet (although Thoreau called his style "sublimo-slipshod"), but no one reads him now, and obviously the movement did not produce poets anywhere near the stature of the earlier English Romantics. I suppose that Emerson might now be thought of as the best transcendental poet.
DWill

[Thomas Hood]

[DWill]

Well, Tom, he is an artist, so I'm not surprised that you find this in him, whether we call it intention or not.

The chapter reminds me just a bit of "Spoon River Anthology," also of Frost's poem "Directive," describing the former village cultures.

[Thomas Hood]

[DWill]

Tom,
You could expect him almost to be channeling some of these classic books that he'd read in the original language. Thanks for pointing out the similarity.

Will