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Lakes of Light: Modes of Representation in Walden

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openalex:w213904701

Authors

H. Daniel Peck

Reported year

2004

Reported language

en

Source type

article

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2026-11-09T19:17:45.338494+00:00

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2026-11-09T19:17:45.338494+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

The Ponds chapter of Walden, more than halfway through book, presents our first extended and particularized view of Walden landscape. In this essay, author considers modes of representation in this pivotal chapter, which has traditionally been seen as or mystical center of Walden. Here it is viewed instead as a chapter seeking equilibrium as much as ecstasy, in which rather than Transcendental symbolism makes itself felt as dominant, and stabilizing, modality. In this view, various kinds of description, in their interaction, create engine of chapter's development, and ultimately lead to a sense of plurality, aggregation, and inclusiveness appropriate to chapter's commitment to the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature. ********** In Rural Hours (1850), a work of bioregional literature published in United States four years before Walden, Susan Fenimore Cooper took note of a significant change in American artistic and intellectual culture: foundation for change [a shift from abstraction to particularity] may doubtless be found in fact, that all descriptive writing, on natural objects, is now much less vague and general than it was formerly; it has become very much more definite and accurate within last half century. [P]eople, she adds, grown tired of mere vapid, conventional repetitions, they felt want of something more positive, more real. (1) We know that Thoreau read at least part of Rural Hours while he was writing Walden (2) and, whether or not it directly influenced him, this passage unmistakably anticipates certain aspects of his book. Furthermore, its sentiments are in accord with some contemporary understandings of Walden, which have emphasized its relation to natural history. These understandings--influenced by new ecocriticism--have, to some extent, supplanted older mythic and poetic readings of work. (3) In this view, Walden's particularity contrasts with abstracted nature that characterizes much of nineteenth-century American antebellum literature. It thus appears as an antidote to philosophical idealism of age, including transcendental symbolism of Thoreau's mentor Emerson. A focus on Walden's concreteness is certainly not misdirected, and indeed has sharpened our sense of very real nature of nature in this work. But there is a problem here. Defining exactly what constitutes Walden's particularity is made complicated by fact that we have to wait more than 170 pages for an extended description of actual landscape of Pond. This description occurs in The Ponds, a chapter that is often regarded as book's structural center but which in fact falls somewhat past book's midpoint. Readers interested in description, as such, may wonder why they have had to wait so long for it. By making this observation, I do not mean to suggest that Walden, prior to The Ponds chapter, is lacking in concrete descriptions of nature. At every stage of book's development, we find a mixture of fact and truth, to employ Thoreau's own terms. (4) Even a predominantly ideological chapter like Economy has its share of descriptive moments. Yet it is striking to consider how little we learn about landscape of Walden and its neighborhood prior to The Ponds. That Thoreau is aware of this deferral is consistent with what we know about composition of book. Very little of The Ponds was written during his two-year stay (1845-47) at Walden. In fact, most of chapter appears to have been composed during and after 1852, in final two years of book's eight-year composition. At one point in chapter, Thoreau, in an unusual gesture, locates precise moment of his writing--now, in summer of '52. (5) Some parts of The Ponds were written even later than 1852--deep into final phases of composition. (6) That so much of this chapter was composed late suggests that Thoreau withheld view that it affords, in some sense, even from himself, and that he was able to offer such a view only when passage of time had enabled his revisioning and remembrance of Walden experience. …

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OPENALEX

W213904701

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Scholarship

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article

Natural entities mentioned

Lake · Landscape

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• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W213904701

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