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Wordsworth and Thoreau Two Versions of Pastoral g r e g g a r r a r d  Crossings On the very first page of the first edition of Walden, Thoreau issued a challenge: ‘‘I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.’’1 Not for him the sad, meditative — perhaps rather effeminate — insomnia of Coleridge, but instead a manly and disruptive announcement; a shout for the dawn rather than ambivalent nocturnal thoughts. To drive the point home, he repeated it in ‘‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.’’ Walden announces itself with a dramatic renunciation of English romanticism, suggesting a decided ‘‘anxiety of influence.’’ Why might Thoreau, ‘‘accidentally’’ embarking upon his experiment on ‘‘Independence Day, on the 4th of July 1845’’ (84), feel an urgent need to dissociate this work from the English; more specifically, from the English romantic poets; and most specifically, I will argue, from the work of William Wordsworth? The reasons soon become clear. Walden Pond, the apparent center of Thoreau’s New World,isproperly introduced to us only well into the book, after a lengthy first chapter.Here we discover that it ‘‘impressed [him] like a tarn high up on the one side of a mountain’’ (86). ‘‘Tarn’’ derives from the Old Norse tjörn; Thoreau’s vocabulary here comes from the northern dialect of Cumberland, via the most famous poets of that region. Despite the dissociative gesture aimed at Coleridge, the true ‘‘precursor’’ of Walden is a Cumbrian native: ‘‘It is the figure of Wordsworth . . . beyond any single poem, that engages Thoreau.’’2 In this essay I want to look at the ‘‘crossing’’of Wordsworthby Thoreau — the anxious rejection, the undermining and even betrayal, and the hybridization — in terms of some versions of pastoral, georgic, and the sublime. Although in part a textual exercise, the present experi194 ment must in the main be an experiment in and of the present, because thesetwofigureshaveassumedaspecialsignificanceforcontemporaryenvironmentalism . Wordsworth’s suggestion in his popular Guide to the Lakes that the Lake District was seen as ‘‘a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy,’’3 ledtotheformationoftheNationalTrustin1895andlater to the designation of the Lake District as a national park. Thoreau, for his part, makes a plea in The Maine Woods for the establishment of wildlife reserves: ‘‘Why should not we . . . have . . . national preserves . . . in which the bear and the panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist.’’4 Furthermore, several of the key works of ecocriticism published in the 1990s have testified to the importance of Wordsworth and Thoreau: Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology and Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary Criticism focus on Wordsworth; Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination uses Thoreau as the center of its argument; Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory concludes with a section on Thoreau; and Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests has a section on each of them. Without wishing to rehearse their arguments, I might suggest an initial, biographical sense of ‘‘crossing’’ to guide and orient the other senses: Buell argues that ‘‘Appearances of self-contradiction notwithstanding, the development of Thoreau’s thinking about nature seems pretty clearly to move along a path from homocentrism toward biocentrism,’’5 and the period 1845– 1854, during which Walden was written, revised, and published, must cover a considerable part of that path. Self-conscious artistry and design, according to Buell, coexist in the revision process, with an increasing attention to ecological detail. Wordsworth’s path, despite Bate’s cautious attempt to revalue The Excursion, must still be seen as the reverse of this, as his increasingly complacent and conventional piety and nationalism overwrote — in the fifty-one-year process of rewriting The Prelude especially — the youthful republicanism and pantheistic sense of nature’s precious vitality Wordsworth worked through in his most productive period from 1795 to 1807. In their respective ‘‘great decades,’’ we might say — to simplify a good deal — Wordsworth and Thoreau ‘‘crossed’’ each other in environmentalist terms, heading in opposite directions. Mountains One key crossing point is the experience of ‘‘the sublime,’’ explored most famously by Thoreau in The Maine Woods and by Wordsworth in The Pastoral in Wordsworth and Thoreau 195 his literal crossing of the Alps at the Simplon Pass in The Prelude. The 1805 Prelude saw...

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