Hey there.
It's Professor Bernstein, and in this video, I'm going to share with you one of the biggest
misconceptions about the Romantics' writing style and tell you a bit more about Thoreau's
own writing practice.
Okay, so you know that the Romantics placed a great deal of emphasis on the present moment
and intuition.
In terms of writing, they wanted to break free from classical precedents, which meant
they didn't want to have to force their ideas into some pre-existing form.
Instead, they wanted the form—the structure, the style—of their writing to be organically
connected with the ideas themselves.
Some students have been led to believe that the Romantics writing style was really spontaneous,
carefree—freeform--and based on their immediate intuitions.
I can understand where people get this idea.
In Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge that is generally considered to have launched the British Romantic movement—Wordsworth
declared "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."
So sometimes students get the idea that the Romantics just wrote when they experienced
these outpourings of feelings or when ideas rushed through their minds.
They did.
Later in the semester, you'll be reading from Thoreau's journal, where you'll see how he
recorded what he was seeing and thinking in the present moment.
One thing you'll probably notice with Thoreau is that feelings are not as dominant in his
writing as they are with British Romantics like Wordsworth.
His emphasis is really more on the mind and the thoughts that are flowing through it and
on the mind's connection to nature and the higher laws of being.
You'll also notice a really big difference in terms of his writing style in Walden and
his style in the journal.
That brings me to my point about the misconceptions about the Romantics' writing practices.
They didn't just pour out their thoughts and feelings and then publish them.
They might have done this, but they also came back to what they wrote and kept shaping and
reworking them until they seemed—or sounded—just right.
For instance, as one scholar points out Coleridge's poem "The Ancient Mariner," which was published
in Lyrical Ballads, "went through 18 versions, each representing a distinct authorial intention
at a particular time."
Thoreau wrote nearly seven drafts of Walden.
He was deeply committed to the craft of writing, and for him—as for Emerson—reading and
writing were intimately connected.
As Robert Richardson points out in his biography of Thoreau, Thoreau kept a "journal for his
own observations and original thoughts" and another one "for memorable bits from his reading"
(93).
In 1841, he "went back over and recopied into a new notebook all that remained or all that
he wished to keep—still hundreds of pages—of his earlier journals" (93).
Later on, Richardson notes, Thoreau developed a habit of working "back over his journals
and reread[ing] books, to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and
recopy his own earlier journal work, measuring, weighing, culling, and sorting his materials"
(107).
What do you make of this practice of writing and rewriting and reworking his journals?
What does this tell us about how he cultivates his knowledge and perspectives?
How does this relate to—or differ from—what he said about his education at Harvard—the
issue of learning all of the "branches" of knowledge but none of its "roots"?
Is his getting to the roots of things through this process?
How so?
Thoreau didn't just write and rewrite and rework his journals—he'd often "write up"
from them—using his journals as source material for his more formal writings like Walden.
So in his journals he might have recorded his insights and experiences
in the moment—or maybe not exactly when they were happening—but later that day.
These journals are characterized more by their richness of observation and description than
by any definitive rulings on the experiences he was reporting.
It's only later that he shapes and reshapes these experiences—finding connections and
discovering patterns—and turns them into narratives like Walden.
We'll talk more about the structure of Walden as we read more of it, but for now I just
want to point out one significant change he makes when he writes up from his journals
and creates Walden—the narrative we're reading.
As he points out, in Walden, "The present was my next experiment of this kind, which
I purpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the experience of two
years into one" (389).
So as he thinks about and reshapes his private journals for the public narrative of Walden,
he condenses—distills—two years into one.
Why do you think he did this?
What effect might this condensation have on the narrative?
What is the significance of this decision—from your perspective?
Think about these questions and the other ones I raised in the video—and when you're
ready, head over to the video on aesthetics and our experience of reading Walden.
Of course, as always, if you like this video, I'd love it if you liked it and subscribed
to my channel.
Okay that's it for now.