In many respects, Thoreau went to Walden in search of the raw, hoping that an infusion of “savage delight” would cure him and (by the example he would provide) his neighbors of what he regarded as over-civilization, which he linked to timidity and uncritical faith in the authority of others. Throughout Walden, and indeed throughout the greater part of his writing, the impulse to simplify conditions and cast off the debilitating and dispiriting obligations of a respectable life is bound up with this pursuit of uninhibited, unadulterated wildness. His admiration for wildness in nature was unbounded. “Life consists with wildness,” he comments in the popular talk now known to readers as “Walking.” “The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him” (Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, p. 240). “Hope and the future for me,” he adds, “are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (Thoreau, p. 241).

Of course, Thoreau was hardly an actual wild man, a point he acknowledges in another talk, “Wild Apples,” when he notes that “our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock” (Thoreau, p. 452). As this comment suggests, Thoreau recognized that he came to the woods as a highly developed product of civilized society. So too his approach to the Walden environs should be regarded not as a kind of wilderness adventure—Walden was hardly a wilderness, then as now—but rather as an effort to locate and give voice to the wildness that subsists with and within the cultivated and domesticated. Late in Walden, offering an analogy from nature for the kind of extravagance he emulates in his writing, he notes that the migrating buffalo seeking “new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time” (p. 254). It is telling, in ways that few readers have fully understood, that Thoreau should actually prefer this cow to the seemingly wilder buffalo. What appeals to him about the cow is that its wild instinct has survived domestication: The wildness Thoreau pursues is not found in complete isolation from civilized and domesticating influences but rather survives in a deep, if sometimes unacknowledged, layer of being underlying those influences. The experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to recover such wildness, as it survived on the margins of Concord village life and beneath the smooth and refined surface of even the most modern, educated, and enlightened men and women.

Thoreau went to Walden not only to hoe beans, fish in the region’s several ponds, and wander the countryside in pursuit of raw, physical sensation, but also, it turned out, to read and write. Though these would seem to be rather civilized activities, he imagined pursuing them for their wildness as well. Extravagance is Thoreau’s figure for this wildness in Walden: “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced” (p. 253). Thoreau invokes the word’s etymology in order to restore some of its original wildness to it. The background to this ambition is in Emerson, who famously claimed in his essay “The Poet” that all language is “fossil poetry,” by which he meant that words retain, in their etymological roots, traces of their early history and use, reminders of the physical pictures or actions that they originally brought to mind. Emerson argued in his first published work, Nature, that “the corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language,” and that “wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things” (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 223). The poet restores language to its primitive vigor, and so restores men and women to something like a prelapsarian state of unified physical and mental, worldly and spiritual well-being. What’s more, the poet, Emerson says in his essay of that title, “knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, ‘with the flower of the mind’” (p. 459).

Influenced by Emerson, as well as by the work of such contemporary linguists as Richard Trench and Charles Kraitsir, Thoreau would press this point to its limits, using language as an instrument to recover some of the same wildness he sought in swamps and abandoned fields. Only such language, extravagant to the root, has the power to awaken and reinvigorate a somnolent population: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression” (p. 254). Exaggeration takes many forms in Walden, from the depiction in “Brute Neighbors” of a warlike encounter of red and black ants rendered in mock-epic style to the description in “Spring” of the melting railroad embankment, replete with dozens of etymological word-plays that aim to show that “the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth” (pp. 240—241).