Thoreau, Marx forcefully argues, “restores the pastoral hope to its traditional location. He removes it from history, where it is manifestly unrealizable, and relocates it in literature, which is to say, in his own consciousness, in his craft, in Walden” (p. 265).

Throughout Walden, and indeed throughout much of Thoreau’s journal and other published writings, the emphasis regularly shifts from whatever is being observed or described to the author’s very powers of observation and description. Thoreau suggests that he hoes beans “as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day” (p. 129). Thoreau everywhere records the effect of natural phenomena on his sensibility, as if the larger purpose of his project were to describe not Walden and its surroundings but the effects of Walden and its surroundings on his marvelously sensitive and responsive mind. In “Solitude,” he describes his experience of a gentle rain:

I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignif icant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me (p. 106).

The passage highlights the impact of the rain on Thoreau’s own receptive sensibilities, which emerge as the great unifying force of the passage. Thoreau is himself frequently center stage in Walden as his sympathetic powers, his extraordinary imaginative resources, and his wonderfully inventive verbal prowess vie with the actual Walden environment for the reader’s attention.

Even the larger design of Walden underscores Thoreau’s mythopoeic intentions: his effort to situate this world in a deeper, more mythically and even morally resonant reality, to ground the temporal and contingent in the eternal and unchanging. The book’s emphasis on seasonal change—advancing from midsummer through fall, winter, and ultimately spring, a progress underscored in the book’s last few manuscript drafts—reinforces the awakening motif announced in the epigraph. Nature, as Emerson insists in the “Language” chapter of Nature, “is the symbol of spirit”: “By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause” (Emerson, pp. 20, 25). Thoreau’s changing seasons correspond to changing psychological and moral conditions, just as descriptive passages often modulate into moral and symbolic reflections. Moreover, Thoreau uses the seasonal motif to challenge his readers to awaken to realities that, for all their omnipresence, remain unacknowledged and even unsuspected. The book’s many references to Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts and traditions, with their frequent emphasis on the illusion that pervades most people’s commonsense perception of their world, further hints at its overarching design. As grounded as Walden is in its immediate circumstances and contexts, its mythic and symbolic design often has the effect of minimizing or marginalizing those circumstances and contexts. What’s more, the individual self—the figure of the participant-observer at the heart of so much of Thoreau’s writing—serves as the fulcrum for this mythopoeic experience, since it is to something deep within the individual self that the moral and symbolic realities in question typically correspond, what Coleridge aptly called “the one Life within us and abroad.”

More recent scholarship has shifted its emphasis from the mythopoeic and symbolic to the historical and discursive contexts of Thoreau’s work. This is in keeping with general trends in literary scholarship. What is unusual in the case of Thoreau is that Thoreau himself often—though by no means always—seems to downplay the role of such historical and discursive contexts. Indeed, following Emerson’s lead, he sometimes seems to dismiss history altogether. The irony is that Thoreau was in fact surprisingly well read in social and historical contexts and even quite regularly engaged in his writing with actual social issues and political conflicts. The consciousness at the heart of Walden is constantly encountering and reflecting on evidence of the social and historical world around Concord, whether in its repeated attempts to come to terms with the railroad tracks that cut across one end of the pond or in its consideration of the many abandoned homes encountered along the path to and from Concord (most of them once occupied by Concord’s African-American population). Thoreau’s emphatic concern with questions of household economy in the book’s opening chapter is also increasingly regarded in the context of other prevailing and emerging discourses of economy and domesticity. Ultimately, Thoreau frames Walden as a reflection on contemporary social and economic circumstances. Its early chapters represent one of the most important sustained critiques of the material and moral condition of life in the North in the decades before the Civil War. Although many have challenged and continue to challenge the apparent isolation of the reflecting consciousness at the heart of Walden, it has become increasingly clear that critics’ emphasis on the mythopoeic dimensions of Thoreau’s project must be balanced with greater attention to the discursive and historical contexts with which he is also preoccupied throughout his work.

One area where this change is most evident is in scholars’ approaches to Thoreau’s environmentalism. Where Thoreau’s late nineteenth-century reputation as a “poet-naturalist” was displaced by his twentieth-century reputation as a serious and sophisticated, almost cosmopolitan artist, more recent criticism has returned to Thoreau’s engagement with natural history, paying particular attention to his command of the various newly emerging scientific disciplines that were then transforming the study of natural history and to his highly accomplished skills as an observer and recorder of natural phenomena. Not long after Leo Marx had insisted that Thoreau’s real subject was not Walden Pond and its environs but his own consciousness, environmental historian Roderick Nash insisted in his Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) on Thoreau’s important contribution to an emerging and distinctively American wilderness sensibility. For a long time, these reputations occupied separate disciplinary compartments, with literary scholars paying more attention to matters of language and form and environmental historians, environmentalists, and other nature enthusiasts paying more attention to Thoreau’s inspirational practice as a naturalist and natural historian.