American Gods Teaser Shows Gillian Anderson as David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Henry David Thoreau - Wikipedia. Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 1. May 6, 1. 86. 2) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern- day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced . The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near- sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings. His paternal grandfather was born in Jersey. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college; he never petitioned to make a legal name change. The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five- dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates . After he graduated in 1. Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1. Thoreau's first essay published in The Dial was . The first journal entry, on October 2. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. ![]() In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the . For a few months in 1. ![]() William Emerson on Staten Island. He rediscovered the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire and bought in 1. Charles Dunbar. Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), which was used in the electrotyping process. In April 1. 84. 4 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 3. Walden Woods. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.— Henry David Thoreau, . Latest breaking news, including politics, crime and celebrity. Find stories, updates and expert opinion. Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "modest New England family" of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. The Texarkana Gazette is the premier source for local news and sports in Texarkana and the surrounding Arklatex areas. Mother Goddess as Kali - The Feminine Force in Indian Art: An article exploring symbolism behind the Great Indian Goddess Kali, using her representations in art for. Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN.com. In March 1. 84. 5, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, . I see no other alternative, no other hope for you. The house was in . Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes. ![]() In January and February 1. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 2. Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State—an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self- government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's. Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled . It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem . Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,0. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions. The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, . In 1. 85. 0, he and his family moved into a house at 2. Main Street, where he lived until his death. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to . He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as . With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1. Great Lakes region in 1. Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. He devoured all the first- hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook; the arctic explorers. John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry; David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser- known works by explorers and literate travelers. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to . Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, A Plea for Captain John Brown, which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises. As a biographer of Brown put it, . In 1. 86. 0, following a late- night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, . Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn. Channing and another friend, Harrison Blake, edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1. Thoreau's journals, which he often mined for his published works but which remained largely unpublished at his death, were first published in 1. A new, expanded edition of the journals is under way, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society and his by the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, established in 1. Lincoln, Massachusetts. Nature and human existence. He was himself a highly skilled canoeist; Nathaniel Hawthorne, after a ride with him, noted that . Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it. He wrote in Walden, . It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America. He decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred . In the essay . His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord.
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