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Henry David Thoreau 's Life And Legacy

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Lufkin Middle School

Henry David Thoreau Life and Legacy

Aby Nguyen
Intro To Lit II 4th Period
Mrs.Tutt
January 15th, 2017

An American essayist, naturalist, poet, historian, pencil maker, surveyor, philosopher, and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau was and still is an inspiration to many readers around the world. By immersing himself into nature he hoped to gain more of a keen understanding of society through his own personal inspection. Living in simplicity and self sufficiency were other goals of Thoreau. This lifestyle was inspired by the transcendentalist philosophy, a popular custom during the American Romantic period. Proven in his literary works Thoreau was not an author that wrote stories, he wrote some …show more content…

When John endured a lengthy illness in 1841 Henry closed his school because it began to be too much for him to handle on his own. After closing his school Henry was soon invited to be a live-in handyman in the home his mentor, neighbor, and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau’s graduation at Harvard, he had become a protege of his famous neighbor and informal student of Emerson’s Transcendental ideas. Transcendentalism was the American version of Romantic Idealism, a dualistic Neoplatonic view of the world divided into the material and spiritual.During his stay with Emerson, Thoreau developed ambitions of becoming a writer and got help from Emerson in getting some poems and essays published in the Transcendental journal, The Dial. Its inaugural issue, dated July 1840, carried Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” and his essay on the Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus. The Dial published more of Thoreau’s poems and then, in July 1842, the first of his outdoor essays, “Natural History of Massachusetts.” Though disguised as a book review, it showed that a nature writer of distinction was in the making. Then followed more lyrics, and fine ones, such as “To the Maiden in the East,” and another nature essay, remarkably felicitous, “A Winter Walk.” The Dial ceased

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