ABSTRACT
This chapter is about Walden by Henry David Thoreau and about some poems by Robert Creeley. Both men are, in a profound sense, solitary, inward and meditative philosopher-writers, whose posture in relation to their world is angular, and inveterately critical. Creeley writes of 'the immense loneliness of this country's people', hearing in Thoreau and Whitman 'the self's cry de profundis for an annealing company'. Thoreau conceived his most influential book in a cabin in the woods which he built with his own hands; and yet his mother, who feared for the dietary consequences of his isolation, brought him doughnuts, and his cabin could be seen by commuters on the Fitchburg Railroad. This constant and somewhat paradoxical oscillation between the self-communion of an introspective authorship and the projection of that very isolation as a social and political stance is a deep stimulus to both writers.
