The Legacy of Emerson and Thoreau
Judith Mela
Background: This unit is designed for a standard 11th grade American Studies class that is
taught in conjunction with a history teacher. In addition to the historical perspective provided by
the history teacher, the students will have read (as summer reading) John Krakauer’s Into the
Wild, a book that generates great class discussions in connection to many themes in the unit.
Overview: This unit is intended to introduce students to Transcendentalism through the writing
of Emerson and Thoreau. Because students seem to struggle with these authors, we will do
much of the reading together in class and read only brief selections. I have included copies of
the selections found in Prentice Hall’s anthology The American Experience.
Students will keep a journal in which they respond to quotes and prompts. Most journal
assignments are intended to be completed as homework and will be used to generate class
discussion the next day.
Students will write longer essays on conformity, being alone and a “field trip” to the woods.
As a culminating project, students will research an individual or movement influenced by the
work of Thoreau and the beliefs of Transcendentalism. Each group will be responsible for an
oral presentation and a brief, written paper. [This project is a warm-up for a culminating, end of
the year project that requires students to make connections between American history and
literature.]
Please Note: Each of the following lessons is described in barest detail. Some will take more
than one class period and teachers may decide that some class work is better assigned as
homework and vice versa. Some handouts follow.
Lesson 1: Introduction to Transcendentalism
Handout Transcendentalist Fact Sheet. Students will mark up (underline, write questions, make
connections, etc.) and then discuss the text.
Journal: Create a visual representation of the Transcendentalist’s perception of the relationship
between man, nature and oversoul. Include a brief written explanation.
Lesson 2: Introduction to Emerson and Nature
Provide students with biographical information about Emerson. Together read brief excerpt
from Nature and then, with a partner, students will work to explain selected quotations. See
attached worksheet.
Lesson 3: Self-Reliance
Class will read passage from Self-Reliance. Working with a partner, students will answer
questions. See attached.
Journal: Choose two of the selected quotations (or find your own), explain what Emerson is
saying and then respond to each quotation: Do you agree? Is the quotation relevant today? Why
or why not?
Lesson 4: Excerpts from Emerson’s Journals
Students should gather in groups of 3-4. Assign each group several of the passages from
Emerson’s journals (see attached) so that each group is responsible for different passages.
Students will work together to explain what each reveals about Emerson. Groups will then share
responses with the rest of the class.
Lesson 5: Emerson’s Poetry
Read and discuss The Concord Hymn and The Rhodora (see attached questions).
Lesson 6: Introduction to Thoreau
Read Henry Hikes to Fitchburg to class. Ask class to write down everything they know, think
they know or want to know about Thoreau. If they don’t know anything at all, what can they
infer about him from the children’s book? Write responses on the board. After assessing
students’ background knowledge, provide some biographical information, including the
“Curriculum Vitae” to give students a sense of his diverse experiences. Use handout “Back in
Thoreau’s Time” to help students begin to locate Thoreau in time.
Lesson 7: Excerpts from Walden
As homework, students will read selected passages from Walden. In class, working with partner,
students will paraphrase and interpret quotations (see attached). Discuss quotations as a class.
Journal: Making inferences based on your interpretations of the selected quotations from
Walden, what kind of person was Thoreau?
Lesson 8: A Yearning Toward Wildness
Students will read and annotate the Biographical Foreword, Introduction and several passages
from A Yearning Toward Wildness. See attached sheet for questions and journal entry.
Journal: How do you feel about nature?
Lesson 9: A Thoreau Field Trip
Prior to this “field trip” students should think about the different ways to write about nature.
Discuss the differences between scientific language and poetic or literary language. Read
samples. The class will go outside with the task of observing and writing about something in
nature (see attached).
Lesson 10: Civil Disobedience
Students will read excerpt from Civil Disobedience.
Journal: Do you agree with Thoreau’s idea that you should ignore a law if you think it is
immoral? Can you think of a law that you would be willing to break as a matter of conscience?
Who else in history has practiced civil disobedience? Are there any dangers to practicing civil
disobedience?
Lesson 11: Transcendentalism Research Project (see attached handout)
Students will have class time to work in groups, researching a movement/person influenced by
the beliefs of transcendentalism (and specifically Civil Disobedience). Each group will be
responsible for an oral presentation, a fact sheet, and a brief written paper. [This project is a
warm-up for a culminating, end of the year project that requires students to make connections
between American history and literature, as well as learn research documentation skills.]
Lesson 12: Field Trip to Walden Pond
If possible, students will conclude unit with a field trip to Walden Pond. Students will tour the
pond and the site of Thoreau’s cabin, and write in their journals.
Journal: Find a spot where you can sit by yourself and record your thoughts and reflections.
One question to consider: We’ve spent a great deal of time learning about the ideas of Emerson
and Thoreau. What ideas can you connect with in some way? What ideas do you find disturbing
or confusing?
Essay Options
The attached essay options may be assigned at any time during the unit.
To Conform or Not to Conform
A Walk in the Woods
Being Alone
Nature
Emerson’s essay Nature has been called the manifesto of transcendentalism as it expresses many
of the movement’s central tenets:
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Human spiritual qualities are reflected in nature.
Nature and humans are both connected to the Creator.
Humans can intuitively perceive truth in the contemplation of nature.
In Nature, Emerson describes a mystical experience, possible only when alone with nature.
What does Emerson mean when he says:
1. “In the woods, too, a man casts off his years…”
2. “I become a transparent eyeball…”
3. “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult
relation between man and the vegetable.”
4. “…the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a
harmony of both.”
5. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”
Answer the following questions on the back of this sheet:
1) What does Nature reveal about Transcendentalists’s attitude toward nature?
2) How does Nature convey the Transcendentalists’ belief in the Over-Soul?
Quotes from Self Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide….
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows
what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried….
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place
the divine providence has found for you; the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
so….
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one
of its members…. The virtue in most request is conformity. Selfreliance is its aversion.
Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist…. Nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your own mind….
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…. With
consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do…. Speak what you
think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in
hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. “Ah,
so you shall be sure to be misunderstood?” -- Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and
Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every
pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.
Read the excerpt from Self-Reliance by Emerson and answer the following questions.
1. What does “self-reliance” mean? Is it a good title for this essay?
2. What does Emerson mean when he writes that “envy is ignorance; that imitation is
suicide”?
3. How does Emerson describe society?
4. How does Emerson feel about conformity?
5. What is Emerson’s comment about consistency?
6. Why, according to Emerson should people trust themselves?
Excerpts from the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson
February 17, 1838
My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear
perception. How comic is simplicity in this doubledealing quacking world. Every thing that boy
says makes merry with society though nothing can be graver than his meaning.
Nov. 10-11, 1838
My brave Henry Thoreau walked with me to Walden this P.M. and complained of the proprietors
who compelled him to whom as much as to any the whole world belonged, to walk in a strop of
road and crowded him out of all the rest of God’s earth. He must not get over the fence; but to
the building of that fence he was no party. Suppose, he said, some great proprietor, before he
was born, had bought up the whole globe. Suppose he had been hustled out of nature. Not
having been privy to any of these arrangements he does not feel called on to consent to them and
so cuts fishpoles in the woods without asking who had a better title to the wood than he. I
defended of course the good Institution as a scheme not good but the best that could be hit on for
making the woods and waters and fields available to Wit and Worth, and for restraining the bold
bad man. At all events, I begged him, having this maggot of Freedom and Humanity in his brain,
to write it out into good poetry and so clear himself of it.
June 9, 1822
He who wanders in the woods perceives how natural it was to pagan imagination to find gods in
every deep grove and by each fountain head. Nature seems to him not to be silent but to be eager
and striving to break out into music. Each tree, flower, and stone, he invests with life and
character; and it is impossible that the wind which breathes so expressive a sound amid the
leaves – should mean nothing.
December ? 1842
I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods. Wherever that music comes it has a sequel. It
is the voice f the civility of the Nineteenth Century saying “Here I am.” It is interrogative: It is
prophetic: and this Cassandra is believed: “Whew! Whew! How is real estate here and in the
swamps and wilderness? Swamp and Wilderness, ho for Boston! Whew! Whew! Down with
that forest on the side of the hill. I want ten thousand chestnut sleepers. I want cedar posts and
hundreds of thousands of feet of boards. Up my masters, of oak and pine! You have waited long
enough – a good part of a century in the wind and stupid sky. Ho for axes and saws, and away
with me to Boston! Whew! Whew! I will plan a dozen houses on this pasture next moon and a
village anon; and I will sprinkle yonder square mile with white houses like the broken snowbanks that strow in March.”
August-September 1866
The progress of invention is really a threat. Whenever I see a railroad I look for a republic.
October 24-26, 1850
Now that the civil engineer is fairly established, I think we must have one day a Naturalist in
each village as invariably as a lawyer or doctor… to have a man of Science remove into this
town, would be better than the capitalist who is to build a village of houses on Nashawtuck. I
would gladly subscribe to his maintenance. He is, of course, to have a microscope and telescope.
June 1847
If a man own lands, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare. Every tree and
graft, every hill of melons, every row of corn, every hedge-shrub, all he has done and all he
means to do, stand in his way like duns when he so much as turns his back on his house…
June 3, 1838
Solitude is fearsome and heavy hearted. I have never known a man who had so much good
accumulated upon him as I have… Yet leave me alone a few days , and I creep about as if in
expectation of calamity.
June 12, 1838
Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen. You can
soon learn all that society can teach you for one while. A foolish routine, an indefinite
multiplication of balls, concerts, rides, theatres, can teach you no more than a few can. Then
retire and hide; and from the valley behold the mountain. Have solitary prayer and praise. Love
the garden the barn, the pasture, and the rock. After some interval when these delights have been
suck dry, accept again the opportunities of society. The same scenes revisited shall wear a new
face, shall yield a higher culture. And so on. Undulation, Alteration, is the condition of
progress, of life.
August 1852
I waked at night, and bemoaned myself, because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable
question of Slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured voices. But then, in
hours of sanity, I recover myself, and say, God must govern his world, and knows his way out of
this pit, without desertion of my post which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other
slaves to free than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the
brain of man – far retired in the heaven of invention, and, which, important to the republic of
Man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I.
October 14, 1851
Today is holden at Worcester the “Woman’s Convention.” I think that, as long as they have not
equal rights of property and right of voting, they are not on a right footing. But this wrong grew
out of the savage and military period, when, because a woman could not defend herself, it was
necessary that she should be assigned to some man who was paid for guarding her. Now in more
tranquil and decorous times it is plain she should have her property, and, when she marries, the
parties should as regards property, go into a partnership full or limited, but explicit and recorded.
For the rest, I do not think a woman’s convention, called in the spirit of this at Worcester, can
much avail. It is an attempt to manufacture public opinion, and of course repels all persons who
love the simple and direct method… I find them all victims of their temperament… And this
excess of temperament remains not less in Marriage. Few women are sane.
February-March 1847
How can we hear children ask for a story or men for a novel or the theater and not realize the
necessity of imagination in Education?
June-July 1866
Bias. Seven men went through a field, one after another. One was a farmer, he saw only the
grass; the next was an astronomer, he saw the horizon and the stars; the physician noticed the
standing water and suspected miasma; he was followed by a soldier, who glanced over the
ground, found it easy to hold, and saw in a moment how the troops could be disposed; then came
the geologist, who noticed the boulders and the sandy loam; after him came the real estate
broker, who bethought him how the line of the house-lots should run, where would be the
driveway, and the stables. The poet admired the shadows cast by some trees, and still more the
music of some thrushes and a meadowlark.
The Concord Hymn
1. What event took place by the “rude bridge”?
2. What is meant by “the shot heard round the world”
3. What transcendentalist idea is expressed in the last stanza?
4. Find an example of alliteration.
5. Find an example of assonance.
The Rhodora
1. What question might sages ask the rhodora?
2. How does the speaker’s attitude toward the rhodora differ from that of the sages?
3. What might the rhodora represent?
4. What transcendentalist belief does the final line reflect?
5. What is apostrophe and where is it used in this poem?
6. How does the use of apostrophe reinforce a theme of this poem?
Quotes from Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
What does Thoreau mean when he says…
1. “As long as possible, live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether
you are committed to a farm or the county jail” (283).
2. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” (285).
3. “I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life” (285).
4. “Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!” (285).
5. “Time is but the stream I go afishing in” (286).
6. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there” (286).
7. “Our life is frittered away in detail” (286).
8. “How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of
tradition and conformity!” (286).
9. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a
different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away”
(286).
10. “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself to get new
things, whether clothes or friends” (287).
11. “…if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours”
(286).
Judging from these quotations and your interpretations, write a brief paragraph
explaining what kind of person Thoreau is.
A Yearning for Wildness: Environmental Quotations from the Writings of Henry David
Thoreau
Read and annotate the Biographical Foreword and the Introduction to A Yearning for Wildness.
1. What does Tim Homan mean when he writes in the second paragraph of his Introduction,
“…the cradle of American environmentalism was a rowboat rocked by the waves of
Walden”?
Now read the selected passages and answer the following questions.
1. What does Thoreau mean when he writes, “In Wildness is the preservation of the
World.”?
2. What is the “tonic of wildness”? Why do we need it?
3. Do you think that zoos can substitute for wildness? Why or why not?
4. People feel differently about nature and people write differently about nature. What is
your reaction to how Thoreau writes about nature?
Journal Entry: You will be doing some nature writing of your own. How do you feel about
nature? Consider the following questions in forming your response: Is it important to you? Do
you seek it out? Where do you find nature? Do you think about environmental issues?
Some suggestions for our Thoreau Field Trip:
1. Observe a natural inanimate object (tree, flower, spider web, rock,
etc.) very closely for 15 minutes. Take notes on every detail you
can see, hear, feel or smell.
2. Observe an animal, bird or insect for 15 minutes. Take notes on
appearance, movements, sounds, etc.
3. Find something very small (acorn, berry, leaf). Describe it and its
location.
4. Sketch any of the above.
5. Listen for any sounds of nature (wind, birds, thunder, leaves).
6.
When you are back in class or at home, read over your notes.
Turn any of your observations into a poem, short story or
essay.
Essay Options
Essay 1: Being Along
As we have discussed, authors write about isolation in different ways. Being alone can be a
positive experience or a negative experience. How do you feel about being alone? Write about a
time when you felt alone. Were you choosing to be alone, or were you feeling left out or
unhappy?
Also, think about your own personal need/desire to have time by yourself. Are you the type of
person who needs space, or do you thrive in the company of others?
And finally, does our society encourage people to spend time alone, or does our society make it
difficult to be alone?
Essay 2: To Conform or Not to Conform?
Does our society reward people who conform and punish those who do not? Or does our society
tolerate those who choose not to conform? Write an essay in which you discuss the issue of
conformity in our society. You must have an introduction with a clear thesis statement, at least
two strong examples that support your thesis statement, and a conclusion. In your concluding
paragraph discuss how you feel about the issue of conformity.
Essay 3: A Walk in the Woods
Take yourself on a fieldtrip. Find a quiet place to sit outside and observe a natural setting for at
least 15 minutes. Following Thoreau’s example, take notes on what you see. Start with broad
observations of the entire scene and then focus your attention more narrowly on one aspect of the
scene. When you return home, write an essay in which you use vivid details to describe what
you have observed. As a conclusion, describe how you felt as you sat observing nature.
Research Project: Transcendentalism
Working in groups of four, you will research a movement, cause or person influenced by
Transcendentalism. After discussing your preferences with your group, choose one of the
following categories to research:
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Abolitionist Movement
Civil Rights Movement
Women’s Movement
Vietnam Anti-War Movement
Environmentalist Movement
King of Denmark
Gandhi
Your own idea?
Several of these broad topics need to be narrowed. Your group might want to focus on a
particular person or incident related to your chosen topic. I must approve your group’s choice
before you begin working.
Each group is responsible for completing the following:
1) A fact sheet with 10-15 facts about your topic that everyone should know. Each fact
must be properly cited, following the MLA style.
2) A MLA style works cited page
3) A visual. Your visual must display and clarify information (not just look nice!).
4) A one-page explanation of how your topic is connected to Transcendentalism.
5) A 5-minute oral presentation, explaining your topic (and how it is connected to
Transcendentalism) to the class. Each member of the group must participate in the
presentation.
You will receive one group grade for your presentation and one individual grade for the part of
the project for which you are responsible. See rubric for more details.
You will have two extended blocks to work on this project with your group members.