Who Owns “Baker Farm”?

Walden (1854) is a shocking document, most so when it encounters the poor. Henry David Thoreau argues in “Economy” that philanthropy must begin in spiritual improvement, lest “if you give [a man] money, he…buy more rags with it.”¹ Such transgressions “reawaken [us]” as readers to the instability of textual dwelling, requiring our “conscious endeavor” to revise simultaneously our lay ethics and how we find them in language (Walden, p. 90). Yet the lesson comes at a real human cost. In the “Baker Farm” chapter, Walden’s middle, Thoreau’s narrator puts this model of philosophy-as-charity into practice, where it fails painfully and predictably. After walking afield, Walden’s narrator shelters from the rain in the hovel of John Field, a poor Irish immigrant, to whom he prescribes the reduction of wants rather than the expansion of means, “talk[ing] to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one” (p. 205). After failing at this project and fleeing the premises, the narrator utters a startling curse:

The embittered and highly literary self-amusement of such a voice, projecting a naturalized determinism, is hard to square with the text’s more usual earnestness and its emphases on transformation, to the extent we might reasonably wonder who is speaking, and to whom.² Indeed, the chapter transgresses so far across contemporary taboos of race and class, and so blurs a received sense of Thoreau’s ethics, that Laura Dassow Walls, one of Thoreau’s most attentive interpreters, exclaims, “Henry, how could you?”³

What has remained unnoticed in previous explorations of this problem area, however, is that the chapter rambles over physical, thematic, and stylistic ground that, through three substantial quotations, is ascribed to the lightly anonymized “Poet” alluded to a half-dozen times in Walden. Its high artifice and fraught ethics are, in part, borrowed. The “Poet” is Thoreau’s constant companion, occasional rival, and future biographer, William “Ellery” Channing II, whose poems, set in Concord landscapes, including on Walden Pond, were written coevally with Walden, and were published first. The chapter “Baker Farm” becomes more legible, if not more expiable, when read as the central site of Thoreau’s attempt to reframe and absorb the English pastoral tradition—and Channing’s ambitious, parallel interpretation of it—in his prose. Seen thus, “Baker Farm” reveals itself as an intense local poetomachy with long stakes; the practices of ambivalent, frictional verse quotation by which it progresses allow us to see how this struggle with the affordances of verse extends across Walden. Once we understand Thoreau to be negotiating a complex relationship to his own poetic vocation, to his inconstant mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and to Channing’s verse production, the chapter’s central conflict expands from an unequal antagonism, in which the immigrant John Field and his family serve as the sole targets of the narrator’s bile, to an unstable triadic conversation about tenancy and possession characterized by rapid tonal pivots and the serial ventriloquy of a range of deindividuating discourses. However, to hear the conversation as such requires first reconstructing Channing’s and Thoreau’s relationship in the 1840s and 1850s as a many-sided intellectual exchange between competitive and developing protégés of Emerson, who pursued divergent strategies to inherit the mantle of Emerson’s valorized “Poet.”⁴

Returning Channing and Thoreau to their contemporary parity allows for the recovery of transcendentalist debates over the function of such a poet, the value of poetic work, and the ownership of language. These questions reflect broader cultural renegotiations of the value of labor during the wave of Irish immigration in the 1840s, as well as frequent nationalist calls for poetic production as a means of justifying and securing American hemispheric hegemony.⁵ Though its stakes resonate nationally, this article excavates them in the extraordinary locality of “Baker Farm”—a triplex signifier that gathers 1) the middle chapter of Walden (1854), which quotes extensively from 2) the long locodescriptive poem that concludes Channing’s volume The Woodman (1849),⁶ and 3) the “outlands” of “James Baker’s large farm,” a previously unimproved tract made potentially profitable by the depressed cost of labor and the increased ease of transporting agricultural commodities in the 1840s.⁷ At the same time, a close examination of how Walden’s “complex pastoral” reacts to and assimilates the verse extracts responsible for these tensions in the “Baker Farm” chapter elucidates how Thoreau’s flexible prose depends on a shrewd inheritance of certain verse genres.⁸

Extant efforts to rehabilitate “Baker Farm” and parse out its layered tensions have depended on reading biographically, on reading through Irish race to ideological and economic tensions, and on underscoring the episode’s destabilizing ironies. William Gleason is the first to stress Thoreau’s considerable efforts on behalf of the impoverished Irish child, Johnny Riordan, as evidence of a gap between Thoreau’s personal attitudes toward the Irish and their allegorization in Walden, an argument furthered by Dassow Walls in 2015.⁹ Drawing on the broad cultural metonymy between the Irish and unskilled labor, Gleason argues that “the bog farmer” is for Thoreau “an emblematic foil…against whom to construct his narrator’s identity as…a ‘free’ person,” whose characterization is preserved even after Thoreau’s attitudes toward the Irish warm because by the time of Walden’s major 1852–54 revisions this tight midpoint chapter had become “structurally pivotal” (“Re-Creating Walden,” 693, 694).¹⁰ Dassow Walls, leaning on biography, suggests further that John Field, whose name echoes that of John Thoreau, is transformed at the end of “Higher Laws” into successful townsman “John Farmer.” Harsh portrayals of the Irish in “Baker Farm,” Dassow Walls suggests, reflect Thoreau’s disappointment at Irish conformity to “the same slave-driving global capitalism that has instituted Southern chattel slavery” it might otherwise disrupt (“‘As You are Brothers of Mine,’” 18).¹¹

Such valuable contextualizations are the foundation of this argument, though their defense of Thoreau’s liberal bona fides comes at the expense of an evasion of Walden’s text. By contrast, this article recognizes in “Baker Farm” not an accidental, but an explicit challenge to liberal pieties, whether in 1854 or 2025. It further recognizes that the moral surprise is intertwined with the stylistic and formal surprises created by the chapter’s protean acts of voicing, chief among which are its ambivalent inhabitations of Channing’s poem. Verse, as Thoreau’s chapter allows us to see, is a problematic and inevitable target for Thoreau because the medium, and the figure of the poet, are so privileged in the version of transcendentalism Emerson sets out. We do not need to bring in a Whitmanian iconoclast to complete the task Concord writers were able to imagine but could not fulfill; for Thoreau, as for Emerson, Channing’s prolific production and claims to the mantle made him the representative transcendental poet, his evident flaws notwithstanding.¹² Reading Walden’s instances of intermittent, liminal, and absorbed verse as load-bearing elements throws new light on the metaphysical ambitions of transcendentalism, marking and enacting the slippery, occasional temporality that is so characteristic of it. As critics such as Timothy Sweet have shown, the historicity and generic friction inherent to practices of extracting create rich, contestable nodes of meaning for both authors and commentators.¹³

Take, for instance, Thoreau’s quotation of William Gilpin quoting Milton in “The Pond in Winter.” Having dismissed popular myths of “Bottomless Ponds” and plumbed the pond’s depth (“exactly one hundred and two feet”) in highly matter-of-fact language, Thoreau then lets Gilpin, the popularizer of the picturesque, hoist himself on his own bombast (Walden, pp. 287–288). Gilpin’s sentimental magniloquence offers a literary parallel to Thoreau’s credulous villagers peering into the ice “with watery eyes” (Walden, p. 285). The effect is clean, and by quoting Gilpin’s ornamental quotation of Paradise Lost (1667), itself paraphrasing Genesis, Thoreau spoils it.¹⁴ Milton’s sober, equanimous lines exceed both Gilpin’s handwaving (“crash,” “convulsion,” “gushed,” “horrid”) and the interpretive and tonal framework Thoreau has prepared. What Thoreau gains, in a chapter that contrasts surface illusions with an assay of the pond’s solid “bottom,” is a bifocal acknowledgment of how deeply Milton and Genesis undergird English prose, making palpable the flimsiness of structures built atop them. Though Milton’s lines function as a trailing ornament in Gilpin, as they hinge the reader back into Walden, we understand them to be, conversely, a deep wellspring for Thoreau. Activated by direct proximity to Milton, Thoreau’s sober skepticism becomes legible as a new and old cosmogony of water.

This method for interpreting Thoreau is prepared by critics such as Stanley Cavell and Branka Arsić, who urge readers not to discount feats of transcendentalist rhetoric, but to read them as encoding earnest, if often evanescent, metaphysical propositions.¹⁵ Few, however, have treated the complex sites where verse mediates prose. For Saundra Morris, the verse headers to Emerson’s essays act as thresholds readers must cross, which prepare them to read for a more lyrical formal logic captured in the figure of the Sphinx.¹⁶ Meredith McGill, reading Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), argues that the narrative discontinuity produced by frequent intrusions of verse inverts values of modernity and history, making future fragmentation tangible in contemporary work and ancient sources fresh. This culminates in a “powerful resistance to the reading norms of historicist literary criticism.”¹⁷ A similarly expansive view of poems’ “roles in creating lived and imagined relations among people” drives Michael Cohen’s The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, most notably his discussion of how coterie circulation of multiply-authored poems enabled affective bonds and the “imaginative work of reform” necessary to abolitionist projects.¹⁸

Though claiming that verse may deform and reform logical causality, history, and the fabric of social bonds, respectively, may seem grandiose in an era accustomed to reading verse as a minor form, such claims pale beside the epochal claims made for and in American poetry in the early to middle nineteenth century. In 1836, Edgar Allen Poe asserted that true artists are “gifted ministers to those exalted emotions which link us with the mysteries of Heaven,” infinitely superior to “vermin” who “crawl around the altar of Mammon.”¹⁹ One might also cite John L. O’Sullivan’s fiercely nationalistic editorial of the inaugural number of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (1837), which substantiates its thesis that literature is at once the foundation and apogee of democratic feeling by presenting William Cullen Bryant’s “The Battlefield” on the following page.²⁰ However, the most familiar example may be Emerson, who, first in Nature (1836), and then in “The Poet” (1844), positions the poet as the renewer of language and society, whose mind is a “Noah’s ark” which will “people a new world.”²¹

The figure of the poet is less abstract than he seems. Like all of Emerson’s essays, “The Poet” gathers material from across his notebooks, but one of its germinating occasions was Emerson’s rhapsodic response to an 1842 visit by Channing: “It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What [!] that wonderful spirit has not ceased! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated!”²² A year later, in May 1843, the ringing prose that would become the essay’s conclusion (“thou true land-lord!…he is the Universe in a mask”) segues directly to “20 May. Walked with Ellery. In the landscape felt the magic of colour.”²³ Indeed, Emerson’s enthusiasm was of unusual duration. It resulted in Channing moving to Concord in 1843 and becoming the single contributor most represented in the contents of the Dial—even as Thoreau’s poetry was routinely rejected.²⁴ Emerson’s retraction of encouragement from Thoreau in 1843 effectively silenced him as a poet.²⁵ In Concord, Channing walked with Emerson sometimes twice a day and is frequently quoted in his journals, as well as in Thoreau’s 1848 Journal, in which he is the constant presence denoted “C.”²⁶ The three-way friendship is memorialized in their naming a site of frequent excursion “Three Friends’ Hill” (or, per F.B. Sanborn, “The Hill of Three Friends”; later, Lincoln Hill) as it is in the mingled record of their literary conversations that Channing assembled at Emerson’s behest, “Country Walks.”²⁷ Thoreau made both mundane and career-defining journeys with Channing, including to Cape Cod (Cape Cod, 1865, ed. Channing), to Fire Island to gather what effects of Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s they could (she was Channing’s sister-in-law), and to Quebec (A Yankee in Canada, 1866, ed. Channing), the Catskills, and New Hampshire.²⁸ Despite his present reputation, Channing was an outsize presence in the intellectual and social life of transcendentalist Concord, especially for Thoreau.

A punning 1845 letter that Channing writes in response to Thoreau, who was melancholy in New York, is representative of their jostling familiarity. Channing writes:

Such advice is a direct translation of Channing’s own experiment in McHenry County, Illinois, where he farmed desultorily and wrote from 1839 to 1840. Within four months, Thoreau had moved to Emerson’s lot on Walden Pond (what Channing calls “Briars”). The letter’s language is striking for the avuncular interjection of Channing’s “I” into Thoreau’s material and intellectual condition, as Thoreau’s prospective actions are entirely subordinated to Channing’s repeated “seeing” of them. Stressing his “christen[ing]” of “Briars,” Channing casts himself as a name-giving Adam, and Thoreau as a banished Cain. When he exhorts Thoreau to “go out upon that,” the loose “that” refers not to a simple “field,” but to the entire noun phrase, field plus christened name, as imprinted by Channing’s mock-heroic sacrament. Self-cannibalism, in Channing’s injunction, reads as the parodical sublime of self-reliance, and foreshadows the dietetic qualms Thoreau develops in “Higher Laws.”

Channing may not own “Briars,” but in extending a claim to its poetic title, he shows how deeply he has metabolized the precedents articulated by Emerson in Nature and “The Poet.” In Nature, a revolutionary call for Thoreau’s and Channing’s generation, the poet detaches objects from their relations—he “lift[s] from the ground” “the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden”—and, enlightened, orders them anew.³⁰ Though Emerson employs the poet as an exponential case of man in general and stresses consistently that the poet’s power is purchased by his extreme receptivity to nature, he rings despotic. The poet’s “integrat[ing]” perception affords him the title to “the best part” of others’ fields; he “conforms things to his thoughts”; and the “imperial muse” of Shakespeare, the type of the poet, “subordinat[es] nature for the purposes of expression” (Nature, 9, 31). In “The Poet,” the poet’s association with land rights in the era of literary travel narratives and O’Sullivan-inspired expansionism is even more strongly marked. At first curiously objectified alongside his poems as, for instance, a “Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides,” the poet becomes increasingly spiritualized over the course of the essay (“The Poet,” 6). Later, he is a kind of harvester of geographic potential, as with “an ear sufficiently fine” he records the melodic “daemon, or soul” that stands over “the sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed” (15). At the essay’s conclusion, Emerson’s hortatives reach an aristocratic ecstasy: calling forward the “genius in America, with tyrannous eye,” he promises him,

Whether advancing the fiction of an uninhabited and abstract nature or explicitly devaluing rival claims (“others’ fields”; “others are only tenants”), Emerson’s promissory notes consistently transpose into a literary key the expropriations and the geographical primacy of settler colonial discourses.³¹

Emerson’s discounting of present occupancy in the light of an imperial future “possession” echoes nearly verbatim Alexis de Tocqueville’s discounting of indigenous claims in the first volume of Democracy in America (1835): “The Indians occupied [the wilderness], but they did not possess it”; “Providence…seemed to have given them only a short lease on [the wealth of the New World]; they were, in a way, only in the meantime.”³² As Adam Dahl argues, the obfuscation of such acts of disenfranchisement and appropriation underpins declarations of both political and intellectual independence, even as representations of evacuated space actively participate in the forceful realization of the absence they depict.³³ Indeed, Dahl stresses how deeply the fiction of empty, cultivable land underpins Emerson’s use of it as a moral and cultural foundation for American character, which “closely mirrors but also extends beyond O’Sullivan’s safety-valve theory of colonization” (Empire of The People, p. 123). Dahl’s argument, however, needs to be expanded to acknowledge that Emersonian and de Tocquevillian “possession” emerges not only in emptiness, but also against the specter of mere tenancy that haunts Emerson’s essays, as it will emerge in the thinking of Thoreau and Channing, especially in “Baker Farm.”³⁴

The specter of dispossession is the reason Emerson buys Walden at all. In a letter to William Emerson, Emerson recognizes his right to enjoy the land (described, with strong common-law overtones, as “a sort of daily occupancy”) is imperiled by “two or three men who told me they had come thither to sell & to buy a field, on which they wished me to bid as a purchaser.”³⁵ These deindividuated (“two or three”) fates who herald the transformation of the economic and legal order are not the only actors interpellating Emerson into this economy; the day after his impulse buy, Emerson writes, “I carried some of my well-beloved gossips to the same place & they deciding that the field was not good for anything, if Heartwell Bigelow should cut down his pine-grove, I bought, for 125 dollars more, his pretty wood lot of 3 or 4 acres.” Despite the peer pressure, the result is a sublime ownership: by the paragraph’s conclusion Emerson has become, in wry grandeur, “landlord & waterlord of 14 acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden…and mad for more” (letter to William Emerson, 4 Oct. 1844, 263). In terminology (“Thou true land-lord! sea-lord!”) as in ascent from reluctance to a semi-possessed tyranny (“mad for more”), the letter strongly echoes “The Poet,” whose imminent publication Emerson closes the letter to William by anticipating; his acts of dominion are at once telluric and literary.³⁶ Furthermore, in 1844, Emerson’s available “well-beloved gossips” would almost certainly consist of Channing, Thoreau, and possibly Alcott, making it likely that this assessment (“not good for anything”) is also the occasion of Channing, ever puckish, interjecting himself into Walden’s primal scene by christening it “Briars.”

Channing’s poems pick up Emerson’s aristocratic vision of the landlord-poet as an ideal, but one that emerges most dramatically in counterfactual response to the poet’s actual tenancy, his economic and social marginalization. This empowerment of the ideal poet, and the assumption of his mantle in response to an antagonistic cultural field, is set forth most explicitly in Channing’s Poems: Second Series (1847). There, the poet’s characteristic act is anathematic, sacralizing moments and locations by marking them as proprietary and removing them from secular circulation into a more exclusive literary circulation. But that act is only authorized in Channing’s poems by an intensity of affective response, which is supplemented in the next volume, The Woodman, by a georgic emphasis on the performance of poetic labor.³⁷ Channing’s poets resemble, in this, the narrator of Walden—who is also constantly showing his work and belaboring his style as he bushwhacks his way out of capitalism’s ethical entanglements. (This near-indistinguishability, and the anxiety over it, power the masque between “Hermit” and “Poet” at the beginning of Walden’s “Brute Neighbors.”) Meanwhile Thoreau, I suggest, works hard to contain the Channing-esque figure of the Poet in Walden not just because of their structural similarity, but also because of the powerful continuity of the verse tradition that Channing speaks for and through, from which Thoreau, writing in variegated prose modes, has alienated himself. He does so by undermining linguistic “possession” as an attainable telos, and turning in a satirical key to the logic of the commons also latent in Emerson’s “The Poet.” This is the central gesture of his “Baker Farm.” As we will see, Thoreau’s narrator’s commitment to a doctrine of free, responsible, and evanescent use extends from axes, to land, to language, so much so that what he quotes he neither claims nor endorses, and indeed he often abandons his own words behind him.³⁸

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Channing extends the claims of possession he makes in his 1845 “Briars” letter with the locodescriptive poems he writes while Thoreau is at Walden Pond, which frequently include Thoreau as a “hermit” or “poet,” as in the poem “Walden.” Though their competitive relationship is gentle in the poems, it is overt when Channing later describes Thoreau as merely “bivouack[ing]”—noting that he “really lived at home, where he went every day”—and in the acid-laced representation of Thoreau in the unpublished satire “Major Leviticus.”³⁹ The poem “Walden” is the penultimate in Poems: Second Series, a volume in which Channing often claims the mantle of an idealized “Poet” who emerges in counterreaction to loss, is explicitly connected to the Puritan expropriation of Indian rights, and often extends claims to land above others’ rights.⁴⁰ One such rival is Thoreau, whom the worldly speaker of Channing’s “Walden,” carefully contains as a harmless (“little”) figure, picturesquely “fitt[ed]” to his “place,” who “passes life” and “let[s] the line run off / The mortal reel” (Poems: Second Series, p. 157, ll. 10, 12, 13–14). This last image of belatedness bears an undertone of unsuccessful fishing and poetic failure. Against this, the Channing-Emersonian Poet encounters novel places, such as a deserted farm, and legibly sacralizes them by extending cosmopolitan cultural markers and highlighting the value of his own poetic activity.

This poetic activity is figured as manual labor in The Woodman, whose settings and themes closely presage Walden; in the opening title poem, the poet is introduced as an idealized laborer whose work improves land. The use of poetry—specifically the medial mode, georgic—as a means of expanding the cultural frontier echoes the nation-building projects explicit in the Virgilian poetic career and its English inheritors.⁴¹ In Channing’s “Baker Farm,” this vision of labor as simultaneously manual and poetic is the means by which the poem solves the sensual attraction of landscape with nature’s resistance to discrete legibility—one recurrent problem in transcendental poetry.⁴² In the poem’s central act, Channing remediates the “artless meadow.” Clearly enacting what he exhorts, the poem climaxes:

As “Baker Farm” has been throughout the subject of the apostrophe, the violent consummation staged here is rather circular: the land has to be “dash[ed]” (off) until “wrinkles” (i.e., poetic lines) appear, but the desired “beauty” exists a priori, and the syllogism lands with a tautological if frenzied thud. However, as in “churn[ing],” the repetitive circuit of reasoning and labor is the point. The sustained duration of the Poet’s active verb, to verse, interrupts (“wrinkle”; interfere with circumstance) and alienates “artless” land, as it integrates his attributes into the landscape—“mad,” an attribute of the Plotinian poet, seems at first to attach adjectivally to “thy beauty”; rhymes “burn,”—making newly visible what was already there.⁴³ Having thus introduced himself into the circuit of perception, affect, and naming, Channing’s prophet-poet intones: “Thou art expunged from to-day,” and, later, in the lines that conclude the poem and the collection:

With this last apotheosis, the physical farm is simultaneously converted into its representation (“volume”) and removed from circulation; it remains “passable” only to the intimate poetic counterpublic—“me and thee”—the poem itself has cultivated.⁴⁵

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Thoreau’s Walden, excerpting and anonymizing Channing’s “Baker Farm” as it does with other poems, gives the lie to such exclusivity. Rather than the “air-lord,” the open door of Thoreau’s cabin endorses a different side of Emerson, the “adventitious” and reader-oriented poetics of “happy hits” advocated in “Thoughts on Art” in which verse gives “greater delight…in happy quotation than in the poem.”⁴⁶ Among the many features of Channing’s poem Thoreau incorporates and reorients is the metaphor of land as un-churned cream, a figure which partly reflects the rapid, railroad-enabled reorientation of Concord’s agricultural economy toward butter production for the Boston market. This is the explanation for the Field family’s presence at all: as Robert Gross records, the increase in potential returns led farmers to hire cheap Irish labor to ditch their boggy meadows, reflected in the poem by the “wrinkles” that stand for both lines of verse and ditches.⁴⁷ By the time Thoreau reuses the metaphor in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” to describe the poet’s appropriation of land, the churning has dropped out, and Channing’s earnest versifier is peaked to parody. Thoreau writes:

Here, the movement from prose into a ventriloquized poetic hyperbole (the boast is from Cowper, speaking as a shipwrecked Selkirk—both notably penurious figures) has the curious effect of splitting or alienating Thoreau’s voice. Before he steps into Cowper’s monarchical “I,” the narrator, a poet himself, “carrie[s] off” the (literary) yields of landscape; after the excess of the verse interruption, his perspective is allied with the farmer, against the Emersonian/Channingian poet who has become a knavish land speculator. Although the extrinsic quotation seems to emerge metonymically through an associative logic of commonplaces about the relationship of poets to landscape, the earnestness of its absolute claim ends up inscribing a tonal nec plus ultra, from which the narrator recoils.⁴⁸ By the time the thread of Thoreau’s prose picks up again, the narrator has exiled the now-ridiculous poet, his semblable, as retrograde and antidemocratic. From the perspective of working proprietorship, the poet’s invisible hand resembles the alienating and intersecting processes of extractive debt finance and the legal processes (“impound”) that enforce it, the deceptions of which Thoreau decries in “Economy.”⁴⁹

In contrast with Channing’s production of confidently epiphanic artifacts, Walden’s flexible tonal matrix repeatedly figures how stressing the processes of writing and thinking reveals new ways not of knowing, but—in Cavell’s idiom—its cousin, “neighboring.”⁵⁰ Knowledge is teleological, possessable; neighboring is a dynamic state of readjusting relationships, entailing frequent acts of turning away, or “aversion.” I offer the term here as a way of thinking, too, about how Thoreau incorporates and abandons extrinsic texts, and how this frictional process, reconstituting narrator and reader, makes us reconsider how persons do and do not emerge in language (as critics such as Sharon Cameron have influentially suggested) and renews our sense of the ethics of coexistence in a linguistic commons. Poetry, especially, enters as a way of dramatizing the insufficiencies of the narrator’s single perspective, perforating the envelope of the book’s generic affiliation and its narrative time, as in the example above. “Economy” ends with “complementary verses” that in fact invert the chapter’s argument; at the end of “House Warming,” the words of Ellen Sturgis Hooper’s poem “The Wood-Fire” (1840) “return…with new force,” pointing toward a temporality of return and renovation that remains only a shadow in the text proper (Walden, p. 254). Poignantly, in “The Ponds,” immediately after the narrator cries, “Walden, is it you?” the text answers in an altered voice, chastened and stern:

Time has passed; the “I” seems to have weathered between the cry and the answer. The poem curtails the gnostic impulse toward rapturous identification with nature with Yankee skepticism; though it limits itself to that which is adjacent to Walden—the “shore” and “breeze”—it inhabits these powerfully. Whereas for Channing place is a simple value that must be improved and it is the role of the poet that is held at a slight remove (and arrogated), Thoreau uses verse to approach, slant, a pond that, though unknowable in itself, charges neighboring entities with meaning.

Such a moment shows Thoreau exploiting the resources of lyric poetry—personae, enjambed or leaping thought, and capacities for rooted sincerity and intense affect, including a genealogical relationship to questions near divinity—as a supplement to the agile tonal and tropological play Walden’s prose has taught us to read for. Unfortunately, as with the narcotic “Chalmers’ collection of English poetry” which the narrator can’t read “without skipping,” the prose narrative picks up after the poem by telling us “the [railroad] cars never pause to look at it” (Walden, pp. 259, 193). Verse is again exiled as marginalized because of its slow temporality, hence antimodern and antidemotic associations.⁵¹ “Sounds,” a chapter deeply nostalgic for the capacities of lyric fluency, twice repeats this gesture, anxiously severing quoted verse with the intrusion of railroad time, as the time it takes to read poetry is counterpointed with the bustle of modernity (Walden, pp. 115, 121). This reflex ironization of verse incursions throughout the text is necessary context as Thoreau remediates and intervenes in Channing’s poem—amid other alien linguistic material—in the tonally uneasy “Baker Farm” chapter.

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This chapter, characterized by intense punning and whiplash, unmarked ventriloquisms of Biblical and literary sources, shows us Thoreau’s narrator at his most extravagant and—with respect to his labor sympathies—most suspect.⁵² As almost all the manuscript pages associated with the “Baker Farm” chapter have gone missing, its draft evolutions also present a cipher. Gleason notes that “nearly every leaf on which these specific passages probably appeared is missing from the original 1847 manuscript” (“Re-Creating Walden,” 692). Beginning in a habitual past (“Sometimes I rambled”) the chapter thematizes in its first two paragraphs not settlement but wandering and deviation, alongside cognate themes: imagination, shadows, ephemeral light effects, and fishing, which are refracted through intense Biblical allusion (two rainbows, “the elect”) (Walden, p. 201). Its central episode then picks up with the narrator’s arrival at the physical Baker Farm, which is described via a six-line quotation of Channing’s poem, and then, when the weather storms, another four-line quotation which describes the Field family’s hut. After a few pages in which the narrator volubly fails to impart his philosophy to them, he flees, momentarily doubts himself—“my haste to catch pickerel…appeared for an instant trivial”—before the voice of his “Good Genius,” heavily paraphrasing Ecclesiastes, enters the text to confirm him in his philosophy: “Enjoy the land, but own it not” (p. 207). Immediately thereafter, a lyric apostrophe—“O Baker Farm!”—sets up Thoreau’s dramatic recutting of Channing’s 92-line poem down to a 14-line sonnet with revolutionary politics. Finally, John Field joins the narrator in fishing, but his failure to catch fish, even when the men change seats in the boat, becomes the occasion for the narrator’s fatal pronouncement on his “derivative old country mode” and inability “to rise in this world” (pp. 208–209).

The text’s style is striking in its magpie licentiousness, even as the physical topos through which the narrator errs is already triply marked—by its owner James Baker, by Channing’s poem, and by the tenant Field family. Thoreau’s linguistic excesses and transformations must be read as ways of navigating these competing, prior discourses and claims. Place, in Thoreau’s writing, is never an unmediated phenomenological experience, but is always approached through its documentary and literary record; the near pastiche of “Baker Farm” merely highlights the latency of this fact throughout Walden.⁵³ In this case, that literary record is overdetermined by Channing’s poetry, which represents for Thoreau a tradition he has first been rejected by, and then has repudiated. Whereas Channing represents the plot as vacant and in need of his improvement and regularization in a move familiar to settler colonial discourse, Thoreau represents it as a linguistic commons overfull with stylistic, epistemological, and generic conventions that he inhabits only in order to satirize and disown them.

Quoting the first few lines of Channing’s poem as descriptive flavor, Thoreau archly stresses it as a quaint and picturesque “retreat”:

As elsewhere, the presence of poetry is associated with a satire of spectral harvesting and a past anterior.⁵⁴ The harvest here is the quotation itself, the succeeding paraphrase of which plunders its fruit trees, “leap[s]” or evades its brook, and “scare[s]” off its animals: each line is negated, apotropaically, as it is absorbed in the prose. “Hooked,” which does not occur in the poem, seems to land in quotation marks because its link to the rhyme scheme makes it suspect. The insistence with which Thoreau stresses his own priority to the poem (“since sung”; “before I went”) as he juxtaposes its putative instantaneity with Walden’s long gestation reflects an anxiety over precedent: a lyric such as Channing’s buttresses Walden’s fleeting moment with the longue durée of powerful tradition, effects which Thoreau’s prose experiment has to reproduce anew, internally. This proximity to the dilatory effect of lyric time and its prodigious belatedness produces the pathos of “it was already half spent when I started.”

Two sentences later, Thoreau brings in Channing again to figure that poetic tradition as shelter—however disused, borrowed, and isolated from the common road. When a storm sends him running for cover, the narrator uses deictics (“here”, “therein”) to interact with the quoted verse as an object even more explicitly, linking himself and John Field as two temporary inhabitants of poetic convention:

In Thoreau’s quotation, the casually picturesque imputation of a previous “poet” as the builder of the “trivial cabin” in Channing’s poem slips naturally to the most proximate poet, Channing himself. The invocation of a “cabin,” of course, makes the situation an uncomfortable and obvious doubling of Thoreau’s own house—from which the chapter gathers some of its satirical bite. Even as Channing’s subjectivity is attached to this “trivial cabin,” however, Thoreau stresses the serial emptiness of the role, and the meniality of its condition.

In one sense, the claims to ownership exerted by Channing’s poem have worked: Thoreau links him foundationally to the place. But he does so to dance around him, making him another trivial representative of a decomposing tradition and a superseded stage of development. Making John Field the denizen of the cabin “a poet” (Channing) “builded” is both a measure of its decline into parody, and, in its lingering on the uncleanliness of the domicile, an exposure of the original class lie implicit in the highly aestheticized georgic tradition itself—hence the disclaiming sarcasm of “So the Muse fables.” Whereas Channing tucks Thoreau away in a “little hermitage” in the poem “Walden,” Thoreau, in “Baker Farm,” steps inside Channing’s cabin and finds it clacking with chickens and peasants. Thoreau represents the lease on poetic language as short, entailed, and inherently subject to reappropriation.⁵⁵

Under this thick agar of literary modes and referents the Field family is buried. Take, for instance, the stylized excess of the “wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles…with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world” (Walden, p. 204). When read as part of the narrator’s negotiation of physical and literary territory imprinted by Channing’s rural Romantic tropes, the description shows rightly as mock language of aristocratic privilege and inherited ownership, an assault on the “derivative old country mode” not only of Field’s economic activity, but of Channing’s poetry. In the infant’s description lies a parody of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” (1807): “Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, / A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!”⁵⁶ Biological age is no match, here, for the premature senescence of outdated social and aesthetic orders; race and poverty are two of several factors stiffening the child into aesthetic object.⁵⁷ Recognizing that Thoreau has in mind imported Romantic precedents clarifies the otherwise obscure admonition of the “Good Genius” toward the end of the chapter—“Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay” (Walden, p. 207, emphasis added). In Thoreau’s call for the Irish to reject a default American consumerism is sublated an appeal for American poets to write verse unmediated by the English pastoral.

This “Good Genius” comes in to preach a Demosthenic abnegation more drastic even than Thoreau’s: “Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds” (Walden, p. 207).⁵⁸ The introduction of this alien voice, and the extreme permeability to event and language it advocates, signals the fray of individual identity that is figured, later, in the narrator’s “switching places” with Field in the boat. Thoreau forthwith pursues this abnegation of verbal identity and property by fusing his own voice and Channing’s. Whereas previous quotations of Channing’s poem are introduced by clear attribution (“a poet”; “the Muse fables”) and thus cordoned off, here the text slips into verse via the signature of lyric overflow and authentic individual affect: “O Baker Farm!” Such a generic gesture strongly prepares the reader to expect extemporaneous output from a Romantic speaker. Instead, Thoreau serves Gordon Lish-esque editorial practice, stitching together four parts of Channing’s 92-line “Baker Farm” into a sonnet which cancels out, in both practice and content, the grounds of Channing’s proprietary claims. With repeated negations (“No one…no man…never perplexed”) and the denial of economic value (“the richest element / is a little sunshine”), Thoreau’s revision preserves the farm as a locus of festal revolutionary potential that, scrambling received political and religious affiliations, remains outside the social order. It concludes by forcing our gaze back on “the state” and the social “conspiracies” which structure the experience of any discrete “landscape”:

Whereas in Channing’s original this ecstatic note is absorbed back into a more elegiac, conventional tone, Thoreau revels in its latent wildness, exploring how the “hate” and “peril” that comes of being a riotous guest in another’s text, or cabin, might redound politically and create genuinely “new experience and character” (p. 208)

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The ethical shock of Thoreau’s treatment of the Field family is not diluted by this density of intra-literary engagements. Rather, it is intensified; social violence is necessary to make palpable the consequences, potentially salutary and presently deleterious, that attend on the extreme literary abnegations of social codes, of property, that Thoreau’s narrator experiments with in “Baker Farm.” The wordplay of a statement such as “the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe,” for example, does not soften the jab, but deepens it, as physical figures of digging prevent “culture” from rising into an intellectual valence (Walden, pp. 205-206). With “undertaken” and the violent cutting of bog-hoeing, the concomitant figure of not growing, the statement implies the burying of the “Irishman.”⁵⁹ This caricature of Irishness, trapped in old-world attitudes, and blurring under the warping effects of Channingian poetics, with its parallel stress on misdirected industry, is what Thoreau must bury at Walden’s midpoint. The Fields are Thoreau’s inverse: heavy and bodied, as opposed to his persistent “lightness,” they are already encumbered by capitalist consumption without yet being able to be in it. Whereas Thoreau, during the first year at Walden, resembled them as a buyer, seller, and tiller, his second year featured a retreat from agriculture into an ethos of leisure, accompanied by the increased frequency of fishing, a practice he recommends to the Fields, “without labor, but as a recreation” (Walden, p. 487). The Noahic covenant premised on the prevalent wandering in “Baker Farm” and activated by “recreation” makes clear that fishing, for Thoreau, functions from here on as an alternative master figure for the production of poetic lines.⁶⁰ The fishing line, aleatory and contingent, evades the georgic’s willfulness and its equation of lines with labores and furrows, deriving poetic production ultimately from the “sweat of [the] face.”⁶¹ Still, a structural parallel to Irish itinerance notably frames Thoreau’s own philosophical and linguistic tenancy: not only does the narrator originally build with the boards of James Collins’s shanty, but also that family’s few “encumbrances” and ease of motion are far more positively valued (Walden, p. 43).

One way of reckoning with Walden’s rhetorical violence is prepared by Katie Simon’s argument about narratorial detachment in Thoreau’s Cape Cod. Simon takes as object another episode of ambivalent ethical response to Irish suffering, the shipwreck of the famine ship, St. John. Reading the text alongside J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), she argues that the narrator’s “mimetic performance of detachment…models the detachment of capitalist systems, thus disturbing our notion of a heroic pastoral retreat.”⁶² Such a model requires the implicit sacrifice of the narrator’s ethical authority as he, complicit but aware, resigns himself to functioning as the mouthpiece of the systems to which he belongs. In Thoreau’s “Baker Farm,” characterized by a broadly mordant satire of the narrator’s reform efforts, the systems in question are the linked tropologies of English verse conventions, the proprietary poiesis of Emerson and Channing, and the erosion of the commons by a burgeoning consumer economy. By peopling a landscape depopulated in Channing and showing in the breach how the ethics of literary representation redound in the social realm, Thoreau leverages a strong critique of the obfuscations of rural poetry, and, in an American context, the settler-colonial fantasy of empty, moral earth on which Emerson’s hortatives depend. In this, Thoreau anticipates Raymond Williams’s argument that the country house poem functions as a mystification that replaces human “work” with a vision of land “yielding of itself.”⁶³ Having registered the human toll of these interlocking discourses on the Fields, Walden’s narrator—his own identity scrambled in the vanity fair of allusion, pastiche, and quotation—does not recover. The subsequent, self-ironizing masque between the Hermit and the Poet in “Brute Neighbors,” which distances both figures equally, is a preliminary recognition that the toll of “Baker Farm’s” renunciatory “errand” is too high and that, despite his struggle to escape it, Thoreau remains as trapped in generic precedent and archetype as Channing. The thematic expansions of the text’s second half derive their force from the narrator’s sublime acceptance of his complicity in such systems.

In “Baker Farm,” Walden draws closest to the formative verse traditions Thoreau was slowly renouncing, resulting in the crisis this paper details; elsewhere in the text, the relationship is less personally and ethically fraught. However, the ways Walden incorporates, appropriates, and distances verse in the matrix of its prose throughout offer rich insights into Thoreau’s thinking about literary and economic appropriation, his development as a language artist away from Emerson’s shadow, and, generically, into the twilight authority of poetry as a privileged medium for representing and culturing American geography, with which emergent prose forms had to reckon.⁶⁴ Further, the friction in these acts of textual neighboring generates fields of ethical and epistemological purposiveness as poetry’s tendency toward polysemy makes it liable to evade the cordon of quotation and invokes a vertical temporality at odds with the metonymic skew of prose narrative, and as poetry deploys meaning along semi-rational vectors such as sound and affect.⁶⁵ Such verse extracts, and the poetic authority they reserve, whether in literary sources, newspapers, or copy-books, need not represent diminished instances of majuscule poetry and independent forms; Emerson’s own “The Poet” advocates for both stances.⁶⁶ Rather, such auxiliary verse represents a supplement and a challenge—from both the angle of genre, and of minoritarian or subalterned positions—to evolving American prose modes and the swiftly reorganizing society they speak to.