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384 Biography 33.2 (Spring 2010) the Concord and Merrimack River, Thoreau’s transcendental move beyond Goethe also involves a “continuing anxiety of infl uence” in his “pointed cri- tique of Goethe” (124–25). Although Kuhn does not view it this way, the scenario of Thoreau’s “ri- valry with Goethe” (126) could be seen as that of a Lilliputian shooting ar- rows at Goethe’s gigantic stature. In Kuhn’s developmental narrative, how- ever, Thoreau fi gures as the culminating point of the nature writing he tracks from Rousseau’s botanizing to Goethe’s “all is leaf ” metamorphic view of plants. Walden “reveals the complexity of Thoreau’s engagement with nature and makes it impossible to regard him simply as Transcendentalist, natural- ist, autobiographer, or poet: he is all of these at once” (135). Thoreau is thus the terminus ad quem of Romantic nature writing, and in the “metaphorically exuberant and extravagant prose” of Walden, he “achieves a synthesis . . . be- tween reason and imagination, empiricism and idealism, the literal and the fi gurative; in short, between the poetic and the scientifi c” (140). As Kuhn notes in his “Conclusion,” there is a dearth of studies “that treat [these] writers comparatively” (141). His exploration
Biography – University of Hawai'I Press
Published: Sep 12, 2010
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