Walden and the Georgic Mode‪.‬

Walden has strong ties to a formal and informal georgic tradition that stretches from classical antiquity through eighteenth-century England and antebellum America into the present day. Under the influence of agricultural works--Virgil's Georgies, Roman agricultural writings, seventeenth-century American natural resource surveys, eighteenth-century georgic poetry, and nineteenth-century technical agricultural works--Thoreau turns to the georgic mode in Walden as a means to integrate creative artistic work and the natural environment in a way unavailable to the more familiar pastoral tradition, a modal shift evident in Thoreau-inspired writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The georgic critical approach requires the significant revision or reordering of pastoral interpretations of Walden's engagements with questions of time, history, nature, labor, and language. **********