Three Thoreaus (in One?)

Richard Lebeaux. Young Man Thoreau. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.1 262 + x pp. Michael Meyer. Several more lives to live: Thoreau's Political reputation in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. + xii pp. Robert F. Sayre. Thoreau and the American Indians. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. (240 + xx pp. In one widely-accepted map of the literary situation, there are four recognized coordinates: the work, the world, the artist, and the audience. M. H. Abrams links these four coordinates with four emphases in literary criticism: mimetic theories based on the world imitated; pragmatic theories based on the audience affected; expressive theories based on the artistic personality or identity; and objective theories, based on the art object itself.1 In our day, it has been usual to place the art object at the center of this map, relating centripetally and centrifugally to the less central coordinates of world, artist, and audience.2 For some modern critics of literature, however, the specific literary object almost disappears within a whirling total complex of world, work, audience, and artist, all four interacting, combining, even fusing into a single locus of meaning often called a "myth." To quote Leslie Fiedler, who elsewhere calls his work "a venture in literary anthropology": "There is no 'work itself,' no independent formal entity which is its own sole context; the poem is the sum total of many contexts, all of which must be known to know it and evaluate it."3 Thoreau obviously conceived and carried out his literary career with an intense awareness of all four coordinates of his literary terrain. The three books about Thoreau under review here fall almost perfectly under the three headings of audience, author, and world, respectively. Together, they pose two questions: how meaningfully can our Thoreau be considered in each of these contexts? how relevant can each context be made to the fourth and— for many of us, the most important object of our attention— to Thoreau's own formal published writings

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