ISSN:
0021-8758
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
English, American Studies
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History
,
Political Science
,
Sociology
,
Economics
Notes:
Since Thoreau's reputation today rests largely on his grasp of concrete reality – on his ability to suggest what he called the ‘hard bottom and rocks’ of that reality in his prose – the connexion between his works and the theories of the mystic Swedenborg does not receive much attention. In recent studies of Thoreau, when the Swedish mystic appears in die text, the mention is commonly brief and dismissive: Thoreau's imagination is often defined in contra-distinction to that of the ‘saint’ of the Transcendentalists. Answering a friend's enquiry in 1856, Thoreau himself admitted that he had not read Swedenborg, ‘except to a slight degree’, but he also stated that he had the highest regard for the mystic's ‘wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life’. The ‘wonderful knowledge’ to which Thoreau here refers was revealed to Thoreau, and to his age, in the theory of ‘correspondence’ between the ‘interior and spiritual’ and the exterior, natural – or material – world. To be aware of that wisdom, Thoreau did not need to read much in Swedenborg's own works, since die theory of correspondence was ' thanks to a number of interpreters ' in the air of New England when Thoreau was developing as a writer.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002187580001375X
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