Henry David Thoreau 
Walking 

Walking, or sometimes referred to as ‘The Wild’, is a lecture by Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. It was written between 1851 and 1860, but parts were extracted from his earlier journals. Thoreau read the piece a total of ten times, more than any other of his lectures. ‘Walking’ was first published as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly after his death in 1862. He considered it one of his seminal works, so much so, that he once wrote of the lecture, ‘I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter.’ Walking is a Transcendental essay in which Thoreau talks about the importance of nature to mankind, and how people cannot survive without nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, yet we seem to be spending more and more time entrenched by society. For Thoreau walking is a self-reflective spiritual act that occurs only when you are away from society, that allows you to learn about who you are, and find other aspects of yourself that have been chipped away by society. ‘Walking’ is an important canon in the transcendental movement that would lay the foundation for his best known work, Walden. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, and George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, it has become one of the most important essays in the Transcendentalist movement.

‘Walking’ is a transcendental essay that analyzes the relationship between man and nature, trying to find a balance between society and our raw animal nature.

‘Walking’ fits into transcendental ideas of the 1800s enlightenment period, by claiming that we are part of nature,

Thoreau believes that when we are in nature we learn who we really are at our core,

‘Walking’ The main theme is Nature. Thoreau is looking at nature, and how nature brings self-reflection through the act of walking, how nature represents the wild natural aspect to man that has been suppressed by society, and criticizing society and people who think society is everything, and lastly Thoreau is trying to push us towards exploration particularity in the west, because at the a time the United States was living under the idea of Manifest destiny that promised westward expansion to fulfill a duty to cultivate and civilize land, however, for Thoreau the west represents a different kind of future with new opportunities.