How Walden or, Life in the Woods drew on The Analects
A documented line of influence: Henry David Thoreau demonstrably engaged Confucius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Analects
Confucius · c. 450 BCE
Ancient EastThe influenced
Walden or, Life in the Woods
Henry David Thoreau · 1854
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On Walden or, Life in the Woods’s page
- One of the Eastern voices threaded through Walden — Thoreau quotes the Analects and its sister classics ten times, in his own renderings
- Confucius's lines on true knowledge and on virtue swaying men like grass before the wind sit alongside Thoreau's own deliberate living
- He'd steeped himself in the Analects a decade earlier, editing forty-plus Confucian passages for The Dial; reading it first reveals which of Walden's aphorisms are Confucian in origin
On The Analects’s page
- Thoreau carried Confucius to the cabin — Walden quotes the Analects and the Confucian classics ten times over
- He had already edited 'Sayings of Confucius' for The Dial in 1843, excerpting forty-plus passages, and rendered the lines himself from a French translation
- The Analects' counsel — on what true knowledge is, on virtue bending lesser men like grass before the wind — becomes part of Walden's moral spine