How Walden or, Life in the Woods drew on The Iliad
A documented line of influence: Henry David Thoreau demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Walden or, Life in the Woods
Henry David Thoreau · 1854
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Walden or, Life in the Woods’s page
- The Iliad sits at the heart of Walden's chapter on reading — Thoreau's case for meeting the great books in their original Greek
- He alludes to Homer throughout: an "Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings," Achilles and Patroclus surfacing in the bean-field
- Walking into Homer's epic first shows you what Thoreau wanted from a book — something worth the labor of the original
On The Iliad’s page
- Thoreau kept the Iliad on his cabin table all summer and read it in the original Greek
- Homer becomes the centerpiece of Walden's argument that the great books reward — even require — reading in their first language
- "The shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising" — Homer is Thoreau's proof that the oldest poetry stays new