...more at length, for convenience putting the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I 3, 4 do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to...lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his 5 roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began...

...Writings of Henry David Thorean, vol. 4, p. 282, Houghton Mifflin (1906). See also REFORM AND REFORMERS I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. Walden (1854), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 2, p. 94, Houghton Mifflin (1906). Os SIAN...

...break regardless of how disgusted he becomes with his society.23 When Thoreau declares that he does "not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up,"24 he presumes that his neighbors are capable of such an awakening. And this presumption is the...

...reviewing.' DeVoto certainly expected strong reactions. Like Henry David Thoreau (in Walden) he meant "to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." Still, the consensus predicted IhatMark Twain 's America was sure to become a classic (except in Twain's...

...or distorting the appropriate Background of a statement. Somebody could take the epigraph of Walden, "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up," as evidence of Thoreau's egregious male egotism — if he or she could manage to avoid knowing that...

...fundamental term for Walden, heralded in the sentence from itself that Walden takes as its epigraph: "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up" (n, 7). Nothing short of Walden itself could give what it calls a faithful account of what is strung...

...sufficiently similar to his own to make his story potentially significant for them. "As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up" (389). When, at the end of the book, he observes that "We think that we can change our clothes only"...

...up is precisely what Thoreau aims to do. "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection," he says, "but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost." The morning is the temporal correlative to the cabin site at Walden Pond. In the same way that his...

...duplicitous tone in Thoreau's epigraph, something I did not stop over when I introduced it a while ago: "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag ..." Now leaving open what relation Thoreau is proposing of h1s work to Romanticism (whether the allusion...

...(With apologies to Alexander Pope) -I he only good is knowledge, the only evil, ignorance. Socrates I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but...standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. Heniy David Thoreau CONTENTS Preface xui 1. Homage to the Square z 2. Making the External World Safe...