Written in 1828 or 1829, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is one of Hawthorne’s earliest tales. But even here, two decades before The Scarlet Letter, he has begun to develop the conception of romance that he will elaborate and build on in his later novels.

The story’s events take place, Hawthorne notes again and again, in moonlight rather than daylight. Here, as throughout his work, Hawthorne associates the romance not with daylight order but with the opposing or subversive force of moonlight.¹ In “The Custom-House,” he speaks of romance as “a neutral territory”; but it is also an unsettled, altered space,...

Hawthorne offers several different definitions of the romance; perhaps the best known are those in his first two novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. There is, however, at least one key difference between these definitions—a difference that suggests both Hawthorne’s own political ambivalence and the flexibility of the romance as a form.

In “The Custom-House,” where Hawthorne delineates the “neutral territory” of romance, his image for this territory is “a familiar room,” illuminated “distinctly,” but differently, by moonlight, which now invests it with “a quality of strangeness and remoteness.”¹ The tableau is a domestic...

“ ‘Moonlight, and the sentiment in man’s heart, responsive to it, is the greatest of renovators and reformers,’ ” Holgrave remarks, “ ‘And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine!’ ” (2:214). The daguerreotypist’s distinction is a crucial one for Hawthorne’s romance—that between the real reforming power of “moonlight” and the pleasant illusion of mere “moonshine.” In The Blithedale Romance, published only a year after The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s view has darkened considerably; here reform is just illusion, moonlight and moonshine one and the same.

The House of...

Of the twelve poems in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, only one had previously appeared in print. An early version of “Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States,” entitled “ Resurgemus,” had been published in the June 21, 1850, edition of the New York Tribune. Whitman’s choice of this particular poem to revise and reprint is significant, for it is one of his more openly political ones—a response to the failed European revolts of 1848 and 1849. Beyond this, his choice of a final title both reinforces the poem’s historical reference and places it in...

In the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman gives its longest poem (“Song of Myself”) the title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.”¹ The phrasing still preserves a duality: “Walt Whitman” is both the poem’s source and subject. But it is now classed as a poem, a linguistic artifact that comes between Whitman and the reader. So, too, where America was declared to be itself a poem in 1855, now “an American” and a “poem” seem to be quite different things. From the very outset of this edition—in the table of contents—poetic language is already granted less...

In the preceding chapters, I have traced the shifts in Hawthorne’s and Whitman’s views of literary representation by discussing their works in chronological sequence. The former, I have suggested, abandons the image of romance as dramatic middle ground after The House of the Seven Gables, while the latter falls back into a version of poetry as mediation in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” after having earlier sought to supersede representation altogether.

Henry David Thoreau shows an even deeper ambivalence about the status of writing, one that leads him to both assert and deny the efficacy of literary mediation—in works of the...

Tucked away at the end of each volume of the Princeton edition of Thoreau’s journals is a long list of cross-references linking passages from the journals to sections of his published works. These lists reveal an interesting pattern: Thoreau drew freely and widely from his journals for material for Walden and the Week, ranging across a decade’s worth of entries; but he worked quite differently in composing his abolitionist essays. None of the journals from 1842–49 provides any material at all for “Resistance to Civil Government.”¹ There are drafts of passages from “Slavery in Massachusetts” (in 1851 and 1854)...