The main theme of his travel writing is not really what is seen or experienced during the trip but how he portrays himself. What he sees or experiences are presented as they are reflected in his mind.
Thoreau’s travel writing presents his exploration of his spirituality.
Thoreau’s style mixes facts uncovered or representative of the place he is traveling, such as descriptive sketches and historical lore, with entertaining elements, such as verse fragments and prose poetry. Thoreau cycles between observation and speculation and neither of these two principles dominates.
Thoreau’s work is then hybrid: it is “part sketch, part information, part narrative, part wit, part philosophy.”
Thoreau’s guiding principle when writing about a thing he observes is to be in total relation with it. Walden is the work where Thoreau’s most thorough and sophisticated level of observation. It could be considered a travelogue: Thoreau’s interior travel.
Among all of Thoreau’s works though, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is the most informed in the travel writing tradition.
References
Buell, Lawrence. “Thoreau and the Literary Excursion.” Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Cornell University Press, 1973, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1g69x7r.14.
Even when considered as a travelogue, Walden emerges as Thoreau’s masterpiece, of course, for not only does it carry the principle of significant travel as interior travel farther than any other Transcendentalist work, it is also more thorough and sophisticated on the level of observation than the rest of Thoreau’s writing.
Of all Thoreau’s books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is probably most illuminated by an understanding of the travel-writing tradition, because it presents on the surface the most perplexing mixture of subject matters and levels of style.
its attempt to intermix facts and entertainment, its academic wit, and its tendency to overrefine ideas.
The center of literary interest in such writing, Curtis goes on to say, is not what the traveler sees or the adventures he experiences, but the self-portrayal of the traveller himself.
stressing the importance of the individual mind over that of empirical fact.
what “we care to read about” in travel books is not paintings and churches and rivers and mountains, “but the reflection of these in genial and original minds.”
True travel is spiritual travel, an exploration of one’s own higher latitudes.
Thoreau interspersed descriptive sketches with verse fragments, prose poetry, and quaint bits of historical lore
In all these cases one becomes conscious of an interplay between the sequence of actual observations and the interests of a subjectively imposed mood or design. Neither dominates to the exclusion of the other; rather, the works oscillate between the two structural principles.
Thoreau had but a limited interest in the purely picturesque; but his mode of writing does resemble Irving’s in most of the ways listed here-in its descriptive, peripatetic, and miscellaneous or hybrid character: part sketch, part information, part narrative, part wit, part philosophy.
Thoreau demanded that the observer enter into a total relation with the thing observed.
Even when considered as a travelogue, Walden emerges as Thoreau’s masterpiece, of course, for not only does it carry the principle of significant travel as interior travel farther than any other Transcendentalist work, it is also more thorough and sophisticated on the level of observation than the rest of Thoreau’s writing.
Of all Thoreau’s books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is probably most illuminated by an understanding of the travel-writing tradition, because it presents on the surface the most perplexing mixture of subject matters and levels of style.
A Week primarily as a narrative with philosophical interpolations which mar its unity, and those who see it as a thematic progression with certain unassimilable elements.
The difference between Whitman and Thoreau and the popular excursion, in addition to the fact that their writing is simply more difficult, is that they refuse to do no more than daydream; they must also prophesy, whereas Margaret Fuller is largely content to remain on the level of description and anecdote. This made Whitman and Thoreau less popular but truer to Transcendentalist ideals of art.