Brooklyn, Thoreau, and Making the Self

Over at Alsace-Lorraine, Brooklyn Copeland writes:

The life you lead shows up in your poetry. It does.

Now, I don't want to be a tuba player (as she suggests later in that post), but I've also been reading some Thoreau lately. Her post reminds me of these lines:

My life is the poem I would have writ,
but I could not both live and utter it.

Of course, she's not taking the same stance as Thoreau takes in those lines, but I do think it's important to consider the relationship between self and our writing. In "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," HDT writes:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

And in "Higher Laws":

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

There's something clearly noble here about the cultivation of the self, but this is not self-improvement in the way self-improvement is typically presented. This is not improving oneself within the context of a fixed world. Instead, it is improving oneself in a way that changes "the very . . . medium through which we look"--that changes our very understanding of the world.

Brooklyn also writes:

You don't trust yourself, and you don't like yourself. Your dislike shows up in your poetry.

Thoreau points out what, I think, Brooklyn points to in her post: that by cultivating the self (that is, through the way(s) we live our lives), we shape our own perspective, our own ways of seeing the world. And it is this perspective that determines what and how we are able to write.

HDT's good friend Emerson, in "Self-Reliance," says something that isn't exactly the same, but it seems closely related in my mind:

Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.