David M. Robinson's Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism demonstrates that Thoreau's works are sufficiently rich that they invite continual new readings of the shifting and evolving nature of nature as he viewed it, understood it, and used its contours to mold his life.... Robinson's book may tell us more about the inside of Thoreau's head than about the world around him, but in so doing he adds depth and life to the Thoreau that we carry around in our own heads, the Thoreau who perennially sends us to find Waldens of our own. Insofar as Robinson explicates Thoreau's thought and thereby gets us to contemplate how to live our own 'natural lives,' he is doing important cultural work.
The American Scholar
Natural Life evokes both scholarly and personal responses. As scholarship, the book synthesizes David M. Robinson's extensive study of the life and work of Henry David Thoreau around the core of Thoreau's ideas about conducting 'a natural life.' At the same time, Robinson shows the development of the concept in Thoreau's texts and life in such a richly human life that I looked up from the book asking questions about my own life.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environmen
Natural Life offers a rich synthesis of Thoreau criticism over the last two decades, providing an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional biography of Thoreau from his first introduction to transcendentalism to his last works, left unfinished and only recently published.... Robinson writes especially sensitively of Thoreau's relationship with his brother John, whose death in Henry's arms plagued him into a life-threatening despair.... That Henry was shadowed by survivor's guilt makes the serenity of his final essays all the more poignant, earned as it was against such a constant sense of sudden loss. Robinson, one of our foremost Emerson scholars, also gives a remarkably thoughtful account of transcendental ideals of friendship and the strain those ideals placed on Thoreau and Emerson's relationship.
New England Quarterly
This book is considerably more than a compendium.... Robinson, having thought deeply about the scholarship he has read and about Thoreau's life and writings, has also added to his narrative many of his own insights, all of them stemming from or serving to highlight the central insight and guiding metaphor of the book: that Thoreau yearned to live a fulfilling 'natural life' which aligned him with his 'own deepest needs and instincts.'... Robinson is as fine and engaging a prose stylist as he is an insightful critic and generous, perspicacious scholar. Gracefully written, inexpensive, founded upon a solid of the last fifteen years and more of scholarship in Thoreau and transcendentalism, and brimming with wonderful insights into Thoreau's life and writings—Robinson's Natural Life is a magnificent contribution to Thoreau studies, one of the best contributions we've ever had.
Thoreau Society Bulletin
Thoreau faced at least two significant crises in his life. One was recovering from the grief he suffered at the death of his brother. The other was finding a suitable career. According to Robinson, living the natural life helped Thoreau with both. To live the natural life meant two things to Thoreau: to study nature by observing and recording natural phenomena in the life around him, and to bring his life into a harmonious accord with all the movements, patterns, and events of nature.
Choice