Consider the way Worster's version of Thoreau's empirically rooted difference from Emerson's figuratively deracinated use of nature has extended into recent criticism that gives greater attention to Thoreau's unpublished work after Walden (1854). This is "the Thoreau of the journals and later natural history projects," as Rochelle Johnson identifies the turn to Thoreau's more ecocentric work of the 1850s, focusing her attention on the abstractions of Emerson's rhetorical nature--that is, nature as raw material of tropes and symbols--in order to contrast the transcendental aesthetics Thoreau must overcome. Johnson locates a more ecologically minded Thoreau only when the naturalist can move beyond Emersonian metaphor in his later work, and therefore initiate (along with Susan Fennimore Cooper) an empirical "counteraesthetics" to the dominant paradigm in American environmental aesthetics codified in Emerson's line from his 1836 Nature: "The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind." For Johnson, Thoreau's ecological perspective emerges in the writer's "observation and knowledge of the literal, physical world" in the work of his last decade that moves beyond his own (and not just Emerson's) use of metaphor to describe the physical world. (5) Lance Newman argues further that the "irreducibly material environment" of Concord that Thoreau records so palpably in his journals and unpublished natural history projects transforms his "writing and even his consciousness." In its thoroughgoing and often messy empiricism, in contrast to the polish of Walden or the lyricism of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreauvian ecocritics read this later work no longer as aesthetically deficient in Emersonian metaphor or the transcendental poetics of correspondence, but rather as environmentally vital--sufficiently "soiled"--in its counter to metaphor's abstraction of the literal matter of nature.
