Intentions of an Author - Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau is known as an important author that made an impact to the American literary and philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism. Through his essays, books, and poems, two themes are recognized and famously shown - nature and the conduct of life. In one of his famous works, Walden he details his life around the shores of Walden Pond. Two major excerpts from the essay create an important point of view of Henry David Thoreau. In The Bean-Field, Thoreau shares the rewarding experience he had in preparing and planting a field. Likewise, in Brute Neighbors, Thoreau focuses on the intellect of the animals by sharing the times with animals one by one. He uses metaphors to characterize…show more content… Being a transcendentalist Thoreau's self-culture takes place in the bean-field. Thoreau’s Walden has a mythical imagery he borrows from classical mythology to describe his bean cultivation. Thoreau takes simple agriculture and turns it into a symbolic and transcendent activity. He talks about manual labor as “to the scholar yields a classic result,”. Thoreau would then turn his labor into a classical role he is playing rather than as a farmer who tends to these beans he reaps. Likewise, when Thoreau talks about his labor of hard work in hoeing the fields, he instantly shows himself as the Greek mythological figure of a North African giant who wrestled with Hercules. He follows with, “my beans … attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus,” thus, he would emphasize the labor in an energetic and symbolic way rather than showing it as a material productivity of his endeavors. This excerpt that Thoreau takes the effort to write is to show his readers symbol of life. Likewise, by using a mythological reference, Thoreau compares his endeavors and hard works to a mythological being. By doing so, his insight of life is apparent in which he portrays that every hard labor that comes to people in life come with reasons and teaching of morals. In addition to mythological reference, Thoreau also compares farming to a popular movement -