Thoreau's Personification

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How people see one another vary in numerous ways, whether it be from actions or what is gathered through spoken conversations. When an intellectual meets someone for the first time, they tend to judge by appearance before they judge by how the person express their thoughts or ideas. In Thoreau’s excerpt, he emphasizes the importance of his philosophy, especially by making sure the reader is aware of his own feelings about it. He puts literary devices such as metaphors, personification, and imagery to construct his explanation for his philosophy as well as provide several attitudes to let the reader identify how he feels towards people and the value of their ideas.
In the beginning of the excerpt, Thoreau is disdainful towards the people in …show more content…

His use of personification implies his enjoyment of deep, one-on-one conversation. Previously noted, Thoreau prefers that ideas are said carefully and smoothly to avoid an abruptness to presenting it to someone else, if the room were to be crowded. Or, if the distance between the two people isn’t far enough to be able to register each other’s thoughts. He states that “our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval (25-26),” meaning that in order to let thoughts and ideas be understood by the other individuals, both must be at a distance to allow to process it and be able to let that distance add more detail to the thought or idea. This is supported by the following sentence where Thoreau describes it as “a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side (28-29).” Thoreau signifies the importance of communication and delivering thoughts by making it as though the thoughts and words themselves are actual living creatures that also have needs and wants. This complements his earnestness because he basically hinted to the reader in the beginning that he’s more fond of the contents of the mind than the person …show more content…

His attitudes help decipher his meanings and intentions of informing about philosophy as they give a more specific innuendo as to what he wants the reader to understand from what he’s saying. However, it’s quite difficult to narrow down what type of people Thoreau can intellectually connect with, because he doesn’t take the time to get to know them personally, which can be hard to follow. But, his applications of literary devices made it broad enough for anyone to be able to see his perspective and opinions and understand enough to be able to see it themselves in their daily

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