Who Owns “Baker Farm”?

Noah Warren, “Who Owns ‘Baker Farm’?” (pp. 270–301) The politics of the “Baker Farm” chapter of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), in which Thoreau’s narrator racializes and demeans a family of Irish immigrants, have troubled critics, whose explanations have tended to invoke Thoreau’s later activities on behalf of Concord’s Irish community. This article reapproaches the chapter through the lens of Thoreau’s career-long agon with English poetry in the pastoral and georgic modes. It has not been previously remarked that the chapter “Baker Farm” is structured by William “Ellery” Channing’s poem “Baker Farm” (1849), which it vigorously revises. A close examination of Thoreau’s incorporations of verse in Walden reveals an active debate between these two protégés of Emerson about the affordances of verse as a medium at a moment of economic and social modernization, and about the power of the figure of the poet to mediate the attendant tensions. Facing, without apologizing for, the chapter’s cruelty, this article shows how Thoreau’s racially charged language emerges also from a repudiation of outdated poetics of ownership—emblematized by Channing’s verse—in favor of a linguistic commons of free use. The article’s central contributions consist of 1) highlighting the rivalry and the mutual influences of the Thoreau-Channing relationship, which stretches across their careers; 2) tracing how Walden anxiously remediates the verse it quotes and how this reflects Thoreau’s evolving relationship to the vocation of poetry; and 3) exploring how debates about literary authority and ownership restructure the contemporary economic conditions they reflect.