Reviewed in Thoreau Society Bulletin

Joining Thoreau in the lineup are Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, with cameos by Poe as well as Irving, Cooper, and others. Yet if this extraordinary book has a central figure, it is still the philosopher of Walden and the masterwork he wrote. This hefty book offers none of the usual checklists, makes no effort to systematize system-resistant domains of verbal fun. Larded with authorial drollery, Transcendental Wordplay is an organic, dynamic summa punnologica that practices what it analyzes. West shows us Whitman rummaging in a midcentury etymological textbook to come up with the raw stuff of his poem “There Was a Child Went Forth.” He shows us Thoreau following trains-within-trains of thought during revisions of Walden?s famous pickerel passage until it reaches its final crystalline density.

Thoreau Society Bulletin