1. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy
David Robinson, for one, exploring Thoreau's "worldly transcendentalism," pursues a similar interest in the emergence of Thoreau's empiricism in the 1850s, but cautions against reading his ecological immersion in natural history after Walden as necessarily divorced from the poetics of "Emersonian idealism" evident in Thoreau's own earlier work: "Over the last decade of his life, Thoreau devised a set of interlinking projects in which empirical observation and metaphysical conceptualization played vital and complementary roles." (7) In this essay, I heed Robinson's caution, ...
- Word Count: 9971
- Approx Pages: 40
- Grade Level: Undergraduate