Abstract: All conversation, as all literature, appears to me the pleasure of rhetoric, or, I may say, of metonomy [sic]. " To make of motes mountains, and of mountains motes," Isocrates said, "was the orator's office." Well, that is what poetry and thinking do. Whatever new object we see, we perceive to be only a new version of our familiar experience and we set about translating it at once into our parallel facts. Of course, we have hereby enriched our vocabulary.Everything has two handles.According to James Elliot Cabot, Emerson's literary executor, Emerson remarked late in life that he would have become a professor of rhetoric at Harvard College, his alma mater, had the position been offered to him.1 Unlike Adams Sherman ... Read More Keywords: Emerson, Ralph Waldo,; American literature; Maple; Thoreau, Henry David, PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), time seemingly progresses so slowly that a single minute fails to pass into the next. As the narrator describes, "An hour was very long in that coast town where nothing stole away the shortest minute." Yet, while this line suggests that time is static, we may interpret these words differently: the narrator's denial that a minute is "stolen" suggests that it is not merely removed, but put to good use. Significantly, the next sentence begins, "I had lost myself completely in work . . ." 1 Jewett grounds her narrator's temporal experience in the pleasurable process of work, displacing an image of a static regional past and instead considering the textures ... Read More Keywords: Emerson, Ralph Waldo,; American literature; Maple; Thoreau, Henry David, PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On a mild spring day in March 1856, following an especially cold and snowbound New England winter, Henry David Thoreau set out for an afternoon walk, departing from his family home on Main Street in Concord, Massachusetts, and threading his way through farm fields and woodlots toward the banks of the Assabet River northwest of the village. As he had done each spring for the past decade or more, Thoreau had his senses on the alert for evidence of seasonal transition. At this time of the year, he often measured the snowpack in the woods or the depth of ice on the rivers and ponds, studiously recording the results in his Journal and later transferring them into the charts of his so-called Kalendar of Concord. But this ... Read More Keywords: Emerson, Ralph Waldo,; American literature; Maple; Thoreau, Henry David, PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance."The item described in the Morgan Library's online catalog as "Wooden box said to have been built by Thoreau to house his journals" is little known, if at all, among the generations of readers inspired by Walden (1854) and little discussed among scholars of his life and works.1 The box's absence in Thoreau's cultural afterlife is understandable: as the title given in the Morgan Library catalog admits, it is "said to have been built by Thoreau," but cannot be attributed to him with any certainty. The only extant ... Read More Keywords: Emerson, Ralph Waldo,; American literature; Maple; Thoreau, Henry David, PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
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