The Horizon’s Hoop: Emerson’s “Monadnoc” in Contingency and History

• Main Author: Nicholas Birns
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: 807113:American literature:topical; 1000077:Literature and history:topical; 1000093:Literature and science:topical; Emerson; abenaki
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17613/M6K30F

When it is spoken of at all, Emerson’s “Monadnoc” is described as a solicitation of natural sublimity. But a close rhetorical analysis of the poem reveals greater ambivalence about this sublimity than is apparent—linking it to later American philosophic poems by Frost, Stevens, Ammons, and Kinnell t...