Criticism > Poetry > Thoreau, Henry David - Richard Fleck (essay date 1969)

Thoreau, Henry David - Richard Fleck (essay date 1969)

Richard Fleck (essay date 1969)

SOURCE: “A Note on Thoreau's Mist Verse,” in Thoreau Journal Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3, July 1, 1969, pp. 1-5.

[In the following essay, Fleck analyzes Thoreau's use of misty, foggy landscapes in his verse.]

Within the works of Henry David Thoreau one finds ample description of and commentary on mist and haze. Whether in the form of damp and dense fog or in shimmering rays of heat, mist and haze created for Thoreau an ethereal effect. All recognizable landscape became transformed and paradisiacal and stimulated his poetic imagination into new realms. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers Thoreau describes the misty summit of Mount Greylock in the Berkshires of Massachusetts: “All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It...

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