Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy

" (9) I give particular attention to Emerson's late essay "Poetry and Imagination" (1875), a work whose commingling of natural science and natural history with a rhetoric of imagination recirculates various threads and pieces from Emerson's unfinished "natural history of the intellect," seeking as he puts it to bring "poetry back to nature." (10).
             The construction of an empirical Thoreau rooted in the rejection of Emersonian metaphor has been largely built upon Emerson's earliest work, almost exclusively the 1836 Nature and its "metaphor of the human mind." In doing so, critics continue to mistake the fact that Emerson offers in his later work and its focus on metonymy something of a "counteraesthetics" to his own earlier conception of metaphorical nature. (11) In this later work that conceives of a natural history or natural method of mind in organic, biological relation to matter, a conception informed by changing views of both matter and mind found in the nineteenth-century natural science he observes in his writings, Emerson revises his poetics of transcendental idealism by shifting the rhetorical grounding from metaphor to metonymy. Emerson proposes metonymy as the primary figure in his new scientific poetics, a natural-analogical basis of all writing, all thinking, and life itself. Emerson's "metonymy," I argue, figures a more empirical, if not ecological, way of thinking about writing and writing about thinking. In this way, "metonymy" names or anticipates that sort of "radical empiricism" that emerges later in the philosophy of William James, a blending of science and metaphysics, matter and mind, that critics such as Steven Meyer and Joan Richardson have linked back to Emerson's natural history of intellect. Not unlike Thoreau's work, Emerson's writing in natural philosophy moves toward what we will come to think of as an ecology of mind. (12).
             My thesis is that Emerson's neglected "metonymy" provides a path toward a more complex relation between Emerson's rhetorical idealism and the protoecological empiricism most often associated with Thoreau.