SOURCE: Clough, Wilson O. “A Native Metaphor Is Born.” In The Necessary Earth: Nature and Solitude in American Literature, pp. 77‐87. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

In the following excerpt, Clough examines the western frontier of the United States as a metaphor that has been assimilated into the American psyche and has influenced American literature.

The title of this section, “Frontiers of Thought,” was no haphazard choice. It was suggested, indeed, by one of many available passages from the writings of Henry Thoreau, in this case his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, begun around 1839 and published a decade later. Thoreau wrote:

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact … there is an unsettled wilderness … between him and the setting sun, or farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a loghouse with the bark on...