Thoreau's Sense of Time

Free and open to the public. There will be a welcome reception at noon.

This lecture explores Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with time as an environmental, personal, and political dimension of experience. While Thoreau is often celebrated for his environmental imagination, this talk focuses on his temporal imagination — his effort to resist the thin, linear time of industrial capitalism and reclaim a richer, cyclical sense of duration rooted in the natural world. At the heart of this inquiry is Thoreau’s late-life project, the Kalendar, a series of charts tracking seasonal phenomena across years, designed to reveal patterns of recurrence and change in the more-than-human world. The lecture will argue that Thoreau’s attention to time and seasonality offers a powerful model for rethinking our relationship to the worlds we occupy and create.

BIOGRAPHY

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar: Charts and Observations of Seasonal Phenomena (Milkweed Editions, 2025) and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). She has also published three books of poetry, most recently, Daphne (Tupelo Press, 2025). She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers, including the Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She lives in Maine.

SUGGESTED READING

Case, Kristen. Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar: Charts and Observations of Natural Phenomena. Milkweed Editions, 2025.