From popular culture to politics to classic novels, quintessentially American texts take their inspiration from the idea of infinity. In the extraordinary literary century inaugurated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the lyric too seemed to encounter possibilities as limitless as the U.S. imagination. This raises the question: What happens when boundlessness is more than just a figure of speech? Exploring new horizons is one thing, but actually looking at the horizon itself is something altogether different. In this carefully crafted analysis, James von der Heydt shines a new light on the lyric craft of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill and considers how their seascape-vision redefines poetry's purpose.

Emerson famously freed U.S. literature from its past and opened it up to vastness; in the following century, a succession of brilliant, rigorous poets took the philosophical challenges of such freedom all too seriously. Facing the unmarked horizon, Emersonian poets capture—and are captured by—a stark, astringent version of human beauty. Their uncompromising visions of limitlessness reclaim infinity's proper legacy—and give American poetry its edge. Von der Heydt's book recovers the mystery of their world.

 "Jim von der Heydt's exciting study At the Brink of Infinity is as astute as it is timely. In smart and often pleasingly unconventional chapters on Emerson, Dickinson, Frost, Merrill and Bishop, von der Heydt shows that in an encounter with the boundlessness of American space, a lyric poet's "elemental belief is: she has things to learn." Moving gracefully from general philosophical themes to close readings of some of our best poems, At the Brink of Infinity should please any reader of American poetry."—David Orr

 "Obsession with the infinite is an American trait, endowed as we are with two vast oceans and a dazzling literary tradition. James von der Heydt explores the brinksmanship of an Emersonian line where the American shoreline-sublime awakens feelings of expansiveness and diminution at once. This philosophically rich, critically nuanced study wrests American poetry from Hegelian narrative and shows us instances—from Emerson to Merrill—of imagination and nature made new in each intimate encounter."—Bonnie Costello, author, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry