Chapter 9 - Toward a Transatlantic Philosophy of Nature

Summary

In “Toward a Transatlantic Philosophy of Nature,” Samantha C. Harvey demonstrates how British Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge articulated a philosophy of nature in poetic form that would be reinterpreted in two central prose works of American Transcendentalism: Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Through detailed analysis of the works of Wordsworth and Emerson, Harvey suggests that nature’s vital role in the nineteenth century becomes particularly pronounced when Romanticism is considered as a transnational movement that flowed beyond national boundaries. Harvey shows how a transcendentalist philosophy of nature crossed, recrossed, and crisscrossed the Atlantic in various directions, undergoing continual transformations along the way.