Nature in American Poetry

We human beings can not separate from nature. No nature, no human beings. As far as poetry is concerned, nature plays a great important role on it, for uncountable poets have been writing lots and lots of great poems on it along the history of human beings. America is not an exceptional. My paper is right to deal with nature in American poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882), the leader of the Transcendentalism in New England, is the first American who wrote prose and poem on nature and the relationship between nature and man Emerson's philosophy of Transcendentalism concerning nature is that nature is only another side of God "the gigantic shadow of God cast our senses." Every law in nature has a counterpart in the intellect. There is a perfect parallel between the laws of nature and the laws of thought. Material elements simply represent an inferior plane: wherever you enumerate a physical law, I hear in it a moral rule. His poem The Rhodora is a typical instance to illustrate his above-mentioned ideas on nature. At the very beginning of the poem, the poet found the fresh rhodora in the woods, spreading its leafless blooms in a deep rock, to please the desert and the sluggish brook, while sea-winds pieced their solitudes in May. It is right because of the rhodora that the desert and the sluggish brook are no longer solitudes. Then the poem goes to develop by comparison between the plumes of the redbird and the rhodora . Although the bird is elegant and brilliant, the flower is much more beautiful than the bird. So the sages can not helping asking why this charm is wasted on the earth and sky. The poet answers beauty is its own cause for being just as eyes are made for seeing. There is no other reason but beauty itsel...

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...self but being part of the surrounding, part the world and part of the winter just like a snowman to see the truth, not only the surface but the essence. Stevens gets the inspiration from the snowman (nature) that man must lives in a real life to catch the essence of the modern life. Gary Snyder in Things to Do Around the Lookout shows us a casual and relax picture of the watcher's life in the forest. Allen Ginsburg in his Howl has made his voice, the natural true voice sprung from the heart of American request, heard as the poet laureate of the Beat Generation to protest against all the mainstream culture America had come to represent his time.

All in all, throughout all the history of American poetry, we can easily find numerous poems concerning nature from different angles, for nature will never betray a nature-loving heart just as William Wordsworth says.