Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Environmentalism: The Ecological Poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller

This essay situates the work of three key Transcendentalist authors within contemporary debates about ecopoetics. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller understand poetry not as a medium for the expression of subjective emotional states or as a vehicle for purveying information about the natural environment, but as an art of “world-making, ” a linguistic performance that transforms the reader’s relationship to the world. Emerson’s poem “Woodnotes” dramatizes the conception of the poet, also developed in his essays, as a redemptive figure whose language enacts nature’s generative principles, producing new forms rather than imitating existing ones. Thoreau’s “Haze, ” a hymn to the protean energy coursing between earth, sea, and sky, correlates its own rhetorical power as a poem with nature’s dynamism. Fuller’s “Lines Written in Illinois” commemorates her sojourn at a country estate, celebrating the landlord’s care for the land and participating in the exchange of gifts that allows its inhabitants to flourish. With their emphasis on the performative dimensions of poetic language, these poems both anticipate and complicate current attempts to theorize an ecological poetics.