Transcendentalism: The Relationships Between God, Man, And Nature

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The natural world has always been an important subject to transcendental poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. These Concord writers of Massachusetts were the “intellectual light of the American Movement”. Nature serves much more than a natural setting in the world. It is all the poems and essays By Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman which define nature as “the living character through which human identity is constructed either through the characters’ alignment with the natural world or their struggle against it. According to the readings the works of each of them portray nature as a living force and viewed as possessing the knowledge that man needs to know. Transcendentalism was applied to Ralph Waldo Emerson…show more content…
Nature is an expression of the divine and people should be able to understand and value the theory. Emerson himself identifies nature and spirits as only components of the universe. His main focus was to link the importance to man and nature in which he states, “His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows” ( ). This quote explains the relationship and harmony between man and nature. It can be unchanged by man in relation to space, the river, the air, and the leaf. He then adds “stars should appear one night in a thousand years” (). To Emerson this brought him to question how will men believe, adore, and preserve the many generations through god. Nature is perfect and is the only thing that all men can apprehend. It is to be kept perfect since it is the place where everyone will live to form large societies and institutions. The beasts, fire, water, and garden are what serve him and his field is his bed. Even if man is unable to understand his own personal nature or the world then there is an order that will still exist “No man can violate his nature,” Emerson writes the “ Andes and Himmaleh cannot be anything other than mountains” (
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