Union College Union | Digital Works Honors Theses Student Work 6-2017 Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers Robert Pinkham Union College - Schenectady, NY Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Pinkham, Robert, "Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers" (2017). Honors Theses. 71. https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses/71 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Union | Digital Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Union | Digital Works. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers By Robert Pinkham ******* Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in the Department of English Union College June 2017 ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: William Cullen Bryant’s Pre-Industrial Nature Poetry 13 Chapter 2: The Transcendentalist Response to the Industrial Revolution 37 Chapter 3: Looking Back, or Moving Forward, from the Modern World 67 Conclusion 104 Works Cited 110 iii ABSTRACT This thesis examines five New England nature writers and their works from three distinct historical literary periods―William Cullen Bryant’s poetry from the era before industrialism (up to 1830); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841-1844) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) from the Industrial Revolution (1830-1860); and finally Robert Frost’s poetry and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House (1929) from the modernist period (1920-1950). These writers are connected by a shared and intense love of nature; however, because they write during different moments in history, their approaches to and definitions of “nature” vary.