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Bruce RondaColorado State University

By the mid-1840s, in one of several reinventions of his career, former transcendentalist Orestes Brownson had turned to Roman Catholicism and proceeded to launch bitter diatribes against his one-time colleagues. For them, he charged, “the individual is the authority before which all must bow…their leading doctrine is, that each man may and should be a Christ.” Ultimately, Brownson concluded, the entire Protestant movement “ends in Transcendentalism,” and “Transcendentalism is the last stage this side of nowhere; and when reached, we must hold up, or fly off into boundless vacuity” (Brownson 1966, 6: p. 134).

Although some transcendentalists doubtless blanched at Brownson’s harsh words, they may also have admitted their truth. The coterie, labeled “transcendentalists” mostly by their enemies, embraced no uniform political or social ideology and no one aesthetic approach. Many of the transcendentalists shared an admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially in the years when he was a controversial lecturer and essayist. But for nearly all of them, the charge that Brownson leveled stuck, for it was their religious radicalism that most consistently defined transcendentalism in its historical phase, the three decades before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Religious radicalism would have a huge impact on the way transcendentalists used language and wrote poetry, the particular focus here. There is, certainly, no identifiable “transcendentalist” poetry, no singular body of work that enters anthologies along with “Romantic” or “modernist” poetry. Rather, transcendentalism introduces a set of concerns or preoccupations into the poetry of many writers across many decades, a restlessness or anxiety about what language is available to poets in the wake of the shift in consciousness that transcendentalism encouraged and modeled.

In “The Transcendentalist” (1841) Emerson writes that the transcendentalist “believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy” (Emerson 1996, p. 196). But what is the source of that miracle? Nearly all of them originally Unitarian Christians and some still claiming that identity, these radicals had already come a great distance from historic Christianity. For them, the only god we know for certain lives in each person, for whom visionary experiences can exceed our ordinary lives and become vehicles for recognizing and expressing the divinity within.

How are those experiences to be expressed? In what language, through what tropes, allusions, frames of reference? For many transcendentalist poets and those who followed in their wake, the biblical narratives expressed in beliefs, practices, and art were no longer compelling, or at least no longer singular. Like their British Romantic counterparts, transcendentalists sought a language to express evanescent “border” experiences as fully human rather than supernaturally induced, experiences that are transfiguring and may just as quickly fade (Abrams 1971).

The triumphs and pathos of “the aboriginal Self,” as Emerson called it in “Self-Reliance,” constitute one important thread in transcendentalism’s poetic legacy. There is, however, another thread, less visible in transcendentalism’s historical moment but increasingly visible in our time. This effort deliberately seeks to diminish the human voice, to decenter the human center of gravity. Here the restlessness of transcendentalists who moved from reform to reform manifested itself in efforts to see in nature not correspondence to the human story but its own independent life, and to find, paradoxically, human language to express that life. Thoreau’s work from Walden (1854) to his last essays and journal entries are the central texts in this version of transcendentalism. Few in his lifetime grasped the implications of his writing, but important modern and contemporary poets and critics have recovered his work as resources for their own.

The ante-bellum United States was awash in poetry, and poets associated with transcendentalism contributed to that flood-tide. Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune was a favorite newspaper outlet for these writers, but many more published in the transcendentalist journal The Dial (1840–1844) and in The Una (1853–1855), the first US women’s rights newspaper. Many of those contributors were women, including Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Ellen Sturgis Hooper. Fully one-third of the poems in the first issue of The Dial and nearly all the poems in the second issue were written by women. Between 1835 and 1844, the years of her greatest involvement in the transcendentalist movement, Margaret Fuller wrote over 100 poems, most of which were published in her lifetime (Kohler 2017, p. 142). Combined with poems written by men like Christopher Cranch, Jones Very, Ellery Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, and others, poetry was clearly a familiar vehicle for the transcendentalist coterie.

Emerson was often unimpressed with the work of his fellow poets. Jones Very, Greek tutor at Harvard, wrote sonnets that Emerson at first praised, but then found overwrought and unconvincing. A similar pattern of initial encouragement followed by disappointment marked Emerson’s views of Thoreau’s, Channing’s, and Charles King Newcomb’s verse, while Cranch’s poetry seemed barely worth considering by him (Moss 1976, pp. 49–59). Part of the difficulty lay in Emerson’s elevated sense of what a poet should be and do. In “The Poet,” he calls for “a liberating god” who is “a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents…but of the true poet.” Few, it seemed to Emerson, could live up to such standards (Emerson 1996, pp. 462, 466).

Several recent critics share Emerson’s skeptical views of the poetry written by his fellow transcendentalists. In an influential essay in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Lawrence Buell argues that transcendentalist poetry is marked by a “rhetoric of cerebral rather than visceral intensity committed to filtering represented experience through the lens of philosophic or moral reflection” (Buell 1993, pp. 116, 119). Stephen Cushman builds on Buell’s insight by proposing that the flight from the personal in much transcendentalist poetry stems, ironically, from the very Christian doctrine of self-denial that the movement critiqued (Cushman 2011, pp. 91–92). Or perhaps, as Ed Folsom has suggested, adherence to poetic tradition offered one place for the radicals to be safely grounded in Victorian gentility (Folsom 2010, p. 268).

Looked at differently, and less overshadowed either by Emerson’s dicta in “The Poet” or by Whitman’s and Dickinson’s subsequent achievements, transcendentalist-era poets did produce abundant, interesting, and often memorable work. For many of these writers, the two persistent issues were finding a distinctive poetic voice and finding fresh language for expressing spiritual or visionary experiences. As outlets for women poets expanded in the mid-nineteenth century, it is not incidental, therefore, that so many women writers associated with transcendentalism should write poetry, nor is it surprising that such poetry dealt with such themes.

Here, for example, is Margaret Fuller’s “Double Triangle, Serpent and Rays”:

Patient serpent, circle round,

Till in death thy life is found;

Double form of godly prime

Holding the whole thought of time,

When the perfect two embrace,

Male & female, black & white,

Soul is justified in space,

Dark made fruitful by the light;

And, centred in the diamond Sun,

Time & Eternity are one.

(Fuller 1998, p. 60)

Here Fuller confirms transcendentalists’ fascination with images of circles and orbs, but pushes further. Within a verbal representation of the ouroboros, the Egyptian and Greek image of the snake swallowing its tail, she embeds two triangles with their prime-number sides, and around all that she radiates the rays of the “diamond Sun.” The poem suggests the transcendentalist desire to go beyond accepted binaries in society and culture and to find non-Christian images of eternal life and sacred wisdom. It also likely springs from Fuller’s desire to acknowledge in her own life a complex identity that could not be reduced to easy dichotomies.

A second example of transcendentalist-era poetry is drawn from Unitarian clergyman Frederic Henry Hedge’s “Questionings,” published in the first number of The Dial:

Now I close my eyes, my ears,

And creation disappears;

Yet if I but speak the word,

All creation is restored.

Or—more wonderful—within,

New creations do begin;

Hues more bright and forms more rare,

Than reality doth wear,

Flash across my inward sense,

Born of the mind’s omnipotence.

(Hedge 2000, p. 523)

While Hedge resisted the anti-clerical attitudes of transcendentalists like Emerson and Bronson Alcott, his intellectual affinity for the movement is evident here. Hedge’s poem takes up the same issues as Emerson explores in Nature and “Self-Reliance”: to what extent does the phenomenal world exist apart from human perception of it? Or, pushing the question even further: does the mind create an inward world that is far richer and more varied than anything perceived to be external to it?

Meanwhile, in New York City, journalist, printer, and carpenter contractor Walter Whitman, Jr., spent much of the decade between 1845 and 1855 soaking up his city’s theater and opera performances and reading voraciously. A vast, undisciplined reader, clipper, and saver, Whitman returned to some texts repeatedly, including the Bible and works of Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin (Zweig 1984, p. 6). Simultaneously, Whitman was fascinated with the lives and talk of working-class people. Out of this welter of influences would come, in July 1855, the slender green volume without its author’s name on the cover, called Leaves of Grass.

Later that month, Emerson wrote to Whitman saluting him “at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.” In Leaves of Grass, he found “incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be” (qtd. in Loving 1999, p. 189). Whitman did not see that letter until October, but as soon as he did he sent it to Greeley’s Tribune, where it was published without Emerson’s knowledge or permission. A second edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1856, which included Emerson’s letter, again without his permission. By then, Whitman’s publisher, Fowler and Wells, were determined to get maximum effect out of the “emphatic commendation of America’s greatest critic” (qtd. in Loving 1999, p. 213).

First notices of Leaves of Grass quickly linked the book to transcendentalism. Emerson’s own letter, as Jerome Loving points out, appears to be an effort to rekindle the movement which had begun to flag. But linking Whitman to the largely New England movement was at best a mixed blessing. With attention came inevitable blowback, including an outraged review by literary powerhouse Rufus Griswold. Leaves of Grass is “a mass of stupid filth,” Griswold wrote. “There was a time when licentiousness laughed at reproval; now it writes essays and delivers lectures” (qtd. in Loving 1999, p. 184).

In 1881, Whitman visited Emerson, now largely lapsed into aphasia, at dinner with Frank Sanborn, Louisa May Alcott, and her father Bronson. What Whitman remembered as a pleasant event was largely overshadowed by efforts of many influential New Englanders to separate the declassé poet and his supposedly shapeless poetry from Emerson’s reputation as New England’s sage. Emerson’s son Edward had been working hard in the years before and after his father’s death in 1882 to smooth out the elder Emerson’s reputation, including his efforts as a poet. “[T]he tide of protest of those days, the so-called transcendental period, ran strong and sometimes carried Mr. Emerson into fantastic and startling imagery and rude expression,” he wrote in 1898. It was that same impulse, Edward thought, that led his father to champion the work of “a young mechanic” and allowed him to overlook “the occasional coarseness which offended him.” Edward was sure his father was annoyed that Whitman published the famous letter of congratulation, and that his father was also disappointed that nothing more came from Whitman’s first great achievement (Emerson 1898, pp. 227–228).

But in 1855, Emerson had been “happy” to read Whitman’s poetry, “as great power makes us happy.” Whitman hears Emerson’s call to enjoy an original relation with the universe and creates himself, “Walt Whitman,” in the course of his long unspooling lines. The speaker both creates and transcribes ecstatic, visionary experiences, as in “Song of Myself,” where he lay with “you” on a “transparent summer morning”:

Swiftly arose the spread around me the peace and joy and

knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the

earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my

own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my

Own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers

and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love.

(Whitman 1992, p. 192)

“Song of Myself” is the first and most extensive poetic treatment of the drama of the ecstatic figure who co-creates and inhabits the world around him. What is striking here is not just the connection to Emerson but the connection to transcendentalists and transcendentalism. Like the movement’s lesser-known poets, Whitman recasts an “earth/heaven” dialogue into an earthly drama. Salvation here is simultaneously personal, natural, and relational, transfiguration a human possibility, not the result of divine intervention. At the same time, Whitman’s “I” is not a solitary self, but rather a fluid one, seeking connections with other selves and with the natural world, as poet Mark Doty has recently observed in What Is the Grass. Walt Whitman in My Life (2020).

Of all the major American poets, Emily Dickinson was the last to live and write in years shared with the remaining survivors of the transcendentalist coterie. Starting with Dickinson, critical language about “legacy” and “influence” begins to shift away from proximity or community connection to something less direct and more subject to judgment and interpretation. From Dickinson onward, biographers and critics begin to use phrases like “hearing echoes of,” or “the tradition of” or “arguing with the work of.” Even more, with her taut and precise use of language and her metrical experiments, Dickinson seems to belong on the modern side of the great divide, an enemy of all that is flaccid and Victorian in writing.

At the same time, Dickinson belonged to her time and culture, which included the work and influence of transcendentalists. She was an attentive reader of Emerson’s essays and poems. She also read the essays, in Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere, of the man she called “Preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Abolitionist, transcendentalist, Civil War officer, feminist, essayist, editor, Higginson carried on a twenty-five year correspondence with Dickinson, even if the poet’s works more than occasionally baffled him. Higginson would also preside over a two-part “regularized” edition of Dickinson’s poetry in 1890 and 1891, one that smoothed out her irregular lines and offered titles to her poems (Wineapple 2009). At least through these two figures, Dickinson would have a more than adequate knowledge of transcendentalism, a movement that, for all its Victorian patriarchal attitudes, featured strong women in positions of intellectual leadership, women like Sarah Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody.

Thematically, too, Dickinson shared and extended transcendentalists’ interests in the movement’s major themes. Many transcendentalists exhibited a common interest in the natural world, as a place of refuge from greed and suffering, a site of visionary experiences, and an arena of the same processes of birth, death, and new life that also mark human life. But Dickinson’s tropes are strikingly vivid, offering both nature’s spectacular sunset and its inevitable fading and decay:

Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple

Leaping like Leopards to the Sky

Then at the feet of the old Horizon

Laying her spotted Face to die

Stooping as low as the Otter’s Window

Touching the Roof and tinting the Barn

Kissing her Bonnet to the Meadow

And the Juggler of Day is gone.

(Dickinson 1961, p. 28)

Like the transcendentalists, Dickinson inherited and transformed the language of religion. For them, the path of religious restlessness had already taken their parental generation away from Calvinism toward liberal religion, and now even that religious perspective was inadequate. For Dickinson, living in Calvinist-dominated Amherst, the rebellion that led some from biblical religion to religion as inward drama was staged in her poetry. She found the inherited language simultaneously a burden and a resource:

Of God we ask one favor,

That we may be forgiven—

For what, he is presumed to know—

The Crime, from us, is hidden—

Immured the whole of Life

Within a magic Prison

We reprimand the Happiness

That too competes with Heaven.

(Dickinson 1961, p. 304)

And like the transcendentalists, Dickinson explored the dimensions and experiences of the inner life. Where Emerson (and the male poets and critics who followed him) traced and celebrated the “central man,” Dickinson traced an often bitter, witty, sarcastic female self:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—Too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

To an admiring Bog!

(Dickinson 1961, p. 47)

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, transcendentalism’s reputation declined dramatically. Henry Adams’s 1876 review of O.B. Frothingham’s pioneering Transcendentalism in New England skewered its adherents as people who “sought conspicuous solitudes; looked out of windows and said, ‘I am raining’; clad themselves in strange garments; courted oppression; and were, in short, unutterably funny” (Adams 1876, pp. 470–471). Less humorous was George Santayana’s address in 1911 called “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” Santayana charged that transcendentalism contributed to a weak, self-centered, and self-conscious attitude among American intellectuals, unfitting them to engage in the world of conflict and desire (Santayana 1982, pp. 252–253).

As transcendentalism as a movement faded, its influence on the writing of poetry began to be located not so much in a shared impulse as in the work of individual writers. In this way, transcendentalism became a literary and cultural influence conveyed in texts, its collective identity condensed into the memorable writings of a handful of figures. According to several influential twentieth-century critics, poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and A.R. Ammons were heirs of Emerson and “Emersonian transcendentalism” (Bloom 1971a pp. 217–234, 1971b pp. 257–290, 1975, pp. 160–176; Poirier 1977, pp. 144–145, 187–188, 1987; Poirier 1992, pp. 68–69). For these and other critics, the work of philosopher William James became an additional lens through which to read the nineteenth-century writers, making Emerson and his version of transcendentalism a forerunner of pragmatism (Poirier 1987, pp. 13–36; Bauerlein 1997, pp. 7–35).

William James grew up in the shadow of transcendentalism, where William’s father Henry senior and Emerson were friends and friendly rivals. “Oh, you man without a handle!” Henry senior once charged. For his part, William disliked the way transcendentalists often lapsed into a vague belief in a universal spirit or “Oversoul,” as Emerson put it. That sounded too much like a comforting doctrine that explained, or explained away, everything. In 1903, preparing to lecture at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Emerson’s birth, James took it upon himself to re-read nearly everything Emerson wrote, underlining and commenting as he went (Richardson 2006, pp. 432–34). That reading changed James’s mind about the Concord essayist.

What was most impressive, said James in his 1903 address, was Emerson’s emphasis on “the sovereignty of the living individual” (Richardson 2006, p. 435). James would find ample evidence in Emerson’s book Nature (1836), which proclaims that “the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself…. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see” (Emerson 1998, pp. 47–48).

At the same time, Emerson understood that the self-confidence to “build therefore your own world” would inevitably be matched by a sense of human inadequacy. “Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow!” he wrote in “Circles.” “I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall” (Emerson 1996, p. 406). James, usually a self-confident thinker and writer, might hesitate to write such sentences. But he did acknowledge that insights can often best be expressed in hesitations and transitions: “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold,” he wrote in “The Stream of Consciousness” (James 2000, p. 180).

For Emerson, the sense of human limitation often arose when he pondered the place of the self in the natural world. What are the affinities between the human and the more-than-human? For Emerson, nature sometimes appeared as the intractable “other” against which the human imagination struggled, and sometimes as a process of which humanity is an integral part (Branch and Mohs 2017, pp. 125, 204–205).

Reading Emerson reinforced for Robert Frost his decision to locate much of his poetry in rural settings, to explore the complex connections between the human and more-than-human worlds. At the same time, reading Emerson through James led Frost to find those connections unsettling and often deeply problematic. A nighttime snowstorm in “Desert Places” covers the ground and smothers the animals “in their lairs,” prompting an awareness of an inner loneliness, “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/With no expression, nothing to express.” The poem continues:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places

(Frost 1961, pp. 194–195).

There are moments, the speaker suggests, when nature and the self are congruent, but only as a mutual emptiness. In “The Most of It” the speaker longs for an independent voice in nature, “Counter-love, original response.” Yet the poem suggests that what the speaker wants even more is someone, “someone else additional to him.” When that “additional” appeared as a huge buck crossing the lake and stumbling “through the rocks with horny tread,” the protagonist concluded “that was all” (Frost 1961, pp. 224–225). In this poem, the quest for an Emersonian “original relation with the universe” is thwarted by a failure of imagination, by a limited desire to see the world only as essentially human.

Frost offers a vision of just how difficult it is to work through that dialectic of self and not-self. In his most memorable poems, he seems to suggest the near-collapse of that effort, the lapse into silence and inanition: “My words are nearly always an offense./I don’t know how to speak of anything/So as to please you,” Amy’s husband cries out in “Home Burial” (Frost 1961, p. 43). Language is at best vague and slippery, its meaning forever eluding our grasp. Both James and Frost nod in agreement to Emerson’s lines in “Experience”: “dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads…” (Emerson 1990, p. 473).

No wonder critic Lionel Trilling called Frost “a terrifying poet…. The universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe… But whenever have people been so isolated, so lightning-blasted… so reduced, each in his way, to some last irreducible core of being [?] … The manifest America of Mr. Frost’s poems may be pastoral; the actual America is tragic” (Trilling 2000, pp. 378–379). Joanna Meadvin builds on that perspective: Frost is a modern transcendentalist, she says, swinging between materiality and ideality, but fully at home with darkness, danger, evil, and chaos (Meadvin 2010, pp. 112, 122).

The challenge of living in a world where meaning is invented rather than imparted is not simply one that Emerson or Frost confronted alone, but rather was the shared challenge of the transcendentalist group. In that sense, Wallace Stevens’s poetry joins in a long conversation that included those nineteenth-century figures. Stevens shapes that conversation in distinctive ways, but as Bart Eeckhout points out, his poetry typically circles around the same epistemological questions that troubled the transcendentalists: can we grasp the world as it “really” is, or do we know it only through the lens of the knower? (Eeckhout 2007, p. 109).

For Stevens, as for Emerson and Hedge before him, the self certainly can experience itself as world-creating. We see this in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in lines that are both very Romantic and transcendentalist:

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

(Stevens 1990, p. 98)

What of the sense that the self is part of a larger cosmos? “There is a conflict,” Stevens writes in “The Course of a Particular,” there is “a resistance involved.” “One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.”

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,

Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.

It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves.

(Stevens 1990, p. 367).

Nature has its own independent life, to which we may not readily impute human meaning. It is inevitable, of course: the poet, at the end, hears the leaves “cry.” But Stevens also writes in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,

There was a muddy centre before we breathed,

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete

From this the poem springs, that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

(Stevens 1990, p. 210)

For several decades at the close of the last century, critical opinion located A.R. Ammons in a tradition of American Romanticism that emphasized the figure of the “central man,” the orphic poet who, though often thwarted, remakes the world through the force of imagination. Harold Bloom acknowledges that in each of the “Emersonian poets” there is both a surge of confidence and a falling-away. Still, for him the greatness of these poets derives from their insistence on the power of the visionary self to assert its dominance (Bloom 1971b, p. 260). Similarly, Bonnie Costello locates Ammons in what she calls the central Emersonian theme of “motion as it mediates the one and the many” (Costello 2002, p. 130).

In my reading, however, Ammons belongs not primarily to this way of thinking and writing, but to another strain, one that also derives from the transcendentalist era but in a very different register. Elsewhere I call it “fluid transcendentalism,” and look to Thoreau as its primary figure in the mid-nineteenth century. Thoreau modeled a way of engaging and writing about the more-than-human world that would resonate with later generations of critics, social commentators, and poets (Ronda 2017). While earlier readers and critics dismissed Thoreau’s journals and later writing as unreadable and mere chronicles, scholars including Laura Dassow Walls, David Robinson, and Lawrence Buell have argued that those writings reveal Thoreau’s interest in attaining deeper knowledge of nature and discerning a less anthropocentric place in the scheme of things (Buell 1995; Robinson 2004; Walls 1995).

“Fluid transcendentalism” is a step beyond what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls “human flourishing,” in which human well-being rather than service to the divine is the ultimate goal and value of human life (Taylor 2007, pp. 12–16). For Thoreau and writers who eventually follow him, a better goal is “material flourishing.” While Emerson and others acknowledge the intimacy humans have with the more-than-human world, their project is really about celebrating human centrality. But Thoreauvian transcendentalism pushes beyond that goal to embrace the vital and enchanted “glow” of all matter. In this way, Thoreau anticipates contemporary “new materialists” like Jane Bennett and Serpil Oppermann, who propose a vital materiality to all things, a “thing-power,” as Bennett calls it. Building on their insights, Kate Rigby emphasizes a “material spirituality,” recognizing the interconnectedness of all things rather than the more common assumption that humans are the center of the cosmos (Bennett 2001, 2010; Opperman 2014; Rigby 2014).

Seen in the light of this alternative transcendentalism, a poet like A.R. Ammons no longer so clearly belongs to the “central man” thesis of Bloom and his school. Certainly there are moments in Ammons’s poetry that seem to echo what Bloom most prizes, the struggle of the poet/speaker for space against a resisting nature, such as in the early poem, “So I Said I Am Ezra”:

Turning to the sea I said

I am Ezra

But there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

In the voice of the surf

Or leaping over the swells

Lost themselves oceanward

(Ammons 1986, p. 1)

But in “He Held Radical Light,” Ammons makes fun of this panic:

Reality had little weight in his transcendence

So he

Had trouble keeping

His feet on the ground, was

Terrified by that

And liked himself, and others, mostly

Under roofs:

(Ammons 1986, p. 60)

More often, however, Ammons works toward a co-extensive voice, the human voice interacting with, answering, often falling silent, in the face of a world not of the poet’s own making, as Thoreau did. This approach can be seen in “Bees Stopped”:

I looked out over the lake

And beyond to the hills and trees

And nothing was moving

So I looked closely

Along the lakeside

Under the old leaves of rushes

And around clumps of drygrass

And life was everywhere

So I went on sometimes whistling

(Ammons 1986, p. 2)

For Ammons, the natural world is invested with its own singular beauty, process, and form. His task is to find language to convey “the forms/things want to come as/from what back wells of possibility,/how a thing will unfold” (Ammons 1986, p. 61).

Contemporary American ecopoetics and poetry are treated elsewhere in this Companion, but here I will notice a few poets whose work seems most akin to Thoreau’s project of fluid transcendentalism and its reformulation by new materialists. W. S. Merwin made the Thoreau connection explicit in an interview with Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson: “For Thoreau, when he sees [the natural world], it’s alive, completely alive, not a detail in a piece of rhetoric. And he leaves open what its significance is. He realizes that the intensity with which he’s able to see it is its significance. This is an immense gesture of wisdom in Thoreau that I miss in Whitman” (Merwin 1987, p. 324).

Merwin’s sense of the living body of the natural world and his rage at human despoliation made Lice (1967) a widely read and critically acclaimed book. In 2017, poet Matthew Zapruder called Merwin’s poems like “The Last One,” “legendary, foundational, proto-eco”:

Well they cut everything because why not.

Everything was theirs because they thought so.

It fell into its shadows and they took both away.

Some to have some for burning.

(Merwin 2017, pp. xii, 10)

The congruities between Mary Oliver’s poetry and the influence of Thoreauvian transcendentalism, especially in books like the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive (1983), are equally striking (Ronda 2017, pp. 181–185). There, in poems like “The Sea,” “The Honey Tree,” and “In Blackwater Woods,” Oliver explores the physicality of her body and the materiality of nature. Janet McNew observes that “Oliver’s visionary goal… involves constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition” (McNew 1989, p. 72).

More recently, in Cascadia (2007) Brenda Hillman explores the mutually unstable conditions of self and environment. Exploring the California landscape, Hillman traces the collapse of a central self who dispassionately observes the world and rather portrays both human and more-than-human as “troubled, unstable, and wounded in an era in which human populations have become a geological force,” as Laurel Peacock observes (Peacock 2012, p. 88). Anthropomorphizing nature serves to decenter the human and stress the “vibrant matter” (to use Jane Bennett’s term) that constitutes the entire cosmos. In “The Shirley Poem,” Hillman writes:

Physical earth reveals itself as persons.

That’s what a body is, an

opportunity, hills dismantled geologically, shifting into

twiceness now, its wishes hearing—

a landscape full of an original

chaos but not in itself divine.

(Hillman 2007, p. 36)

Cascadia is a striking extension and re-imagining of Thoreau’s last project, as he moved from Walden’s self alone in nature to what Laura Dassow Walls calls “a social ecology in which the ethical self does not center and command, but decenters, negotiates, constructs, and defends alliances” (Walls 1995, p. 22). In Hillman’s grimmer vision, however, humanity itself is part of the nature that is destroying itself.

Shaped by a distinctive experience of religious radicalism, transcendentalist writers revealed common anxieties behind an often-smooth veneer of regularized verse: what is the self? What language other than traditional religious tropes can express “limit” experiences? In one direction, poetic responses to these questions followed an Emersonian path: the self-reliant self against limitation, often understood as the natural world, Emerson’s “Not-Me.” Even in the mid-nineteenth century, however, Emerson’s signature individualism was not the only influence. Whitman’s poetry, for example, offers a fluid self whose boundaries are porous to other selves and to nature. Women poets formed, in effect, a community of writers publishing in the movement’s leading journals.

In our own time, inspired by Thoreau’s late writing, several poets and critics have articulated another version of transcendentalism. For poets like Oliver, Ammons, Merwin, and Hillman among many others, the work of decentering the self and expressing the “vital materiality” of the more-than-human world brings the nineteenth-century movement into dialogue with some of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century.