Homer in The iLiad and The odyssey, Virgil in
The aeneid, and the early English poet Caedmon
explain how a people came to inhabit the specific
landscape they do. beowuLF (Anonymous) drama-
tizes the defense of one’s turf. Geoffrey Chaucer’s
The canterbury taLes lend further to the trope of
journey as tale, tale as journey, thereby paralleling
nature and the act of storytelling itself. John Mil-
ton’s paradise Lost even details heaven and hell
as determinants of human consciousness, thereby
deeming the eternal and ethereal as influential
spaces as well. But throughout the Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, and the Restoration, nature was,
for the most part, allocated the role of backdrop—a
mere canvas upon which the acts of humans were
transposed. Occasional personification aside, nature
was rarely afforded the power of agency.
The romantic period (1785–1830) saw nature
utilized as more of a primary subject matter than
previously. William Shakespeare’s comparisons of
women to summer’s days yielded to the direct
treatment of seasonal splendor by William Blake
(sonGs oF innocence and oF experience), Wil-
liam Wordsworth (“Lines Composed a Few
Miles above Tintern Abbey”), and Percy Bys-
she Shelley, who celebrated nature as an inspi-
ration and thereby ascribed it the role of muse, a
position previously allocated to the divine.
But while nature certainly plays a part in writ-
ings of the “Old World,” it was truly the genesis
and flourishing of American literature that eventu-
ally repositioned it as a central, rather than merely
a peripheral, thematic element, replete even with
agency. As opposed to the letters produced in the
well-known, exhaustively mapped countryside of
Great Britain and Europe, those of the Western
Hemisphere were recorded by pioneers in the throes
of attempting to explore—both physically and intel-
lectually—the immensity of an unforgiving foreign
wilderness.
These prenational, or colonial, writings are most
recognizable by the strong and overt religious sen-
timent they propound. Tracts drafted by Puritans
emigrating from Europe to New England promul-
gated strict Calvinism, by which humankind was
placed on a pedestal above the natural world due
to the favor shown it in the Bible, particularly in
the creation of man as the pinnacle of God’s work.
This anthropocentric worldview traveled across the
Atlantic with emigrants who sought to civilize the
“savage” wild into which they were moving: The
wilderness was seen as being in need of the doctrine
they promulgated, as salvation was to be found not
in the forests but in civilization, a divergent absolute
from the “trickster” tales of the Winnebago, Sioux,
Navajo, and other Native American tribes, in which
natural elements and creatures display, paradoxically,
a certain consistent unpredictability when inter-
acting with people. The Puritans frowned on this
subjectivity, maintaining instead that wilderness was
the realm of beasts, of evil—this was the scene of
Christ’s temptation, after all, the post-Fall waste-
land. The key, they believed, was to carve out their
own space and to introduce the word of God to the
deprived landscape that lay before them. If paradise
could be regained, it was not in the trees themselves
but in their felling. Churches were needed to sub-
ordinate the wickedness of the uncouth wilderness
to Providence, illustrated efficiently by the shining
“city upon a hill” envisioned by John Winthrop in
his sermon A Model of Christian Charity, delivered
as a mission statement of sorts while en route from
England in 1630. The concrete physical situation of
the suggestion conveys the goal of these refugees:
The realm of humans, the organized city, will be,
quite literally, constructed above nature.
Following independence, a new challenge pre-
sented itself to the now “American” authors. As
former British subjects became pioneering patriots,
the question of their interaction with their sur-
roundings followed logically—that is, we know
how subjects of the Crown treat nature, but what
of American citizens? Merely regurgitating the
ideology of those against whom they had fought
so hard and long for independence lacked ambition
at best, and seemed dangerously cyclical at worst.
Hence, the initial American literati focused primar-
ily on this new man, this fresh being (whom the
20th-century literary critic R. W. B Lewis would
deem “the American Adam” in his work of the same
name) reborn on a still largely unknown continent.
The French-American writer J. Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur explored this creature as a product of
its space. Washington Irving’s fiction, especially74 nature