1. The Romantic View of Nature (ca. 1780–1880)
Chapter 27
The Romantic View of Nature
(ca. 1780–1880)

2. The Progress of Industrialization
Nineteenth-century Europe experienced a population boom; increased production of coal, iron, and steel encouraged expansion of industry and commerce in the West. In this industrially-based society, goods were increasingly made at factories rather than in homes.
Advancing industrialization encouraged urbanization and spurred Western efforts to find markets and resources in other parts of the world.
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3. Early Nineteenth-Century Thought
German philosophers, influenced by Asian philosophy and Kantian idealism, viewed nature subjectively and in the direction of mysticism.
Hegel proposed a dialectical model according to which all reality, all history, and all ideas progressed toward perfect freedom.
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4. Early Nineteenth-Century Thought (continued)
Darwin argued that by means of natural selection, all living things including human beings evolved from a few simple forms: species either develop into higher forms of life or fail to survive.
While the theory of natural selection displaced human beings from their elevated place in the hierarchy of living creatures, it advanced the idea of the unity of nature and humankind.
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5. Nature and the Natural in European Literature
Nature provided both a metaphor for the romantic sensibility and a refuge from the evils of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization.
William Wordsworth, the leading nature poet of the nineteenth century, embraced the redemptive power of nature. Exalting the natural landscape as the source of sublime inspiration and moral truth, Wordsworth and his English contemporaries initiated the Romantic movement.
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6. Nature and the Natural in European Literature (continued)
The Romantics stressed the free exercise of the imagination, the liberation of the senses, and the cultivation of a more natural language of poetic expression.
Shelley compared the elemental forces of nature with the creative powers of the poet, while Keats rejoiced that nature’s fleeting beauty might forever dwell in art. Blake’s deeply spiritual poems reflect a visionary and moral perception of nature.
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7. Nature and the Natural in Asian Literature
The Romantic embrace of nature and natural imagery was not confined to the West: in Chinese literature, as reflected in Shen Fu’s confessional prose, and in painting, nature becomes a source of inspiration and personal solace.
Asian poets translated nature’s moods by way of only a few carefully chosen words, evoking the subtlest of analogies between the natural landscape and the human condition.
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8. Romantic Landscape Painting
It was among Western Romantics that the landscape became an independent and publicly acclaimed subject in the visual arts.
Constable’s contemplative scenes of English country life and Turner’s sublime vistas are the visual counterparts of the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley.
The elegiac landscapes of Friedrich in Germany and Corot in France reflect the efforts of romantic artists to explore nature’s moods as metaphors for human feeling.
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American Romanticism
American Romantics endowed the quest for natural simplicity with a robust spirit of individualism. The transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau sought a union of self with nature; Walt Whitman proclaimed his untamed and “untranslatable” ego in sympathy with nature’s energy.
In the American landscapes of Cole, Bierstadt, and Church, nature becomes symbolic of an unspoiled and rapidly vanishing world; in the art of George Catlin, the native populations and traditions of America are lovingly documented.
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10. American Romanticism (continued)
Among Native Americans, yet another (less romantic but equally mystical) view of nature flourished, as evidenced in magnificent ceremonial objects.
American folk art, as typified by the paintings of Edward Hicks, made use of natural imagery for decorative and symbolic purposes.
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