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the garment of the Oversoul. Therefore it could exercise a healthy and restorative influence on the human mind. What the Transcendentalists seemed to be saying was ,"Go back to nature, sink yourself back into its influence and you’ll become spiritually whole again." The natural implication of all this was, of course, that things in nature tended to become symbolic, and the physical world was a symbol of the spiritual. This in turn added to the tradition of literary symbolism in American literature. In Nature, all things in nature were symbols of the spirit, of God’s presence.
In Nature, everything in the universe was viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. Behind physical objects was a universal soul. So people should come close to nature for instruction. Nature not only showed humanity its own materiality but taught human morality. Nature’s beauty was the beauty of human mind. The two were joined together. With this view, it stressed unity of human and nature. Nature was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence.
4.3 Influence on Later Writers
Nature has a great influence on American literature. As a manifesto of New England Transcendentalism, Nature does have a profound influence on later writers. New England Transcendentalism is important to American literature at least for two reasons. On the one hand, it is represented by two major writers of the country—Emerson and Thoreau. They became movers and shakers whose writings have had more and more impact with the passage of time. So far as these two writers are concerned, they were more enduringly important for their ideology than for their actual literary achievement. On the other hand, a new group of writers under the influence of Emerson and Thoreau began to apply transcendental ideas in their works. Almost all the writers of the period were more or less influenced by transcendentalist doctrines. Hawthorne, Melville, Lowell, Dickinson, and Whitman were all exponents of transcendentalism in one way or another. They created one of the most prolific periods in the history of American literature. Thus, Nature, which has been a masterpiece of Emerson, played a significant role in American literature. As the manifesto of Transcendentalism, Nature has thoroughly influenced the style and subjects and thought on later writers of the 19th century. As, in Nature, Emerson wrote,"in the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,- no disgrace, no calamity, which nature cannot repair."(Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836: 14) However, it was Thoreau who took this literally and tests Emerson’s ideas about nature by living at Walden Pond. Strongly influenced by Transcendentalism, Thoreau believed in the “perfectibility of mankind through education, self-exploration and spiritual awareness.” But, Thoreau’s construction of a cabin on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond is a fitting symbol of the intellectual debt that Thoreau owed to Emerson. What is more, the writers Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson reveled in their love of nature. Emerson’s masterpiece Nature is the first of many books he will publish over his career as a writer. Whitman, in his Song of Myself published in 1855, like Emerson, demonstrates a unique ability to transform nature into poetic verse. Reading Emerson’s Nature and comparing it to Whitman‘s Song of Myself we will become aware of the enormous influence Emerson had upon Whitman.
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