William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Attitude to Nature: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The article deals with the similarities between American Transcendentalism and British Romanticism, more precisely between William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential engagement with Individualism and Nature. Wordsworth, one of the revolutionary thinkers of the Romantic period, has portrayed the life of the ordinary man in his poetry and Emerson, one of the founders of American Transcendentalism, has dealt with freethinking and the liberty of the people. The article focuses on the similar ideas delivered by both Wordsworth and Emerson in their respective writings in regard to their attitude to Nature. Wordsworth and Emerson argued establishing their view that to understand the world, we must go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it.