From The Stars To The Earth

Nature is an eternal and important theme in American literature. The frequent choosing of nature as the theme comes not by accident but with profound reasons of American history and way of thinking. The experiencing and reflecting of nature and its interaction with human beings have became the focus of American writers since the first Puritans came to the virgin American in the 17th Century. Nature presented itself as the theme in many writers' works in the American Romantic Literature of the 19th Century from time to time while different writers reflected different understanding on it. In transcendental writers' works, such as Emerson's, Thoreau's and Whitman's in particular, nature, due to the writers' individual understanding, not only reflected itself as the subject, but also was endued with many distinct meanings.This paper begins with the interpretation of the concept of 'nature' and a brief historical retrospect of the 'nature' within the European Romantic Literature of the 19th Century. Then it reviews historically the inheriting and development of choosing nature as the theme in American literature from the 17th century to the 19th century. After the analysis of Emerson's, Thoreau's and Whitman's writings, the paper displays in details how the three writers understood nature individually and their understanding of the relations between human beings and nature. This paper also explores the three writers' similarities and differences in observing, experiencing and describing of nature, thus it delineates their relations in many ways as well as the evolvement of nature as the theme in their writing respectively. At last, the paper points out that with the development of nature in the works of the three mentioned writers, how the journey of the theme 'nature' from abstraction to concrete, from reasonableness to the sensitive faculty was realized in the American Transcendentalism Literature in the 19th Century.