Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Roethke: American nature poetry's foe, friend and forte

This investigation of the effect of the Darwinian hypothesis on American nature poetry examines common themes in the work of Charles Darwin and the essays and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and proceeds to the poetry of Theodore Roethke. Although Emerson's pivotal essay Nature came well before Darwin's The Origin of Species, it nevertheless featured rumblings of some Darwinian issues. Darwin steps doubly as the "foe" of nature poetry, giving some trembling and others ground upon which to build the development of the "spiritual naturalist" in American nature poetry. There are similarities among the three authors and therefore a value in reading them together. All three are naturalists, whether scientific or spiritual, and each has a distinctive viewpoint to share with the reader. The friend, Emerson, has a voice that was both shrewd and sympathetic considering his nineteenth century audience. It is from Emerson's achievement that Theodore Roethke discerns his spiritual connection to nature and brings the spirituality, in a post-Darwinian or at least a kind of introspective psychology, to the mid-20th century American reader.