The severe differences between Puritanical conceptions of the wilderness and those of Romantic authors can be attributed to a mass shrinking of the physical wilderness in America. As religious practices changed due to increased immigration and religious movements, such as the Great Awakening, many tenants of Puritan thought transformed and dispersed among different aspects of the burgeoning American culture. One such tenant, the religious claim the Puritans felt for the New World, shifted into the concept of manifest destiny. Thousands of citizens migrated towards the West Coast, claiming the lands as a right assigned to them by God. When combined with improvements to technology and transportation caused by the Industrial Revolution, the closing of the western frontier caused the traditional schema of the wilderness as a vast, “unclaimed” territory to lose potency and relevance.
“Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings, —
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.”
Interactive map of Massachusetts created by Mapping Thoreau County
In the absence of a traditional wilderness, Romantic authors directed their attention inwards. A widespread push among American authors to define and explore the “American Voice” further encouraged an emphasis on the self in Romantic writing. Henry David Thoreau, a prominent Transcendentalist author, epitomizes the Romantic interpretation of nature and the wilderness as a metaphor for, or even extension of, the self. In his poem, “Men Say They Know Many Things,” he compares human nature and wisdom to the natural world. The line, “the wind that blows / Is all that any body knows,” exemplifies the Transcendentalist belief in the superiority of human intuition over science and technology (Thoreau).
In this instance, the key comparison is between the natural world and human nature; the natural world appears more “human” than actual human inventions, such as “the arts and sciences / And a thousand appliances” (Thoreau). For Transcendentalists, the divine existed in both humans and nature, which were so intrinsically connected they could be used as synonyms. In one of Thoreau’s other poems, “I Was Made Erect and Lone,” he makes use of natural metaphors to compare the speaker with a tree, as in the line “take the sap and leave the heart” (Thoreau). Such natural metaphors saturated Romantic literature, furthering the interconnectedness of nature and human nature.
Transcendentalists, much like the Puritans, defined the wilderness through religious and spiritual means. Unlike the Puritans, however, the Transcendentalists lacked the traditional “untamed” wilds the Puritans combated daily. As such, their concept of the wilderness posited nature as a complex, symbolic emblem for human nature. Prominent Transcendentalist writers, such as Thoreau, Emmerson, and Margaret Fuller heavily influenced the thinking of all Romantic authors, thus affecting the broader concept of the American wilderness as well.