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Nature in Romantic Literature: A Spiritual, Symbolic, and Personal Vision

Few themes are more central to Romantic literature than nature. For the writers of the Romantic period, the natural world was not simply a stage for human action; it was a living, sentient presence, a teacher, a sanctuary, a source of spiritual renewal, and a vast symbolic system through which the deepest truths of human life could be expressed. This reverence for nature — the source of modern environmental sensibility and one of the great gifts of the Romantic period to the modern world — is the subject of this page.

The Romantic Discovery of Nature

The Romantic discovery of nature was not, of course, a discovery in the literal sense. Human beings had always lived in and observed the natural world. What changed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the meaning that nature carried for sensitive observers. The Enlightenment had largely seen nature as a mechanism, governed by discoverable physical laws, and useful to human beings as a source of raw materials. The Romantics, by contrast, came to see nature as a living system of meaning, a vast symbolic language in which the divine, the human, and the natural were continuously interwoven.

Several intellectual developments contributed to this transformation:

The legacy of Rousseau, with his insistence that natural feeling, natural life, and natural environment were morally superior to the artificialities of civilization.
The new philosophy of nature developed by Schelling, Schlegel, and other German Romantics, who argued that the natural world was the visible expression of an inner, spiritual reality.
The English landscape tradition of Thomson, Cowper, the picturesque, and the sublime, which had been building since the early eighteenth century.
The discovery of the Alps and the wild landscapes of Britain, France, and America as objects of intense aesthetic contemplation in their own right.

Wordsworth and the Spiritual Reading of Nature

The most influential figure in the Romantic treatment of nature was William Wordsworth. In Lyrical Ballads (1798), in the great poems of the 1800s, and especially in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850), Wordsworth developed a comprehensive vision of nature as a moral and spiritual teacher, a healer, and a source of insight into the human mind.

Wordsworth’s nature is not simply a pleasant backdrop. It is a “teacher,” a “healer,” and a “presence” that the poet addresses in the most intimate and personal terms. In the famous “Intimations of Immortality” ode, Wordsworth laments the loss of the “celestial light” of childhood vision and seeks to recover, in mature reflection, a sense of the “philosophic mind” that can still find “strength in what remains behind” — in the “primal sympathy” and “sober coloring” of adult experience of the natural world.

Wordsworth’s nature is, in this way, profoundly anti-mechanistic. Nature is alive with significance, and the poet’s task is to read that significance, to make the natural world transparent to the deepest truths of the human and the divine. This Wordsworthian idea of nature would become one of the most influential ideas in the Western tradition, shaping the work of the American Transcendentalists, the modern environmental movement, and the contemporary concern for ecological awareness. Our page on Romanticism and environmentalism traces this important legacy.

The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Picturesque

The Romantic treatment of nature was shaped by three important aesthetic categories: the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque.

The sublime — the experience of awe, terror, and exaltation before vast, overwhelming, or terrifying objects — was theorized by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and later refined by Kant. For the Romantics, encounters with the sublime — in Alpine peaks, Atlantic storms, vast deserts, the open ocean, the night sky — were moments of moral and spiritual growth, when the ordinary self was dissolved into a larger whole.

The beautiful — the experience of harmony, proportion, gentle pleasure, and human scale — was the necessary counterpart to the sublime. Romantic nature writing often alternated between the two, moving from peaceful meadows to stormy heights, from the smiling lake to the howling chasm.

The picturesque — a more modest, more local, more decorative category — was developed in late-eighteenth-century England as a way of describing the pleasing roughness of the natural world, the wandering streams, the ruined abbeys, the crooked cottages, the gnarled oaks that were, as William Gilpin put it, “peculiarly adapted to the painter.”

Nature and the Self in Romantic Poetry

The Romantic poets did not simply describe nature; they used nature as a way of exploring the inner life. Wordsworth’s great innovation was to make the relationship between the perceiving mind and the natural world the central subject of poetry. The natural world, in his work, becomes a mirror of the soul, a storehouse of memory, a source of consolation in sorrow, and a teacher in moments of moral crisis.

Other Romantic poets worked variations on this Wordsworthian theme. Coleridge, in “The Eolian Harp” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” explored the relationship between the natural scene and the meditative consciousness. Keats, in the great odes, used the natural image as a way of contemplating mortality, transience, and the nature of beauty. Shelley, in poems like “Ode to the West Wind” and “The Cloud,” used the natural element as a symbol of the poetic and political spirit itself.

Nature and the Dark Romantics

The Romantic treatment of nature was not all light and gentle. The dark Romantics — Poe, Hawthorne, Melville — developed a powerful counter-tradition in which the natural world was not always a place of moral or spiritual renewal, but a site of menace, mystery, and moral danger. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the forest is a place of lawless passion and dark communion; in Melville’s Moby-Dick, the ocean is both a vast natural symbol and a place of terrible, indifferent power. Our page on dark romanticism explores this darker tradition.

The Long Influence of the Romantic Vision of Nature

The Romantic vision of nature has shaped modern literature, philosophy, and environmental politics. The American Transcendentalists — Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller — made the Romantic nature idea the foundation of an American spiritual and political tradition. The great conservationists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries — John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson — were direct descendants of the Romantic sensibility. The contemporary environmental movement, the philosophy of deep ecology, and the literary tradition of nature writing from Mary Austin to Wendell Berry to Robert Macfarlane all draw, often unconsciously, on Romantic ideas about the meaning of the natural world.

A Close Reading: Wordsworth at the Wye

“For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.” — William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798

A few notes on what Wordsworth is doing in this passage, because the passage is doing more than it first appears. Three points.

The first is that the natural scene is not the subject. The natural scene is the occasion of a change in the perceiving mind. Wordsworth is not describing the Wye valley; he is describing what the Wye valley has done to him. The shift from “thoughtless youth” to “the still, sad music of humanity” is a shift from a state in which the world is received passively to a state in which it is received as a kind of moral instruction. The poem is, in this sense, the founding document of the modern nature-writing tradition, in which the writer does not catalogue the natural world but reports on the conversation between the natural world and the self.

The second is that the “presence” Wordsworth feels is not a religious presence. Wordsworth was a fallen-away Anglican, and the Tintern Abbey passage is deliberately not a confession of Christian faith. The “something far more deeply interfused” is Spinozan, not Christian; it is the natura naturans, the active principle of nature, dissolving the boundary between the perceiving mind and the perceived world. The Romantics were, in this sense, post-Christian without quite admitting it.

The third is that the “still, sad music of humanity” is the great Romantic phrase for the inarticulate moral weight that the mature perceiver finds in the natural world. The “sad” matters. The Romantic conception of nature is not the cheerful one of the conservationist, the nature lover, or the pantheist; it is the conception of a nature that is beautiful and morally serious, and that bears the weight of human suffering without explaining it. The Transcendentalists inherit this; the conservation movement inherits it; the deep ecology writers inherit it. So, more or less, do we.