Coleridge, Thoreau, and the Transatlantic "Riddle of the World"

Samantha C. Harvey, Rochelle L. Johnson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

[T]he benefits conferred by [Coleridge] on this and future ages are as yet incalculable...To the unprepared he is nothing, to the prepared, every thing.

Margaret Fuller 1

When Henry David Thoreau alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" in his epigraph to Walden , he situates his Walden Pond "experiment" as a contribution to a transatlantic conversation concerning a central theme in Coleridge's poem - namely, how the self makes meaning of its relation to the world. 2 In fact, Coleridge's corpus shaped Thoreau's dedicated exploration of just this relation - that between the self and nature. For Thoreau, and for Coleridge before him, this relation involved a third integral category: spirit. While today we tend to separate the human "self," the external world of "nature," adn the world of "spirit," Coleridge envisioned these categories as comprising a continuum accessible through the human mind. Hence, he wrote, "Then it is, that Nature, like an individual spirit or fellow soul, seems to think and hold commune with us." 3 Thoreau expressed a similar interest in nature, spirit, and self: "My desire to commune with the spirit of the universe - to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar - to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet - is perennial & constant." 4 Both writers pursued a notion of spirit as interrelated and integrated with the self and with the natural world.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationThoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2016

EGS Disciplines

  • English Language and Literature

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