Ecopoetics in Thoreau: Nature Ethics, Life, Purity and Ontology

Abstract

The most discussed philosopher and the writer from American transcendental writing, Henry David Thoreau, has composed and published more than two hundred individual poems. With Walden he has come up with his philosophy of nature and has pertinently idealized the transcendence of the soul through nature. Nature is the prominent theme in his writing along with the politics of contemporary society in which he has justified himself as a social and political disobeyer. He has realized the nature as the resource to understand the 'Supreme Being', but at the same time he has observed nature with the ethical perspective in which he has engrossed on the individuality and individual freedom of nature and how humans are the part of the nature's system. This research article examines on how he has undergone an ecopoetics through the emphasis on ecology, nature, human-nonhuman relation, nature's purity and ontology in his seminal poems.