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Nature Reclaimed in Nineteenth-Century American Women Poetry
FANG Gu
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.03.001
Zhejiang Yuexiu University, Shaoxing, China
This paper examines the distinct and revisionary concepts of nature articulated by 19th-century American women poets, arguing that their work constitutes a significant departure from dominant anthropocentric paradigms exemplified by Puritan theology, Romantic transcendentalism, and masculinist frontier narratives. Focusing primarily on Celia Thaxter, alongside Frances Sargent Osgood, Lucy Larcom, and Alice Cary, the analysis demonstrates how these poets rejected nature’s conventional framing as either a hostile wilderness opposed to civilization or a symbolic resource for Euro-American spiritual transcendence. Instead, they developed visions centered on nature’s intrinsic agency and autonomous operation. Thaxter emerges as a pivotal figure, forging a groundbreaking “mechanistic” view of nature as fundamentally indifferent to human concerns—governed by its own laws and manifesting simultaneous beauty and brutality without moral intent. This perspective, anticipating American literary Naturalism, starkly contrasts with the unsentimental yet appreciative depictions of nature’s inherent beauty found in Osgood, Larcom, and Cary. Collectively, these poets displaced Western metaphysical binaries (man vs. nature), prioritizing observation over idealization and representing nature on its own terms as an autonomous system or object of aesthetic appreciation, thereby achieving a crucial recasting of nature within 19th-century American literature.
19th-century American women’s poetry, nature representation, Celia Thaxter, mechanistic nature, autonomous nature, American romanticism, transcendentalism critique
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