The first and second-generation of writers of the post-Revolutionary war era found much to admire about the overwhelming natural beauty of the American landscape. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper both used the natural scenery of early 19th-century America as an important backdrop as they created the literature of the new American nation, while, a generation later, painters of the Hudson River School portrayed natural scenes bathed in a warm, protective, quasi-divine quality of light. And Bryant’s poem offers a massage that conjoins nature and spiritual experience in very overt ways, arguing that the experience of God can be found in nature. Although differing in medium, theme, and content, each author offers us the idea that humans can find something meaningful in “natural” settings. Summarize the distinctive views of nature captured in each example and identify how and where they capture overlapping qualities. Then argue that one distinctive example, of your own choosing, offers the most powerful and distinctive expression of the views of nature held in the early American imagination.
