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Jonathan Edwards

“These Western Woods Suggest a Different Kind of Ballad:” Place and Affect in Transcendentalism

“To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in the conclusion of Walden (1854). “The buckeye does not grow in New England,” Thoreau observed, “and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.” “The universe,” concluded this poet-naturalist, “is wider than our views of it.” [1] The white pines hugging Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Read more