From Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Table of Contents

an excerpt from Poets of Nature - BMA Audio

Read by Jonathan Epstein

Like the romantics before him the transcendentalist Thoreau took refuge in nature which he detailed in his monumental work Walden. This audio excerpt from “Poets of Nature” (see In Production) represents the passion these poets had for the solitude and green restorative wisdom of the woods and fields. Nature, they tell us, shows us a more profound and dynamic dimension of life if we can only be still enough to perceive it. From there we can then help the world.

Emerson describes this sought after transformative power in his essay Nature:

“In the woods, too, a man casts off his years as a snake his slough…Standing on the bare ground–my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space–all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me…”