SOURCE: "Man, Nature and Wordsworth: American Versions," in British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982, pp. 29-57.

In the following excerpt, Peach shows how Bryant made use of Wordsworth's poetry, highlighting the similarities and differences of British and American literary romanticism.

Every sympathy is the admission of a power over
us, a line in which sympathetic magic is at play.
—Robert Duncan (The Truth & Life of Myth)

The possibilities of establishing an intimate relationship with nature and an awareness of its healing and cleansing power forcefully entered Western literature and thought with the writings of Hegel, Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Goethe and Wordsworth. As one scholar has shown, however, direct German influence upon American literature in the first four decades of the nineteenth century was very limited and basically confined to those scholars who studied at the University of Gottingen. Only a few American intellectuals...