Romantic Sensibility

It is an irony of fate that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the true hermits and followers of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and the Gita have almost been ignored by the research scholars in India and other Asian countries. As poets and writers, both of them can be ranked with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron and other romantic poets. As products of 19th century. American Renaissance, they are superior to Edger Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and yet their reputation has widely suffered in 20th century. Generally, the seeds of romanticism are traced in the poems and not in the prose works. While reading their prose works, essays and journals, one notices their lyrical quality. Both of them followed their own path and loved nature from the depth of heart. Various description of the scenes of Nature confirm the fact that they were pictorial artists like Spenser, Keats and Shelley.