John Muir, Travels in Alaska
Here's the thing: professionally, in my academic life, I've been bashing the Romantics for decades . Self-important wankers, the lot of them, even if their poetry's gorgeous, even when their poetry's formatted as prose: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, all of them. Their writing can be gorgeous, though, can't it? This past week, I've been in the company of John Muir through his book Travels in Alaska . (I was reading this one , but Project Gutenberg is also a thing.) Muir was many things in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but in his Alaskan prose was certainly a Romantic: "How delightful it is, and how it makes one's pulses bound to get back into this reviving northland wilderness!" (p157). It's lovely, the way his descriptions let you feel so intimately with him, such as his excitement at an intensely damp environment, when he awakes in hard rain one morning near what he calls the Big Stickeen Glacier: "Surely never a particle of ...
