Journal Entry: November 5, 1892

“All great poets are teachers. It is one test of the great poet; What does he teach us? He helps us to master life, to understand life.”

Journal Entry: May 19, 1892

“A day of heavy cloud, peculiar, such a sense of mass and spread, the clouds with those long strong clearly-defined keel-shaped bottoms one occasionally sees: sometimes the effect was like that of a vast groined or slightly arched ceiling. Seldom have I seen such weight, solidity and power in clouds. I have observed that it never rains out of such clouds as long as this appearance continues; they must be smoothed down and melted or softened before it rains.”

Journal Entry: July 14, 1892

“Now at 7  P.M. great masses of cumulus clouds in the east all turned to gold by the sinking sun. The glow falls upon me here in my summer house like a huge lamp. Indicates a change in weather.”

Journal Entry: February 29, 1894

” Milton’s poetry, for the most part, is to me a kind of London Tower filled with old armor, stuffed knights, wooden chargers, and the emblems and bedizzlements of the past. Interesting for a moment, but dead, hollow, moth-eaten. Not a live thing in one of his poems that I can find. Yes, there is a nightingale and a few flowers, and a human touch, here and there. But half a dozen pages would hold all that any man need read. The “Sampson” is said to be in the Greek spirit, but what business find he, a Puritan of Cromwell’s time, writing in the Greek spirit? Why did he not write in his own spirit, or in the Puritan spirit? the 17th Century spirit? What business had he masquerading in this old armor? He put no real life under these ribs of death. His “Paradise Lost” is a huge puppet show, so grotesque and preposterous that it is quite insufferable. Milton seems to have been a real man, but he stands there in English literature like a great museum of literary archeology. He seems to have had no experiences of his own, and rarely to have seen the earth and sky, or men and women with his own natural eyes. He saw everything through the classic eyes of the dead past. Who reads him? Professors of literature, I suppose. He was a great craftsman no doubt, but he has been of no service to mankind, except a literary service; he has helped us to realize the classic spirit of letters, and the absurdity of the old theological dramaturgy. He spoke no word to any man’s real moral or spiritual wants.”

Journal Entry: November 5, 1892

“I love wild virgin Nature, but I am repelled by unkept Nature, by Nature that has relapsed from cultivation, or that is only half cultivated and gone to weeds and bushes. Hence the English landscape satisfies me so much more than our own; it is a more perfect product; it is perfectly cultivated and ours is only half so. The raw, the crude — they always repel in Nature as in life”

This is an interesting excerpt that reveals a lot about Burroughs’ distinct perception of the natural world that differentiates him from other nature writers. His world and scope of inspiration was not the sublime and rugged wilderness held so dear by some naturalists, like John Muir, but the quaint countryside of his own Hudson River Valley. This mindset can be seen throughout his writing and gives it a kind of personal quality because of his commitment to looking close to home for material.

Journal Entry: February 2, 1891

“When I look up at the stars at night I am so overwhelmed sometimes that I say to myself we can not only conceive of a being that could do that, but we cannot take the first step toward conceiving him. How puny and insignificant seems the God of the churches. Therefore I say he is the most devout man who says there is no god – the utmost stretch whose thought cannot make out one feature or attribute of a being who could put those stars up there. The universe is so stupendous that it crushes any Atlas upon whose shoulders we may place is. There is no God. There is a self-existing, self-perpetuating universe.”

Journal Entry: September 13, 1890

“The bee does not gather his honey from the flowers; it is mainly his product. What he gathers from flower is sweet water – diluted grape sugar. Out of this she makes honey by a kind of digestive assimilation. It is not honey till the bee has added something special and peculiar herself. It is precisely so with the poet. He gets only the raw material of his poetry from Nature – himself must be added, his spiritual and emotional quality, before it becomes poetry. Indeed, it is so with true literature of any kind. Tis what the man himself adds to his facts or truths or teaching that makes it literature”

According to the hand-written notes on Betty Kelly’s transcription, this thought was used in in an introduction to an edition of Wake Robin. It is a perfect example of the many ways in which Burroughs draws a connection between man and Nature through writing while maintaining a very scientific and factual observation of his environment.

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