Thomas McGrath as a Neo-Romantic Poet

This essay seeks to locate Thomas McGrath within the wider traditions of British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism if, indeed, they can be called traditions, a term which the essay’s author acknowledges that McGrath himself might have rejected since a tradition for its own sake isn’t, perhaps, worth much more than an empty holiday based on an empty religion. McGrath, the essay’s author argues, looks beyond his inherited Catholicism and its solidification into a congealed, formulaic dogma for a revitalization/reinvigoration with nature. “Never, perhaps, has nature had so much to recover from,” McGrath commented over 40 years ago. This essay traces McGrath’s argument in his masterwork, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, for a greater spiritual relationship with nature by surveying McGrath’s link to major writers like Whitman, Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his surprising focus on Hopi cosmogony/cosmology as antidote to our current alienation from nature.