In a world centered around materialistic ideas, poets serve as guides to redirect people towards truth, goodness, and beauty in life. As Lydia Maria Child showed in her short story “Wergeland, the Poet,” poets help others find these virtues by specifically directing their attention back to nature.
A People’s Poet
Child tells of a poet named Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845), who lived in Norway. He was one of Norway’s most talented poets whom the people loved immensely. In return, he loved his people and “wrote a great number of verses for the peasantry, in all the peculiar dialects of their various districts.”What made Wergeland so special was his love of nature. He wrote poetry that seemed to bring the very nature that he wrote about to life. His writing lends life and personality to nature, personifying, for example, the waves and granting them feelings of vengeance and anger.
