In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt by Robert Boschman (review)

In his book In the Way of Nature, Robert Boschman provides a strong ecocritical framework as well as a fresh approach to American literary history. As an ecocritic, Boschman is concerned with ‘how a specific text deals with nature and the human community.’ For much of Western history humans have treated nature and culture as a binary in which humans define themselves as superior to nature, as tamers of the wilderness, as godlike stewards of its fate. To counter this ecological hubris, Boschman argues that ‘we humans … need a comprehension of ourselves in the world that meshes with nature unconditionally. Doing so requires a relentless reevaluation of Western culture and the moral and ethical assumptions it takes for granted relative to nature.’ To this end, Boschman analyses the nature/culture complex as it plays itself out in the poetry of Bradstreet in her relationship to her Puritan community, and then, how Bishop and Clampitt, in the context of Bradstreet’s legacy, redefine and revise this relationship in important critical ways. Boschman not only demonstrates the numerous ‘cultural, religious, and ecological connections … between these three poets,’ but shows how ‘examining them together can … provide an instructive, critical North American narrative of where we are in terms of where we have been.’ Moreover, Boschman proves himself to be an astute reader of these poets, able to range widely across their poetic careers and skilfully place them not only in dialogue with one other but in conversation with a full range of writings from the early explorers to contemporary environmental scientists. The result is a rich intertextual interplay that opens up the poems and makes them accessible to an important critical conversation.

In the first half, Boschman deals with questions of travel and westward expansion in these poets’ work, scrutinizing texts for the ideological impact they project upon the environment. In the second half he lays out one of his most intriguing arguments, a discussion of what he calls the poets’ Acteon moments, which, he argues, highlight a core element in the relationship between humans and nature. Taken from the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Diana punishes Acteon by turning him into a stag ‘that retains human consciousness’ after he sees the goddess naked, ‘the Acteon story invites its audience to deliberate over its own alienation from its origins in nature.’ Bradstreet’s Acteon moment comes with her encounter with the nightingale, Philomela, in ‘Contemplations,’ representing a brief period when the speaker ‘revel[s]’ for a moment in the ‘bird’s wilderness autonomy’ before Puritan orthodoxy, not surprisingly, is restored and Bradstreet ‘subdue[s] the wild’ to ‘serv[e] the father.’ Bishop’s poetry features a number of such moments, but the one I find most intriguing comes in ‘The Riverman,’ which Boschman calls ‘a transformation narrative to rival anything in Ovid.’ Here ‘Bishop succeeds in evoking a relationship with nature that is non-Western.’ Quoting the environmental philosopher Paul Shepard, Boschman notes that from an ecological point of view, ‘“The Riverman” celebrates: “traditions of human membership in natural communities embedded in place and ancestry.”’ Finally, both Bradstreet and Bishop are part of Clampitt’s legacy, and she draws on both in her meditations on nature and culture. But she parts company with Bishop through her overt religiosity, ‘daring to bring the whole problem of wilderness and culture, which so reverberates through American history and literature, full circle, back to the “inklings of an omnipresence.”’ It strikes me as odd that a book that deals with our cavalier attitude toward our global community and the planet and our ambivalence about wilderness should end with one poet’s desire to ‘transcend’ the material conditions of our existence, to have ‘change in nature’ stand in for ‘transcending nature.’ I would argue that a more explicit discussion of religious transcendence and its place within...