John Burroughs and the Place of Nature

Two: Whitman Land: John Burroughs’s Pastoral Criticism

2Whitman Land John Burroughs’s Pastoral Criticism Ecocentric Aesthetics As important as Emerson and Thoreau were to John Burroughs as a literary naturalist and critic, Walt Whitman exercised the longestlasting and most profound influence on his career as a writer. The two first met in Washington, D.C., in 1863, and they were close friends to the very end of Whitman’s life, when he spoke to Burroughs from his deathbed. In his journal of December 1891, Burroughs recorded that he stepped out of Whitman’s bedroom, “for fear of fatiguing him. He says, ‘It is all right, John,’ evidently referring to his approaching end.” Though Whitman lived another three months, Burroughs never saw him again. At the graveside in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey, on March 30, 1892, Burroughs was an honorary pallbearer but was too overcome by grief to deliver a eulogy.1 Justasthepublicationof“Expression”inthepagesoftheAtlanticsuggests the powerful effect of Emerson on the outsetting writer, Burroughs’s first four books reveal Whitman’s influence as fundamental. The poet edited Burroughs’s first book, Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, published in the spring of 1867. He helped Burroughs with his first book of nature essays, especially in selecting the title Wake-Robin (1871), which became the best known of Burroughs’s nearly thirty books. Whitman’s direct influence came most tellingly in the drafting and naming of Burroughs’s fourth book, Birds and Poets (1877). On January 7, 1877, Burroughs wrote to the editors of Houghton Mifflin Company, proposing “a new vol. for next spring or summer to be called ‘Nature and Genius.’” But just over three weeks later, on January 29, he sent the publishers part of the manuscript 42 Whitman Land 43 and said it was to be titled “Birds and Poets, instead of Nature & Genius as I first thought.” The intervening event was a letter from Whitman on January 24, 1877: I think Birds and Poets not only much the best name for the book, but a firstrate good name, appropriate, original & fresh, without being at all affected or strained. The piece you put 4th should be first—should lead the book giving it its title, & having the name of the piece changed to “Birds and Poets”—which I think would be an improvement. The whole collection would be sufficiently homogeneous, (and it were a fault to be too much so)—you just want a hint for the name of a book—Only it must be in the spirit of the book—& not too much so either. “Nature & Genius” is too Emersony altogether.2 Within a matter of a few days, then, Burroughs took Whitman’s “too Emersony altogether” comment to heart, making precisely the changes in title and arrangement of contents the poet recommended. The phrase itself suggests that Whitman was aware of Burroughs’s “Emersony” tendencies and therefore spoke emphatically against using the abstract, transcendental title. Even though Whitman exercises the most profound influence on Burroughs of all his literary mentors, Burroughs is no mere disciple of the poet. Rather, he accepts Whitman’s editorial advice without feeling threatened or manipulated, partly because of his sincere and absolute admiration for Whitman, but also because he is writing in genres that are outside Whitman’s direct expertise. Nature essays and literary criticism were never Whitman’s strongest genres, even in the Timber Creek essays that open Specimen Days & Collect (1884) or in the literary essays that close it. For his part, Burroughs never ventures into the kind of imitative writing that marks “Expression.” He studiously avoids producing any versions of Whitman’s revolutionary verse, and he definitely does not imitate the orotund, heavily qualified style of Whitman’s post–Civil War prose. Whitman empowers Burroughs as a young writer, and his influence is as practical and concrete as it is profound. As an old man, Burroughs readily admitted that “substantial portions of Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, were read and revised by 44 Chapter Two Whitman himself. The poet reviewed sections as they were completed, discussed drafts with Burroughs, and even wrote a section entitled ‘Standard of the Natural Universal.’”3 The thirteen pages of “Standard of the Natural Universal” contain Whitman’s most important statement on the role of nature in his work, and they suggest how Burroughs understands Whitman in the 1860s and 1870s. The argument of...