Environmental Evasion: The Literary, Critical, and Cultural Politics of "Nature's Nation"

Chapter 3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, United States National Literature, and the American Canon’s Erasure of Material Nature

Chapter 3 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, United States National Literature, and the American Canon’s Erasure of Material Nature In his Leatherstocking series, James Fenimore Cooper deconstructs the myth of virgin land and the rhetoric of manifest destiny by insisting that North America has a history prior to the arrival of Europeans and by suggesting that European expansion is and always has been a bloody imperial project even when clothed in the unassuming garb of natural science . Cooper deconstructs dominant myths and ideologies while pointing out the problems that cannot be resolved: how to balance the rights of the individual and society, how to govern effectively when the democratic mass is as dangerous as imperfect federalist leadership, how to build a new nation without ruining the resources that are the basis for both its cultural exceptionality and its material power. And Cooper performs this deconstruction while writing for popular audiences, while refusing to abandon female readers, while allowing nature to remain immanently feminine rather than the transforming it into the type of masculine abstraction that it becomes in Emerson’s Nature. Like Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was tremendously successful in popular, commercial terms throughout the nineteenth century but fell into a slow critical decline that began rather innocuously in mid-nineteenth-century debates with Edgar Allen Poe and Margaret Fuller and then accelerated in the early twentieth century as he became an even more consistent target of Santayana and Brooks than Cooper. As the most successful, most widely read poet of the nineteenth century who also happened to be a very domestic man, Longfellow, more any of the other figures who bore similar characteristics (Cooper, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier) embodied Santayana’s “genteel tradition.” When Santayana and Brooks set out to demolish this 55 56 Environmental Evasion tradition they effectively broke Longfellow, whose reputation, despite a mild revival over the last twenty years, has not yet recovered. As Longfellow has faded from public consciousness and critical acclaim, so too has a unique environmental politics that motivates much of his poetry. From the beginning of his career, Longfellow worked tirelessly to build a transnational American literature upon the body of a unique North American natural world that he always casts in physical, terrestrial terms, and this goal motivates—even animates—much of his enduring poetry (such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha). Cooper deconstructs the dominant environmental rhetoric of the nineteenth century; Longfellow creates a transnationalist and environmentally determined theory of American literature. Together, Cooper and Longfellow demonstrate a diversity of environmental thought within nineteenth-century American literature that has been rendered invisible by the processes of canonization that gradually bestowed cultural capital upon Emerson’s environmental philosophy to the detriment of all others. Longfellow’s Literary Manifestoes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s environmental politics are woven intricately into a vision for American literature that he defined repeatedly throughout his career. Three times during his career, Longfellow argued that any legitimate national literature of the United States should spring from European literary roots but depend upon the influence of North American nature for its uniqueness. He presents this argument in his 1824 “The Literary Spirit of Our Country,” in his 1832 “Defence of Poetry,” and in his 1849 Kavanagh.1 After the first of these manifestoes, which establishes the fundamental position that persists throughout subsequent arguments, each restatement of Longfellow’s position participates in a debate about the status and the future of American literature that drew the support of figures such as James Russell Lowell and C. C. Felton and the ire of hypernationalistic and nativist Young Americans such as Evert Augustus Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews.2 When it is mentioned at all, Longfellow’s theorization of an American literature is regularly reduced to a single essay—usually the 1832 “Defence of Poesy”—or dismissed as a voice in the crowd.3 Admittedly, Longfellow published his first literary manifesto, “The Literary Spirit of Our Country,” when he was very young—he published it in the United States Literary Gazette in 1825. Regardless of its early date, however, this manifesto is critical to understanding the endurance of Longfellow’s commitment to an environmentally determined and transatlantic American literature. It 57 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow offers a backstory to the more fully developed 1832 “Defence of Poetry,” which has attracted some critical attention, just as Longfellow’s discussion of United States national literature in his 1849 Kavanagh...