In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER THREE Global and Local, Nature and Earth A manuscript draft of a never-used preface for “Song of the Redwood-Tree” that Whitman sketched for possible inclusion in the 1876 Leaves of Grass shows not only that he was very much aware of the geographical element of his poetic program but also that he felt some anxiety about drifting too far away from the places he knew best — the sea islands, villages, and cities of his homeland on the Atlantic Shore:1 Song of the Redwood Tree Preface. Without deprecating at all the magnificent accomplishment & boundless promise of the Older and which where I was born and grew States flanking the ^ Atlantic Shore, I see at least just as much [cause? course? corpse?] that the real America is to expand and take definite loom up and take ^ shape with immensely added population, products & originality in the States drained by the Mississippi and in those flanking the Pacific. facing The argument I will pursue in this chapter is that Whitman’s worry over the location of the“real America”and the relationship of his own“accomplishment ” and “promise” to locales near and far was well founded. His poetic reach was hardly“boundless.”Much as businesses and nations often go to pieces when they stretch their resources too far, Whitman’s poetry generally suffers from overextension.He is at his best as a local poet,a loyal sonof theNewYorkislands.Whenhetriestoexpandtoglobalproportions, or even when he strives for continental and national coverage, his rhetoric appears falsely inflated, a great balloon floating over a landscape he cannot touch but can only see abstracted at a distance, like a map with dots for cities and random-seeming names. In this mode, he tends to treat nature Q as an abstraction — Nature with a capital letter; the idea of Nature rather than the things, patterns, and processes of the material earth; Nature emptied of its earthy contents and filled with human politics and history.When he globalizes, he happily celebrates the accomplishments of technological progress, some of which in fact may have been troublesome for him when they cropped up in his own backyard. He crowed with praise for the engineering achievement of the Mississippi River bridge in St. Louis, for example , but as Arthur Geffen shows in an insightful essay,“Silence and Denial: WaltWhitmanandtheBrooklynBridge,”thepoetremainedcuriouslyquiet abouttheequallygreatfeatof engineeringinhisownhometown.Verylikely he was torn between his commitment to the ideology of technological progress and the sad reality that the bridge of bridges made his beloved Fulton Ferry obsolete and destroyed the neighborhood upon which it depended,a site thatWhitman considered“almost a holy place”(Geffen 2). The idea of sacred places, which I consider more fully in chapter 4, proves to be a key concept in ecopoetics, indicating not only a personal commitment to geographic loyalty but also a sense of limits. As people stray from their own bioregion, they retain something of its character even when the journey is primarily imaginative. The creative spirit, which Whitman addresses as his soul, thrives best and inspires most fully when it arises like alocaldeityfromthegroundwherethepoethaslivedandwalkedandloved. In Whitman’s case, when he strives for the global vision, what he calls his soul comes to seem more and more derivative or conventional and less a matter of direct and even sensual experience. In “Passage to India” — a poem published in 1871, only three years before “Song of the Redwood-Tree” and composed during the time Whitman was weakened by his wartime service but not yet debilitated as he was after the 1873 stroke — the poet inaugurated the global vision that he would always thereafter identify with technological progress. Industry surged in the years following the Civil War, riding the crest of wartime engineering and foreshadowing the runaway technological expansion in the years following World War II, which was also advanced by military researchanddevelopment,thecoldwarfeedingwhatPresidentEisenhower called the military-industrial complex, the dominance of which ultimately led to the series of political reactions we now know as the environmentalist movement. While the New England transcendentalists balked at technological progress and global expansion — witness Thoreau’s comments on the railroad or Emerson’s famous critique of travel —Whitman’s self-concept 75 R Global and Local, Nature and Earth as a poet of the people (rather than a man of the woods like Thoreau or a high-minded moralist like Emerson) led him to view grand-scale technologicalprogressasanopportunityforextendinghumanspiritualityaswell as realizing a new level of material comfort for an ever larger percentage of the population. As a...

Share