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8 7 II • Describing Local Lands At about the same time that Emily Dickinson signed her letters “Amherst” and regularly referred to northeastern fields and forests in her poetry, Walt Whitman signed a series of early essays for the New York Sunday Dispatch “Paumanok” (Genoways 11) and grounded several of his major poems in “Mannahatta’s ship-fringed shore” and nearby Long Island. Both poets imagined familiar landscapes and seascapes with a passion that in itself merits a comparison of their work on the local scale—the distance one could easily walk and grasp in a day or even see on a clear day, stretches of land that are in people’s everyday “circumference .” From an environmental perspective, such a comparison draws attention to another unexpected correspondence between their poetic projects: even though Dickinson alluded mostly to the backlands of the Connecticut River valley, while Whitman wrote much about the sights and sounds of the New York coast, they formulated related visions of people’s lives in their immediate natural environments. In particular, they express a common dedication to description as a means of drawing attention to local geographies as specific places and living systems in ways that deflect attention away from the centrality of the perceiving mind—a strategy that overlaps in indirect but telling ways with certain environmental discussions of the day. By way of particular aesthetic choices, Dickinson and Whitman devise very open, suggestive descriptive modes that rely on a small number of descriptive details and experiment with radically minimizing the presence of the speaking subject in favor of the object, turning the inherently unassuming pose of description, with its ecoethical potential but also with its limitations, into a defining feature of their local poetry. The environmental resonances of their poems about “native lands” (Fr178) become particularly evident if one considers the shift that occurred in people’s relationships with their immediate surroundings at that time. Around midcentury, fields such as 8 8 • p a r t i i botany, geography, geology, and especially biogeography, which emerged in 1858 and is sometimes considered to be the same as ecology (Ball 407– 8), studied local natural units primarily by way of detailed descriptions. When Dickinson moved from deceptively simple poems such as “Frequently the woods are pink” (Fr24) to more complex evocations of local systems in “Nature – the Gentlest Mother is” (Fr741) and “Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre” (Fr778), and Whitman composed some of his most powerful poems about intricate landscapes and seascapes, including “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” “descriptive biogeographers” defined climatic zones and topographical boundaries, and “establish[ed] the complexity of the distribution patterns, [. . .] perhaps attempting to explain them primarily in ecological terms” (Ball 408). Biogeography was also crucial for the development of the ecosystem concept—the idea that biotic and abiotic elements in an area form a dynamic, interdependent, and self-sustaining community—which was discussed for several decades before Arthur Tansley coined the term in 1935. Overall, the field marked a crucial stage in the development of America’s early ecological sciences, but also exemplified the limitations of nineteenth-century green thought: in the words of ecologist Jacob Weiner, the tendency to “collect huge amounts of descriptive data without a clear purpose” was among ecology ’s “youthful follies” (373). In this light, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s local poetry becomes legible as an indirect response to the time’s developing environmental interests; they talk about local naturescapes as living systems by combining descriptive elements with poetic strategies that tackle the problems of quantity and selection of details. For assessing the environmental import of nature descriptions in their local poetry, the popular nature essays of the time, which combined extended descriptions of natural systems with personal narratives of the enlightened self (see Fritzell 73), are even more relevant. The opening paragraph of Higginson’s “Water-Lilies,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, later collected in his Out-Door Papers (1863), and probably well known to Dickinson (see Sewall 547; St. Armand 195–96), serves as a good example: The inconstant April mornings drop showers or sunbeams over the glistening lake, while far beneath its surface a murky mass disengages itself from the muddy bottom, and rises slowly through the waves. The tasselled alderbranches droop above it; the last year’s blackbird’s nest swings over it in the [18.191.240.243] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 21...

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