Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (review)

Ecocriticism's response to our ongoing environmental catastrophe has been the pursuit of two goals: a canon of works modeling a proper attitude toward nature, and an interrogation of the ideologies that support environmental destruction. The arguments of cultural critics such as Raymond Williams and John Barrell suggest that such a pursuit is futile, since descriptive, natural writing is just a way of perpetuating violent hegemony. Bonnie Costello's Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry seeks to speak to both groups. To the second group, she means to show that landscape poetry isn't "exhausted" or necessarily "insidious" (2003, 11). To the first, she argues that the ecocritical canon should include poets whose concerns are more typically thought to be aesthetic. Some twentieth-century poets, she contends, imply a system of values that "lead to acts that materially support the wildness and abundance of what is loved." This "indirect ethics" does not involve superseding the "legitimate urgencies of the environmentalist" and does engage "the distinct role of art in society without reducing art's role to aesthetics alone" (15). Even if her thesis weren't so interesting, her careful and finely nuanced readings would be worth the price of admission.

Costello begins her argument by distinguishing between Romantic nature and twentieth-century landscape. An enlightened speaker in a Romantic work seeks to describe the whole natural world and finds it is structured by a "centered, hierarchical order" (2003, 5) that serves as "a place of origin and authenticity" (8). The speaker presents his vision of nature as an "unmediated spectacle" (8); thus, despite his acknowledgement of his own subjectivity, his ability to perceive the essence of nature paradoxically reifies his own "authority" (6). The twentieth-century writers of Costello's study relinquish these totalizing views of the natural world, focusing instead on specific landscapes. Such a focus not only tends to replace Romantic idealism with a salutary "engagement with the material world" (10), but also brings to the forefront the way that poets "frame" their depictions. That is to say, the poets are not looking at the All; instead, they are choosing a particular place, and in doing so recognize "the boundaries" created by their own framing created and the very "conditions of beholding" that Romantic writers took as inherently authoritative. For this reason, twentieth-century writers tend to "foreground their acts of shaping and encoding nature" (8). In doing so, of course, they give the reader reason to question their authority.

The main chapters of Shifting Ground examine how six twentieth-century poets frame their landscapes, especially "flux" (2003, 15) that they all must struggle to understand. By "flux" Costello means ceaseless change caused by the cyclical patterns of nature, the chaotic variations of everyday, the unpredictable mutations of history, and the relentless incursions of industrialization.

In the chapter on Robert Frost, Costello discusses the way that Frost maps the relationship between self and the natural world. She contends that while Frost's speakers seek their "reflection in nature," they find that nature's image suggests their "own creaturely natures" (26). She characterizes Frost's poetry as in tension between a "pastoral" frame and the flux of "experience" (2003, 52).

In the next chapter, she argues that the poetry of Wallace Stevens provides a drama of speakers who want a totalized view of nature with a "single vanishing point that organizes space in relation to a viewer outside the scene" but instead must make do with "eccentric landscapes, temporally and spatially contingent" (2003, 53). Basically, she applies Stevens's notion of a Supreme Fiction (desirable, but never really attainable—Stevens once suggested that his collected works be entitled The Grand Poem—Preliminary Minutiae) to landscape. Stevens came to realize, she argues, that an Emersonian, stable and centered world is actually constantly turning in its center. Stevens's landscapes partake of, but are simultaneously apart from, this center. Thus, in Stevens's verse, there is "the figure of the will going out into...