New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman by Cecelia Tichi (review)

BOOK REVIEWS81 and his satirical and other prose writings, then conclude the survey with a look at eight historical novels. Last, in Chapter 14, come the most famous of these, the Claudius novels. A fifteenth chapter, "The Myth behind the Myths of Graves," offers acute insights into both the man's ideology, about which he has never himself been reticent, and his psychology, which since the 1920s he has tried to deny or to mythologize. Some discussions are especially valuable. Among these are assessments of Graves' notion of "poetic trance" and of his well-crafted poetry itself; a balanced appreciation of the virtues and vices of his approach to a "Search for the Historical Jesus"; interesting remarks on the novel ofApuleius that Graves translated as The Golden Ass; and candid comment on the qualified success of Claudius the God. On the other hand, a few sections are less convincing, for example the somewhat overenthusiastic symbolic reading of a short story "The Shout." Fairly numerous misprints and mechanical errors too often detract from a pleasing format and writing style. Nevertheless, and despite its rather high price, this book deserves the reading of everyone interested in either mythology or modern literature. VICTOR CASTELLANI, University of Denver Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 290p. $18.50. The appearance of Cecelia Tichi's first book is a welcome one, for in New World, New Earth she argues that in Puritan, Revolutionary, and Romantic writings, early Americans saw the reform of their environment as an ideological and moral imperative. Refuting the old bromide that these settlers despoiled their new Eden, Tichi demonstrates that environmental reform was an obsession in the poetry, fiction, diaries, histories, travel books, geographies, and sermons of the period. Tichi begins her discussion with an analysis of the developing Puritan impulse to reform the New World landscape. Taking into account the most recent studies of colonial America, she notes that the Puritans were very much aware of the effects land greed and destruction might have upon their biblically interpreted rights to the land they saw as their own. From Bradford, who saw the territory of the Millenium as irrelevant, to Mather, who envisioned it as a necessary part in the realization of this New World myth, Tichi traces the early Americans' soul searching through Edward Johnson and Joel Barlow, whose works present the ideology of environmental reform as a major and fully stated theme. But for Tichi, this idea is not realized until Whitman. Using "Passage to India," "Song of the Broad-Axe," and "The Song of the Redwood Tree" as the most prominent examples, she shows how Whitman most clearly artic- 82ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ulated the theme ofenvironmental reform. Unlike his predecessors, Whitman 's New Earth is made "new in words, in language resonant from, but not mimetically correlative with, the actual environment." In her epilogue , Tichi reveals that most twentieth-century American writers abandoned Whitman's view of the New Earth, and that they offered little hope for our nation's environmental redemption. They saw the failure of the American New Earth as a consequence of the failure of the American imagination. In short, Tichi's study is thorough and sound, well-written and welldocumented , provocative, yet palatable. As such, the book is an important one for all students of early American literature and history, environment and geography. JEFFREY B. WALKER, Oklahoma State University Laurel H. Turk, and Aurelio M. Espinosa, Jr., Mastering Spanish. 3. ed. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1979. 386 p.$13.95. The continued success of Mastering Spanish is verified by the publication of its third edition. The changes made in this new edition can only increase its effectiveness and insure its future popularity as a second year text. The book consists of three initial review lessons of verb forms, twelve lessons interspersed with twelve lecturas, a section on letter writing, extensive appendices, a vocabulary, an index, and a concluding series of maps to replace the color prints, which are now incorporated into one of the readings. The contents of the three repasos have been reorganized to make the three...