A Weird Tonic for the Anthropocene: Poe’s Use of Gardenesque Landscapes as Nature Cure

Poe is not generally seen as a health advocate, much less a proponent of a “nature cure” for human ailments. Even critics who acknowledge Poe as an environmental thinker tend to see only his role as a “dark” critic of human hubris. Yet, a closer look at such landscape sketches as “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage” alongside his apocalyptic tales, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” reveals an author both concerned with the pathogenic effects of human-driven environmental degradation and committed to curing it. Thoreau’s “tonic of wildness,” which calls for immersion in an illusory pure nature defined as distinct from the human, has dominated modern environmentalist thinking about the possibilities of a nature cure. Poe, by contrast, draws on a medical paradigm that proposed an osmotic continuum between human bodies, human-built environments, and nonhuman wilderness. Human health thus requires the shaping of a salubrious environment, and the proper tool in Poe’s view is the aesthetic sense, which acknowledges rather than elides the place of art in nature. What results are landscape sketches that shade from the clearly artful “gardenesque” into the “weird,” a heightened artificiality that not only resists the ravages of industrialism but also points toward a potential “supernal” existence. This paper thus proposes an alternative American environmental literary tradition that wends its way, not just through Emerson and Thoreau and their “wilderness cure,” but through Poe and his healing art of landscaping.