Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel (review)

Building Natures enters what is by now a familiar conundrum about the nature of nature: while often mourned as something lost in the face of human industrialization, most environmental humanists now operate from the assumption that nature has included anthropogenic activity since there were anthropoi to include. This turn, however, is not exclusive to the rise of ecocriticism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Building Natures, Daniel traces the debate about the nature of nature across the landscape of Modernist poetry. Pairing extended close readings of the works of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore with readings of the authors' personal archives and the architectural plans that shaped the parks they walked, Daniel brings literary study into conversation with the fields of landscape architecture and city planning. By reading architectural planning documents as cultural texts, Daniel grounds debates about the nature of nature that might otherwise risk endless equivocation; thus grounded, Daniel explores how early planners' and architects'civic goals evinced themselves in the formal qualities of the parks they built and how those formal qualities are ultimately interrogated in Modernist poetry.

While Modernism is often understood as an aesthetic turn away from nature and the idealized Romantic preoccupation with nature, Daniel's thick descriptions of her primary sources demonstrate Modernist poetry's continuing investments in it. Daniel argues that the nature Modernist poets concerned themselves with was "emphatically modern and American," such as city parks; conventionally natural spaces transformed by industrial development; and even the purported last frontiers of the United States, its national parks. As distinct from traditional pastoral visions of nature, Daniel claims that nature in Modernist poetics "always carries about with it a set of implied scare quotes" (9). Nature in Modernist poetics is bound up in the dark side of the United States' pastoral and frontier myths—a dark side that recognizes that the United States' seemingly untouchable, mythic wilderness or benevolent pastoral scenes were critically shaped by human activity—often resulting in the aggravation of societal inequalities that were themselves meant to appear natural. Ultimately, Building Natures studies the role of artifice in Modernist poetry, arguing that focus on artifice draws attention to the artificer and, therefore, to the societal motivations and strategies that shape our environments.

The first chapter of Building Natures concerns itself with the burgeoning city of Chicago, and architect Daniel Burnham's "developing understanding of postfrontier nature as an architectural and deeply human artifice that must be built into American cityscapes" (23). Burnham's Plan of Chicago (1909) frames green spaces as integral to and consciously a part of the American city. By placing Burnham in conversation with Carl Sandburg's poetry, Daniel argues that the metaphors that built Chicago—the poet's and the architect's both—articulate tensions between separating nature and the city and integrating the two. In complicating easy binaries between city and nature, or man and nature, however, Daniel notes that Sandburg also expresses a tendency to nativize the process of building, eliding the difference between Native land claims and claims of white settlers. In Sandburg's poetry, white settlers are made native to Chicago by participating in the city's creation, from its buildings to its green spaces. Through this process, they become part of the environment of the city, and the city becomes a part of them. While this focus on the process of urban creation inscribes new ways of understanding the city as a space of comingling between man and nature, it also erases the dispossession and forced assimilation that undergirds industrial growth. It posits a narrative that privileges creation—in that Chicago's inhabitants become native by virtue of making their own place—without acknowledging that this place first had to be taken from those already Native.

Though readings of the poetry of Wallace Stevens often presume Stevens to view nature in its pastoral mode, in chapter 2 Daniel...