John Burroughs and the Place of Nature

Introduction: The Power of Place

introduction The Power of Place An American Literary Naturalist For the fifty years from 1870 through 1920, John Burroughs was the most famous and widely published nature writer in America. Today, less than a century after his death, he is largely unread, even by teachers of environmental writing. He shares his fate, of course, with scores of writers whose style and vision find little sympathy among modern readers. But Burroughs may not deserve that fate. He gave voice to the art of simple living and to the beauty and power of nature found near at hand. In both respects, his work may speak to modern readers who seek an inclusive, diverse sense of nature, a nature that finds a place in close proximity to culture and exercises a healthy influence upon it. Death came to John Burroughs on a railroad train somewhere in Ohio. For the sake of his health, he had wintered in southern California in 1920 and again in 1921, but toward the end of February 1921 he was hospitalized there for four weeks. After midnight on March 29, aboard an eastbound train, the dying Burroughs awoke and asked his friend Dr. Clara Barrus, “How far are we from home?” He died twelve hours before the train arrived at his Hudson Valley home in West Park, New York. The circumstances of his death point toward the deep elegiac strain in Burroughs’s writing and to his profound sense of displacement in the modern world. Born on a Catskill dairy farm on April 3, 1837, Burroughs led the existence of a farm boy until he left home to become a rural schoolteacher in the spring of 1854. For the rest of his days, he blended the life of a farmer with the life of a literary writer, though he always insisted that his work was humble in its aims: “I always read the best books of English literature eagerly, but I could never acquire any of the marks or accomplishments of a scholar. . . . I got much out of books, but not what the schools and colleges 1 2 Introduction give. I lack the pride of scholarly accomplishments. My farmer ancestry rules me in this respect. . . . Perhaps I should say that it is the technical part of literature and science that I fail in. My natural-history knowledge is more like that of the hunter and trapper than like that of the real scientist. I know our birds well, but not as the professional ornithologist knows them. I know them through my heart more than through my head” (Life and Letters 1:16). Burroughs’s nearly thirty books present the modern reader with an intriguing mixture of direct, concrete experiences of nature; bluff, unsentimental evaluations of literature; and abstract meditations on time, the cosmos, and religion. At their best, his nature essays convey through the imageryandtoneofunadorneddiscoverytheexperientialqualityofwalking in the woods. He was most famous for his descriptions of birds, but in his essay “The Invitation” he notes that “ornithology cannot be satisfactorily learned from the books. The satisfaction is in learning it from nature. One must have an original experience with the birds. The books are only the guide, the invitation” (Writings 1:221). His own books effectively deliver his original experiences with the birds, inviting a host of readers to walk in the woods and learn the birds by heart. In addition to his role as the most famous and prolific American nature writerofhisday,Burroughsexercisedanimportantroleasaliterarycritic.In numerous essays on Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and other nineteenthcentury writers, he advanced the principle of nature as the standard for judging literature, and this marks him as an early writer of ecocriticism. His fourth book, Birds and Poets (1877), combines nature essays and literary criticism so that the two types of writing reflect upon each other, and the conjunction often creates moments of profound insight into the relationship between nature and culture. In the complex mosaic called “Touches of Nature,” for instance, Burroughs notes, “It is well to let down our metropolitan pride a little. Man thinks himself at the top, and that the immensedisplayandprodigalityofNatureareforhim.Buttheyarenomore for him than they are for the birds and beasts, and he is no more at the top than they are” (Writings 3:53–54). The tone of humility is commanding, for The Power of Place 3 Burroughs undercuts the anthropocentric hierarchy of the culture-nature relationship. Burroughs’s lifelong ruminations on nature...