New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott

Conclusion

Conclusion While the foundation of an environmentally and socially healthy society must begin with a deep appreciation for place, affection is not a panacea. As Wallace Stegner has warned, “we may love a place and still be dangerous to it” (55). In addition to greater affection for land we need what novelist Marilynne Robinson in her compelling book The Death of Adam has called “a new, chastened, self-distrusting vision of the world, an austere vision that can postpone the outdoor pleasures of cherishing exotica, . . . and the debilitating pleasures of imagining that our own impulses are reliably good” (253). Modern thought has tended to reduce the moral risks implicit in relating to the physical world by resorting to explanatory discourses that demystify human being, the mystery of which, for Robinson, is what Adam represents. Cultivation of appreciation for place is an important, if complicated, process, since how those affections are born and how they are 397 expressed are exercises in ethical choice. Whether it has been Whitman’s broad embrace that risks generalizations about the Americas, Neruda’s ambition to awake an American love that becomes ideological, or Walcott’s peripatetic itineraries that never seem to settle, each poet’s sense of place has run certain risks based on his capacity to imagine and experience crosscultural contact and contact with nature. Each poet, in differing degrees, has also caught glimpses of the risks his strengths have caused him to run, leading to the kind of self-distrust Robinson describes; a sense of place emerges that is cultivated by a poetic exploration of their own betrayals and prodigal returns. In her poem “Questions of Travel” Elizabeth Bishop articulates the paradox of travel and return by which affections for nature are nurtured. Raised in North America, she also lived extensively in Brazil, and her shifting experience of the southern and northern landscapes helped her to see both with equally stunned fascination. Travel helped to expose the world’s unexpected qualities and fueled the fires of her poetic imagination. For example , Brazil’s “too many waterfalls” make her think that “the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled” (Bishop 93). Out of her amazement, however, come these Dickensonian questions of travel: Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? (Bishop 93) Amazement in the face of nature raises ethical questions about the rightness of our choices, of even our most instinctual urges to praise and celebrate beauty, which may be nothing more than what Robinson means by “cherishing exotica.” Instead of expressing appreciation and attachment, amazement may express self-imposed deracination from home, something self-imposed conditions of modern restlessness only make more likely. Bishop insists for this reason on the geopolitical limitations of “Continent, city, country, society” that mean “the choice is never wide and never free” (94). Our perceptions of nature, wherever we are, are conditioned by culture, 398 | Conclusion language, and history. She asks the logical question: “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?” (94). Why, in other words, is it necessary to travel elsewhere, to seek the sun “the other way around” just so we can understand where we are from and where home is? Isn’t it a symptom of a restless and weak imagination to require the fleshly contact with new landscapes just so that we can then realize the outline of the inner landscapes of the mind? What difference does it make to launch literal or merely literary journeys to other regions of the hemisphere? Pascal had written that human evil stemmed from such restlessness in one’s room, but Bishop raises the possibility that he was “not entirely right.” The basis for this is her suspicion that what travel teaches is the comparative value of place and that if human affection is fickle, it is also adaptable. Diaspora and migration in modernity require strategies of adaptation, since “home” is itself an ambiguous category. The advantage migration affords is that by means of constant transformation the elemental human task of apprehending the world is enhanced. After a long list...