The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

6. The West Side of Any Mountain

       ฀    The฀West฀Side฀of฀Any฀Mountain฀ ฀ Connections฀and฀Future฀฀ Considerations฀ 120 The West Side of Any Mountain ฀ ฀ ฀  journals that during the latter part of 1841, a year that proved to be his most prolific period as a poet, Henry David Thoreau was considering abandoning poetry and adopting the natural essay as his primary mode of aesthetic expression. According to Elizabeth Hall Witherell , Thoreau, the literary ancestor of practically all ecopoets, “harbored fundamental doubts about both the vigor of poetry as opposed to prose and its suitability to his own temperament and particular talent” (59).1 In February 1851, for example, he wrote, “The strains from my muse are as rare nowadays, or of late years, as the notes of birds in the winter, /—the faintest occasional tinkling sound, and mostly the woodpecker kind or the harsh jay or crow. It never melts into song” (Bode xi). However, as Witherell makes clear, Thoreau’s decision to forsake his poetic impulse resulted not only from his doubts concerning his own discordant muse, but also from his disenchantment with what were believed to be the greatest poems of his time, and with the ability of poetry in general to convey the true “Poetry” (in the Emersonian sense) of the natural world. These doubts sprang from his conviction that, while certain supreme artists like Homer had created poetry worthy of praise, most of what Thoreau called the “effeminate” lyrics of his contemporaries were vapid and impotent in their attempts to convey the wildness of the natural world. For instance, in late 1841, when Thoreau visited the Harvard College Library to select poems for an anthology he planned to edit, he experienced a deep disillusionment with respect to the work he discovered there in Cambridge. He wrote of “looking over the dry and dusty volumes of the English poets,” and of his astonishment “that those fresh and fair creations I had imagined are contained in them. . . . I can hardly be serious with myself when I remember that I have come to Cam. after poetry—and while I am running over the catalogue, and collating and selecting—I think if it would not be a shorter way to a complete volume—to step at once into the field or wood, with a very low reverence to students and librarians” (30 November; J1 337–338).2 The undomesticated quality Thoreau searched for was largely absent from both his own work and that of his most talented contemporaries. As he wrote in a journal entry from early 1851, “The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature—They have not seen the west side of any mountain. Day and night—mountain and wood are visible from the wil- Connections and Future Considerations 121 derness as well as the village—They have their primeval aspects—sterner savager—than any poet has sung. It is only the white man’s poetry—we want the Indian’s report. Wordsworth is too tame for the Chippeway” (18 August; J1 321). This frustration with the inability of “the white man’s poetry” to celebrate the “sterner savager” characteristics of nonhuman nature served as a major contributor to Thoreau’s ultimate abandonment of poetry. Readers familiar with Thoreau will notice the similarities between the characteristics of ecopoetry—ecocentrism, an appreciation of wildness, and a skepticism toward hyperrationality and its resultant overreliance on technology—and the principles that dominate Walden and the majority of the Thoreau canon. Just as Thoreau voiced his displeasure with “white man’s poetry” and offered his prose writings in response, much of contemporary nature poetry has been transformed into more ecologically aware verse that attempts to address existing environmental issues and to portray faithfully the “place-ness” as well as the wildness of the natural world. My goal in these readings of ecopoets and their work has been to further define the field and to map some of its key tendencies and characteristics, demonstrating in it a certain continuity. In each writer’s poetry we perceive an intense desire to respond to the modern crisis associated with Cartesian dualism. The project of each is to recover a sense of the world as one organism made up of symbiotic components, both human and nonhuman. In all four poets this vision is manifest in a sympathy for the nonhuman other that leads to a recognition of a kinship between humans and...