Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Whitman's representation of nature, a topic that fascinated his earliest readers, has attracted renewed attention with the historical prominence of the environmental protection movement in the late twentieth century and the consequent development of new strains of critical inquiry, usually grouped under the heading of ecocriticism. This chapter considers a central tension in recent studies of human ecology and geography - the representation of nature as space and as place - as it plays out in Whitman's writing. The concept of space favors an abstract treatment of nature in terms of form and function, allowing for the development of a powerful analogical imagination within a largely formalist and modernist poetics: the poem as environment. The concept of place, especially as developed in bioregionalist and reinhabita-tional thinking, offers an alternative to the spatial imagination. Places are full of history, both human and natural, that resist their treatment as “wide open” spaces submissive to the imposition of modernist (or imperial) values and that also resist replacement by mental and poetic constructs. Approaching the sacred, they demand the respect and tribute of the poet.Whitman made room for both concepts in his vision of American landscape. His view of nature as space suggests his connection with a burgeoning modernism in life and letters while his often-repeated identification ... log in or subscribe to read full text