Re-engaging the poetics of landscape

Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry

by Bonnie Costello

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 225 pages

According to Webster's dictionary, as Bonnie Costello reminds us in her final chapter, a landscape is "a portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a single view." Built into that definition are a number of assumptions that have been tested and contested by the six American poets this study brings together: three moderns--Frost, Stevens, and Marianne Moore--and three contemporary poets who are their intellectual heirs and successors: Amy Clampitt, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery. Costello raises the stakes of their collective project by pointing out that landscape is a metaphor for knowledge--a metaphor so commonplace as to seem inescapable. (1) "Landscape is our trope of knowledge because it makes the knowledge seem to be 'of' something": it enables us both to "accept perspectivism" and to "claim grounds beyond perspective" (175). In the context of American literature, the "scaping" of the land is politically as well as epistemologically fraught: "The land was ours before we were the land's" is Frost's gnomic formulation of the chiastic logic of Manifest Destiny.

Costello aligns herself with Elisa New, who set out in The Line's Eye to rehabilitate American nature writing by uncovering an "alternative American tradition" that seeks a relationship not of mastery but of "open engagement" with the land (12). Costello is also offering to challenge a 40-year-old critical consensus "that landscape is an exhausted, even insidious genre" of both poetry and painting (11). That consensus is widely shared, she finds, not only among critics seeking to discredit the "imperialist aesthetic" of Western art, from Annette Kolodny and Myra Jehlen to the contributors to W.J.T. Mitchell's 1994 volume Landscape and Power, but also by ecocritics who want to insist, with Patrick Murphy, that "the land is more than a scape" (Murphy 12; Costello 13). An ecocritical "preference for referentiality over textuality" (14) is inimical to the writing and reading of poetry: Costello would resist the binary encoded in this preference by highlighting poets' performance and critique of a range of possible ways of entering into a two-way relationship with the earth, aka "nature," aka "the land." It is our poets who keep us alert to the work of mediation that these concepts are doing, to subtle but crucial differences in meaning between such synonyms as these.

As backdrop and foil for the self-consciously mediated, restlessly mobile landscapes of modern poetry, Costello cites Emerson's Nature and the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, where nature is invoked as a "space of origin" unspoiled by human habitation and immune to the passage of time, an expansive and unified scene that can be fully entered into and possessed by the mind's eye. In the twentieth-century landscapes of Frost, Stevens, and Moore we have to reckon instead with entropy, history, flux: "the highway dust is over all" (117) and the observer is perforce "eccentric" (86), a "mobile self" that cannot, as Moore puts it, "stand in the middle of this." In the work of a later generation of poets--Costello gives a chapter each to Clampitt, Ammons, and Ashbery but also glances at the landscapes of Charles Wright and Jorie Graham--the observer ceases to try to stand still or stand "in the middle." Each seeks instead to engage mobility as itself a way of seeing: "cognition," for these contemporary poets, is "behavior and navigation, not a mirror of the world" (143).

There are other poets who might well have figured in a book about "nature-oriented" poetry: Wendell Berry, W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver. Costello is well aware that the six she has chosen are not the ones we would be most likely to turn to under this rubric. One of her stated purposes in giving us this particular set of "landscape poets" is "to override the distinction between nature as reference and as trope," so that landscape can become "a figure for our real and symbolic entanglement with the earth" (9-10; my italics). "Shifting ground" is a complex metaphor that captures the importance all six poets attach to dynamism and flux as predicates of nature but also calls attention to the mutual entanglement of nature and culture, physical and metaphysical grounds and groundings. Both the imperialist drive to take dominion everywhere and the pastoral impulse to frame nature nostalgically as a home or refuge or "perfect whole" are productively resisted by Stevens's "eccentricity," Clampitt's nomadism, Ammons's "focus on local transition and adjustment" (145), and Ashbery's propensity for "disappearing paths and slippery topography" (174).