Alexander Wilson's forest adventure: the sublime and the satirical in Wilson's poem, 'The Foresters'

Abstract

Alexander Wilson's poem (1809—1810) is a topographical poem. Such a poem is rambling in structure and therefore admits a variety of styles and purposes. These poems look back, in part, to the tradition of Virgil's Georgics, which ranges from farming and veterinary medicine to mythology and the influence of the gods. Although the Foresters lacks the aesthetic unity of the Georgics and the Latin poet's spiritualism, it nevertheless implies its own theism in a distant and transcendent assertion of the virgin purity of the forests of Pennsylvania and New York. The land is thus celebrated, but man defiles the purity of the forests, bringing squalor and lust to the pristine banks of the American rivers. Thus sublime motifs and satirical thrusts are placed in contrast, enabling the poet to show the dichotomy between the ideal and the actual. He ridicules the naive assumption that a peopled territory might restore lost Eden. To some, Washington Irving included, the forests induced a sense of claustrophobia felt by travelers deep in the backwoods where commonplace America and wilderness America both yielded up a feeling of meaningless existence, of being cut off from the signposts of civilization.1 To others, new lands offered unique wildlife, virgin flora, and original experiences to enrich poetic catalogues and invigorate that poet who someday would produce an American epic poem. Because Wilson treats obvious paradoxes that the naturalist-satirist Alexander Wilson might have sought to reconcile, it seems worthwile