Review:Shifting Ground

Abstract

w, ' allace Stevens, in a 1953 letter to his Irish friend Thomas McGreevy, emphasized the grounding of his own poetry in particular American places, writing that.. . a man that is himself always seems to do very much better than, say, the cosmopolitan. Whatever I have comes from Pennsylvania and Connecticut and nowhere else. That quotation never fails to surprise some readers of Stevens, who have grown comfortable with the notion of him as a poet of cerebral abstraction. When Stevens asserts that Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar, or that things are like a seem? ing of the sun / Or like a seeming of the moon or night, he seems manifestly more at home in the heady realm of metaphysical speculation than in Hartford, or in the Pennsylvania woods. Yet one can too easily forget that the poetry, too, is densely populated with rivers and woods, with lilacs and bougainvilleas. Indeed, it is not too much to say that landscape, and along with it the thorny relationship between a perceiving human consciousness and a surrounding nonhuman world, is at the very center of Stevens' work. Stevens is not alone, moreover, among modern American poetic voices in his concern with issues of landscape and place. One need only recall Eliot's spectral city scenes, or Moore's octopus of ice, or Frost's reflections on the shifting boundary between nature and culture, to realize that modernism, despite its thumbnail reputation as a reaction to Romantic nature-worship, was deeply engaged with humanity's physical surroundings. Surprisingly, though, especially considering the recent proliferation in 'green' or 'ecocritical' approaches to literature, we have not had a major study of landscape in modern American poetry. Bonnie Costello's excellent new book Shifting Ground helps to repair this gap. Costello rightly frames landscape not merely as a recurrent presence in twentieth century American poetry, but as a defining focus of the period, a kind of organizing rubric that helps give conceptual shape to a canon of writers as diverse as Frost and John Ashbery, Moore and Amy Clampitt. What all of these poets have in common is an interest in the relation between the subjective and the objective; since