Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (review)

Abstract

Bonnie Costello, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 216 pp. Wallace 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 seeming 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 [End Page 129] that blurry dividing line is precisely the boundary occupied and navigated by landscape, landscape becomes, in Costello's argument, absolutely fundamental to the modern sensibility. Costello's central argumentative move is to distinguish between what she calls a "nineteenth century" idea of landscape as a kind of stable, self-contained picture-in-a-frame, from which the viewer remains inevitably separate, and a twentieth century landscape, in which the viewer and the scene interpenetrate, each shaping and informing the other. She argues that modern poets reveal as an illusion the binary opposition between spectator and landscape. In the "shifting ground" landscapes she discusses in her study, the spectator creates the landscape, shaping it according to contingencies of perception, time, and subjectivity. For the moderns, Costello suggests, there is no "landscape" independent of particular acts of seeing and describing. Rather, it is precisely these time-bound acts of perception that compose the modern landscape. The modern landscape poem becomes, in Costello's words, "itself a constructed world, a second nature: the poet's own back yard . . . [the modern landscape is] an image somewhat blurred, an effect of light and water on the eye, seen through the splotch and grid of human presence." Costello's central terms in Shifting Ground are "frame" and "flux": she uses these as a kind of shorthand for her notion of twentieth century landscape as dynamic and shifting, not static and controlled. The "frame" is that surrounding the traditional landscape painting. In the twentieth century, Costello suggests, landscape mischievously refuses to be contained by a frame, and dynamic nature (in the "flux" of modern landscape) presses against the boundaries we impose upon it, distending...