The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless,
It is in my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
In the Preface to his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman makes gestures toward what I might call some of the first inclinations of an eco-geographical consciousness. The poet Whitman champions “responds to his country’s spirit,” and the way he does this is that he “incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes” (Whitman 7). We might imagine the poet after Whitman’s heart as manifesting–or being a manifestation–of the natural geography of America. The ways in which Whitman conceives of the close relationship between literature and the physical environment prefigures in many respects the later development of ecocriticism.
Images of vast expanses dominate Whitman’s treatment of the subject. “When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily stretches with them,” (7) he writes. The American poet, like Whitman himself, must be as vast and diverse and multitudinous as the land. In typical Whit/manic fashion, he outlines an extensive catalog of American landscapes, encompassing the sweeping bioregional diversity of the American continents:
On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and liveoak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree and cottonwood and tulip-tree and cactus and wildvine and tamarind and persimmon. (7)
This sort of deep ecological view understands the poet as someone who takes on the form of the environment, tied–but not necessarily beholden–to the land. It is important to note that it is not nature-qua-nature that Whitman is interested in. Nor does it seem that that he sees a sharp distinction between human and nature. It is always a relation, viz. humans interacting with and sometimes exploiting nature: he mentions agriculture and mining and ports in the very same breath. Nature shapes the poet, but so too does the poet (or America, or whatever) shape nature.
For Whitman, it is not enough that a poet champion nature, or to point to its beauty. This would be too obvious and easy. “Folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects . . . . they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls” (10). Here, Whitman situates himself clearly within the Transcendentalist tradition, where contact with nature points beyond it. However, it is clear that in Whitman we see a deep understanding of the material ecological forces which shape humans and their literature.
As we noted in class, I’m always torn on Whitman’s relationship to nature. He speaks at times about what would seem the inevitability of the displacement and annihilation of native peoples, he writes of felling grand beautiful trees to make way for progress. Sometimes, his language here reminds me of a famous visual of the colonist Cecil Rhodes literally straddling Africa–not so much incarnating its geography as dominating it. This image of poet-as-land is interestingly extended in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and the tradition of an eco-conscious Whitman in the criticism is quite wide-ranging and varied (a recent book, for example, is “Walt Whitman and the Earth”). This might make a great research focus if you can find a fresh angle here.