The Poet's Holy Craft by Brennan Matthew C.;Guilds John Caldwell;

Author:Brennan, Matthew C.;Guilds, John Caldwell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Romantic American Ecology

In such essays as “Americanism in Literature” Simms helped foster the Young America Movement’s calls for a national literature. He also helped create an American romanticism by evoking local and regional landscapes in his poems and by incorporating legends, such as of Native Americans, that arose from these settings. An even deeper way in which Simms’s treatment of nature places him the mainstream of romanticism manifests itself in his southern ecology, which subsumes his use of local settings and materials for his poetry. Most previous studies of Simms and the natural world have focused on the pastoral tradition in American literature. However, John Caldwell Guilds believes that Simms should rank with Thoreau as an original American environmentalist. Similarly, in discussing Simms’s frontier poetry, James E. Kibler calls Simms “one of our first en vironmentalists.” Elsewhere, in some prefatory remarks to a reprinting of Simms’s lecture “The Good Farmer” (1841), Kibler suggests “that Simms had become a true agrarian” who reminds one of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet-polemicist-farmer. Indeed, Simms’s management of the Woodlands plan tation near Barn well, South Carolina, underscores the importance of considering his farming practices as an influence on his poetry and part of his relation to nature, a relationship that is ultimately ecological and romantic.1

Although Wendell Berry holds that the romantics considered nature merely “as a reservoir of symbols” rather than something one needs to live with in practical harmony, Jonathan Bate’s books on Wordsworth and other romantics establish that their work embodies a romantic ecology. An ecology that also encompasses Simms’s thought, poetry, and even his farming, this romantic vantage manifests “a respect for the earth and a scepticism” about “the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production are the be-all and end-all of human society.” It is “an ‘ideology’ based on a harmonious relationship with nature,” and it “emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things.” Thus, to dwell harmoniously with nature, it is necessary to stay put, in contrast to “the rapacious drive of ‘progress’” that travels outward.2 Strikingly, Simms fits with Wordsworth in living this romantic ecology. In his farming of Woodlands, in his essays, and in his poems Simms develops a southern ecology that is both practical and romantic. In Jeffersonian fashion he questions industrialism and promotes stewardship of nature, using the land well, and most of all respecting the genius of the place and the Virgilian idea of place as home. Moreover his romantic ecology also provides not just refuge from labor but also a sabbath when the good farmer can contemplate in his own peaceful forests and fields his organic connection to all things and can experience through this land a harmony with God.

Though in The Dispossessed Garden Lewis P. Simpson sees Simms’s agrari -anism as an impossible pastoral arcadia, it actually represents a corrective to misguided modern industrialism. Adam L. Tate points out that “Far from being an agrarian reactionary, Simms embraced the development of commerce and manufacturing in the South as a sign of social progress” and as a means of independence from the North.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.