Modern American Poetry

(^436) Bonnie Costello
oppositional rhetoric of nature and culture with a reciprocal one. In this way
Moore’s ambiguous reference to “New York” anticipates and complicates
William Cronon’s view of Chicago as “nature’s metropolis.” The links
between city and country are intricate and not all one-way. But a reciprocity
requires distance as well as association. Moore’s poetry maximizes proximity
verbally, but then works to reestablish distance, to remind the reader that our
images are not reality. The consumer’s America is a warehouse for the fur
trade “dotted with deer-skins” and “picardels of beaver-skin.” New York
commercial culture literally skins reality for material goods and self-
aggrandizing images, forgetting nature’s otherness. And yet it would be too
simple to read the poem as the shame of culture against the tragic glory of
nature. Nature can be appreciated as well as plundered in the name of
culture, may indeed require the lens of culture to be seen at all. In this sense
the proximity can be useful. Moore likely admires the imagination of the
writer she quotes from Field and Streamwho compares a fawn’s markings to
“satin needlework [that] in a single color may carry a varied pattern.” He has
not appropriated nature for art but rather has appreciated the art of nature.
Moore’s note tells us that the fawn was “discovered in a thicket and brought
to the hotel.” Whatever ambivalence she may have felt about this
transplantation, she knows it is within culture that its markings can be seen.
Moore was a devoted museum visitor, and most of her knowledge of nature
comes from books, films, and exhibits. She had climbed Mt. Rainier, but in
turning to write about it in “An Octopus” she does not transcribe her
experience so much as collect and assemble various representations of it. The
“contact” sought by Thoreau and revived by Muir remained elusive; the
search for authentic experience must acknowledge the fact of mediation.
These inversions of value and attribution—the savage look of fashion,
the refinement of nature—bring the two worlds of “New York” into close
proximity through the power of imagination, just as they exist in close
association through the power of commerce, in the first, long, embedded
sentence of the poem. But in the next sentence Moore works to reestablish
distance, to separate the two worlds of consumer and consumed, pointing
toward a “wilderness” beyond quick acquisition. Moore is perhaps thinking
of her own journey, not from the old center of the wholesale fur trade, St.
Louis, to the new one, New York, but her more recent migration, from
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and the “conjunction of the
Monongahela and the Allegheny,” to Manhattan, when she asserts:
It is a far cry from the “queen full of jewels”
and the beau with the muff,