Modern American Poetry

Moore’s America 437

from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle,

to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny,

and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness.

Romance takes on a new tenor here, evoking the glass slipper and the silk
rather than the leatherstocking. But the conjunction of the Monongahela
and the Allegheny rivers is not a romance but a locality existing a “far cry”
from the images of adventure and plunder proliferating in the brains and
bowels of the culture and disseminated through postcards of “Niagara
Falls, the calico horses and the war canoe.” (Moore’s family owned an old
landscape painting representing the scene of this conjunction of rivers,
leading out into the open west.) But she knows all too well that, thanks to
the New York barons Carnegie and Frick, industrial Pittsburgh has grown
up on this site. What does Moore mean by wilderness here? Not, it seems,
what John Muir praised and William McKibben mourns. This is a new
kind of wilderness, one of man and nature together; we can no longer map
reality into neat binaries of city and country, where the city is “near” and
the wilderness “far.” Even when culture is geographically close to the
landscape, however, it remains distant, other. Places must be distinguished
from their representations. There is a dense geography and human history
behind a “dime novel exterior.” The effete “beau with the muff” and the
perfume-bottle-shaped coach might be signs of urban decadence. But
Teddy Roosevelt–neo-primitives, bred on urban luxury but seeking in
nature a cure for the malaise of culture, who borrowed images of
masculine prowess from the backwoods “atmosphere of ingenuity,” are not
so different. Their barehanded, anti-modern conquest of nature, of “the
otter, the beaver, the puma skins / without shooting irons or dogs” was a
weekend affair, not a real encounter with the wilderness. Nature is still
object, not other. The wealth of the American landscape, celebrated by
Henry James in The American Scene, cannot be reduced to “natural
resources,” to items for conspicuous consumption, gratuitous adventure,
or even raw necessity.
This anaphora, “it is not,” becomes a structure for the via negativa(a
practice of showing distaste) like a negative map by which Moore can “make
a place for the genuine,” asserting distance from the simulacra of New York.
The practice of reading and writing New York involves resistance,
“contempt” for the quick captions. For the wilderness is its own “scholastic
philosophy,” equal in elusiveness to the works of Aquinas and Duns Scotus
with which Moore was familiar, and equal, as well, to the wilderness of
Henry James’s prose, which she quotes at the end of the poem: “It is not the