Modern American Poetry

(^442) Bonnie Costello
specific relevance to the tradition of the American sublime, of course, and the
myth of America as the unfallen Eden. The paintings of Albert Bierstadt and
Frederic Church suggested immanence and transparence. Moore’s poem
acknowledges mediation from the outset, dashing any illusion of an
American Adam who might establish an innocent civilization in harmony
with nature. Moore’s poem insists that there is no easy turning back. A return
to nature is not a return to innocence. Rainier has been framed and
structured by man; the wilderness, as we conceive it, is a construction. But
Moore creates another kind of sublime in returning elusive power to the
object—a sublime beyond us, not ourselves.^2 This thrilling encounter with
place is intercepted repeatedly by the comic presence of tourists who are
“happy seeing nothing,” and businessmen “who require 365 holidays a year.”
The sense that we have turned Mt. Rainier into a theme park for tourists
enamored of the pseudo-rigors of outdoor life contends with proliferating
details and jolts to our orientation that the contemplation of this place
provokes.
“New York” and “An Octopus” critique the rough pastoral of American
wilderness discourse and suggest a sublime reality that cannot be reduced to
an image or a tag. “The Steeple Jack” (CP, 5–7), written about a decade later,
considers the soft pastoral, exposing the dangers that lie within Arcadia. Not
only wilderness parks, but also resort towns were a growing phenomenon of
the new century. Empson’s definition of pastoral as “a partial world depicted
as a whole world” suits this poem, in which enumerated flowers display
gardens containing much of the predatory animal kingdom (foxglove, tiger
lily, spiderwort, snapdragon), without threat, and in which “there are cats,
not cobras, to keep down the rats.” In this temperate zone we have “the
tropics at first hand” without the threat of exotic serpent life, except on
fashionable snakeskin shoes. Moore delights in the harmonious blends of the
natural and human worlds and values retreat from the centers of modern life.
But she is no Norman Rockwell. She brings her urbanity with her, reminding
us at every turn that we are not in paradise, that place cannot return our
innocence, and that indeed the pastoral world, if we forget the artifice that
makes it, may be more dangerous than any other.
Moore was certainly aware of a different role for herself as she wrote
“The Steeple Jack.” The poet of “New York” and “An Octopus” was
publishing in obscure avant-garde magazines (Othersand Broom). She did not
cater to a “public out of sympathy with neatness” (CP, 76). Her audience was
the New York avant-garde, out of sympathy with the genteel tradition of
literary pastoral. But as winner of the Dial Award and editor of The Dial,she
had become an arbiter of taste rather than its critic, and her audience had