66 PA RT O N E
deploring the state of American literature—“Its costumes and jewelry prove
how little it knows Nature.... it shows less and less of the indefinable hard
something that is Nature”—and urging an “avowed, empowered, unabashed
development of sex.” He prophesies that “American-blooded” poems will
complete the “physical continent” by celebrating “These States” with their
“ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable seas and shores,” which are, he assures
Emerson, “Those shores you found.”
Behind Whitman’s festive embrace of Emerson stand the English Romantic
poets who inspired them both. “One impulse from a vernal wood” had taught
Wordsworth more “than all the sages can.” His heart leapt up at “A rainbow in
the sky” and “A host of dancing daffodils” in verse that reached the States dur-
ing Emerson’s childhood. Against the “mechanic” quality of much eighteenth-
century poetry, its predetermined form, Coleridge heeded “Nature, the prime
genial artist.” A poem should mimic nature ’s “organic form”: “it shapes, as it
develops, itself from within.... Such as the life is, such is the form.” Just so,
“organic” and “energy” share the same root.
This green thinking liberated Emerson. Nature(1836), his first book, declared
that poets must “expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.” Tho-
reau echoes this in his own first book: “As naturally as the oak bears an acorn,
and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem.” So does Whitman: “perfect poems
show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and
loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of
chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears”—though for him the Guinness
record for pumpkins would sometimes be more like it.
Emerson himself sounded primal. “Adam in the garden, I am to new-name
all the beasts in the field.” Naturelooked to “fasten words again to visible
things”—“again” because in Eden we were at one with physical and animal
nature. Thoreau wanted poets “who nailed words to their primitive senses, as
farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved.” Whitman’s
bard would “make every word he speaks draw blood... with the perfect recti-
tude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness
of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside.”
Americans revered their British forebears—“We think this man stands above
all poets,” Whitman said of Coleridge, “he was like Adam in Paradise, and
almost as free from artificiality”—but took their cue from Emerson. Walt ’s
“open letter” called him Moses leading to the Promised Land, and Columbus.
Reading Natureat Harvard, Thoreau felt that “In [Emerson’s] world... Man
and Nature would harmonize.”
So Adam, Moses, Columbus, and Emerson severed us from Europe. Britons
dwelling in domesticated terrain, Thoreau insisted, could not speak for “Vast,