George Handley
Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature
I like to think that Adam and Eve were extraordinary poets. Their original and pure language of nature was undisturbed by custom or the past. When they spoke and named animals and plants for the first time, they brought those things into a living intimacy with their own lives, and the language they used reflected their own history and place within the created world they had been given by a loving Father. So their language was purely theirs, not borrowed but born in their immediate contact with creation, distilled upon their minds from original contact with the dynamic, living and breathing world around them. at, in my mind and I suppose in the mind of most poets, has all the makings of great poetry. At least Walt Whitman would seem to agree when he wrote these words from his famous poem, “Song of Myself “:
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufced at what they are, but
never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every
hazard,
Nature without check with original energy. (25)
His goal was to find an original poetic of democracy that expressed the unique qualities of our New World history and environment. He wanted to cast aside the burdens of “creeds and schools” of thought inherited from our European past and come into direct contact with Nature so that his poems would enable a return to innocence. His influence on generations of poets in the United States after him is well known. What is not so well known is the enormous influence he has had throughout all of the Americas, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Two poets of the Americas, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature, have expressed their appreciation for the transformative influence of Whitman’s Adamic poetry of American possibility when they first began to compose verse: Pablo Neruda of Chile, who won the prize in 1971 just two years before his death, and Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, a living poet, who was awarded the prize in 1992. Both poets clearly had other important influences, but they seem to have been particularly taken by Whitman’s idea of the poet as a kind of Adam in a second, New World Garden, using the joy to be found in nature’s extraordinary capacity to surprise us as a source of historical renewal. is spirit of exhilaration in their poetry is not ignorant of the sordid and regrettable New World history of Native American genocide, African slavery, and the colonial woes of the European conquest. We may never know exactly how many millions of Native Americans were massacred, killed by disease, or forced to suffer untold violence at the hands of European conquerors, but we do know that the death toll makes most of the twentieth-century atrocities look mild by comparison. Add to that the story of African slavery, the perhaps millions thrown overboard during the slave trade, the millions more who suffered almost four centuries of indignity and brutality, and then consider the rampant destruction of nature that has increased in an era of advancing technology and economic disparity, and it hardly seems possible to smile at nature or believe any more in our innocence.
As a literary critic, it seemed fair to wonder if it is even ethical to choose to be obliviously happy in the face of an environment that bears the wounds of such violence. Such criticism has been launched, for example, against Walt Whitman, who, in his celebrations of American possibility and innocence, seemed indifferent to the costs of America’s expansion incurred by Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics. Although Whitman was sometimes seduced by the rhetoric of his own seemingly limitless optimism, he was aware of at least some of the ironies of his own praise of American possibility. In his great book of poetry that he hoped might be a kind of American Bible, Leaves of Grass, he declares grass to be a metaphor for both poetry and nature’s shared capacity to renew our imagination in the wake of suffering. Upon observing leaves of grass, he cannot help but suspect that they hide a story of loss, never to be fully recovered. When asked by a child what the grass is, he responds:
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of
graves.
Tenderly I will use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young
men. (29)
Although written before the Civil War, these lines would later offer a poignant and cautious expression of hope in the wake of national division and suffering. He writes: “I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,” but unfortunately he cannot; he can only praise nature and hope that we find comfort in its capacity to regenerate new life from the very material of dead bodies, a fact that suggested to him that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier” (30). It is because of his awareness of nature’s law of regeneration that Whitman found such strange com- fort and poetic inspiration from the sea, even though it seemed to whisper “death” to him, “[t]hat strong and delicious word” (214).
Over the last several years I have traveled to St. Lucia in the Caribbean and to Chile to find similar grounds of cautious renewal in Walcott and Neruda. My objective was to understand the influence of Whitman on their careers but more importantly to understand the hope they have found in their own damaged but enduring natural environments. Neruda’s most famous poem, “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” complains that the history of the Inca has been lost to contemporary Latin America because of the violence of the conquest and because nature has altered and erased key elements of that history. He speaks to the Urubamba river that runs below the ruins:
What do your harried scintillations whisper?
Did your sly, rebellious flash
go traveling once, populous with words? (Heights 41)
Human violence is not alone responsible for the amnesia Latin America has suffered about its ancient past; natural erosion has also played its oblivious role of transforming the past into the stuff of water and earth. e poet’s duty, then, is paradoxically to pay close attention to the innocence of nature in order to recover knowledge of human injustice. It would seem that, environmental extremists notwithstanding, nature lovers don’t have to be misanthropic after all. Many critics have lost sight of the fact that Neruda was as obsessed with natural history as he was with political injustice. His enormous private collection of books housed at the University of Chile library in Santiago shows a man with a deep fascination for birds, trees, geology, geography, and marine biology. And his poetry, especially in the later years, became increasingly focused on the small miracles of nature and of everyday material life. He shared Whitman’s fascination with the ocean, where he felt his poetic yearnings were first nurtured, making it a lifelong custom to beachcomb and compose in a shed he built on his coastal property in Isla Negra. In some of the most stunning verse ever written about the sea, Neruda sees nature’s hidden promise that violence and death can lead to renewal:
All your force becomes origin again. You only
deliver crushed debris,
Detritus removed from your cargo,
Whatever the action of your abundance expelled,
Everything that ceased to be cluster. (Canto General 338)
Shells, seaweed, and stones cast on the shores are Neruda’s emblems of an Adamic poetry because their beauty reminds us of destruction and loss but also provides grounds for hope.
Walcott’s appraisal of natural beauty takes an even more sobering look at the brutal facts of New World slavery and the devastation to indigenous peoples and environments, but he too remains hopeful. He is keenly aware of how the beauty of Caribbean seascapes has been cheapened by the tourist industry’s exploitation of the myth of the Caribbean as a terrestrial paradise, but he insists that its beauties have never been properly seen. Walcott’s Eden, in other words, is not a private beach vacant of any local poverty or sufering but a tired world whose staggering and simple beauty endures. He looks deep into the blankness of the sea’s face and the waves’ constant erasure of traces on the sand and finds a metaphor for the lamentable emptiness of our historical memory of past suffering. He also finds, however, the opportunity for Adamic renewal. Memories of the past linger in his poetry like open wounds, but the promises of nature held in the trees, wind, sky, sand, and water provide a balm to help him refuse nostalgia or regret. When he considers his own child playing in the sand, he sees
a child without history, without knowledge of its
pre-world,
only the knowledge of the water runnelling rocks . . .
that child who puts the shell’s howl to his ear,
hears nothing, hears everything
that the historian cannot hear, the howls
of all the races that crossed the water
the howls of grandfathers drowned. (Collected 285)
Like Whitman’s leaves, the innocence of nature here hints at a forgotten past that remains untranslatable and thus seems to petition an embrace of the simplicity of the world.
When I visited St. Lucia in 2001 and interviewed Mr. Walcott, I learned that he makes it a daily ritual to visit the beach near his house and take what he calls a “sea bath” (he prefers to leave the salt on his skin for the rest of the day). He brings with him a small note- book upon which he writes his daily lines in his native English, but he is not so occupied that he won’t spend time chatting with the local fishermen in French Creole, the island’s other native language. He wrote in a recent essay: “The less history one is forced to remember, the better for Art—better the name of a painter than a general’s, a poet’s than a pope’s. . . . what I look at from sunrise to sunset when the first lights pierce the dusk around the former island, [is] a past written in water, whose coins are not buried but glittering on the sea’s surface” (“Where I Live” 32).
But his favorite beach, I have since learned, is now closed for the construction of another hotel. Local fishermen are more rare because they can’t compete against corporate-scale harvesting and the increasing loss of coral reef along the shores. Nature’s promise of renewal looks less certain everyday. So perhaps, Walcott warns, we are forgetting the lessons of fishermen and poets alike: “It hurts to think of the fisherman fading, because his individuality was his independence, his obedience to the sea an elemental devotion, his rising before dawn and his return with his catch at the end of the day as much an emblem of writing, sending the line out, hauling in, with any luck, a wriggling rhyme, learning to keep his humility on that expanse that is his home” (34).
As a boy, I enjoyed the solitude of the beaches on the Long Island Sound where Whitman lived, and as a visitor to Walcott’s and Neruda’s homelands, I was stunned by the natural beauty of St. Lucia and Chile. But I am everyday shocked to learn of evidence of increasing degradation to these and to my own environment. If there is a lesson in their New World poetry, I think it is that progress is not inevitable, that the world is a fragile thing, already too full of suffering and loss, and that therefore its beauties are rare miracles, gifts of grace. To miss those miracles is a failure to live life abundantly. But to allow knowingly the destruction of God’s creations is worse still; it is to live life unfeelingly, wantonly, destructively.
To dwell on the earth like these poets means that we shouldn’t rely on tradition or habit to teach us how to see the world. As the restored account of the creation suggests, seeing it as new, even when it is already old, is the first step in living morally in the natural world: “Out of the ground made I, the Lord God, to grow every tree, naturally, that is pleasant to the sight of man; and man could behold it. And it became also a living soul” (Moses 3:9). To be beholden to nature is to want to preserve and, where necessary, restore its beauty. Unlike traditional accounts, Adam and Eve’s task of naming things here is not a discovery or claim of ownership. Instead, like our own efforts to appreciate the creation, it becomes a kind of repentance because they are turning back to rediscover their forgotten kinship with creation and with all of humanity.