blueprints

About River of Words | 111
fantasy,” Yeats wrote—and I think he had the rhetoric of Irish nationalism
in mind—“The heart’s grown brutal from the fare. . . .” So I often found that,
while I found it easy to talk about literacy, education, the power of American
literature, the power and reach of literature in the world, and about the
environment and environmental literature, the subject of poetry left me
mute. Poems were another matter. It was always a pleasure and an interest to
talk about poems in particular—the amazement of this rhythm or the leap
of mind in that metaphor. For several years during that time, I found myself
in the position of having to write a short essay about a poem every week,
and I liked doing it. But when I was asked, as poets laureate are incessantly
asked, about the good of poetry or the social role of poetry or—depending
on what city one was in—the popularity or unpopularity of poetry, my
mind seemed to go on strike.
Yet a line of Frost’s was often in my head. “The land was ours before we
were the land’s.” I’ve always read that with my experience of the stunning
small accuracies of haiku and of the traditions of literati painting in mind.
When Basho was writing his poems in the early seventeenth century,
people had been living on the Japanese mainland for at least ten thousand
years and had had a tradition of written poetry in Japanese since the early
eighth century, so Basho was writing his poems in relation to at least nine
hundred years of a literary tradition of close observation of the land.
Though he lived in New England, in the frontier town of Farmington
for at least forty years, Edward Taylor, who died in the early eighteenth century
and may be the best of our early American poets, wrote poems in
which the rare bird or plant he names is English, not North American. So,
even in New England, the marriage of natural place and the English language
and the powers of imagination and observation are no more than
three hundred years old. In my part of the world, it is younger than that by
almost one hundred and fifty years. As Whitman saw and as Dickinson
taught us with her adaptations of the hymn form, the work required was
not just a matter of putting the inherited forms of English poetry to work
on the American landscape—they needed to be acclimated to one another.
That work seems to have been begun in New England in the early years of
the nineteenth century, roughly contemporaneous with the work Audubon
and our landscape painters and our botanical and geological explorers were
doing. They were learning to see the land and to find a language for what
they were seeing. There is every reason—in the world we have made, in the