New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott

by George Handley

A simultaneously ecocritical and comparative study, New World Poetics plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of the poetry of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott, three of the Americas' most ambitious and epic-minded poets. In Whitman's call for a poetry of New World possibility, Neruda's invocation of an "American love," and Walcott's investment in the poetic ironies of an American epic, the adamic imagination of their poetry does not reinvent the mythical Garden that stands before history's beginnings but instead taps the foundational powers of language before a natural world deeply imbued with the traces of human time. Theirs is a postlapsarian Adam seeking a renewed sense of place in a biocentric and cross-cultural New World through language and nature's capacity for regeneration in the wake of human violence and suffering.
The book introduces the environmental history of the Americas and its relationship to the foundation of American and Latin American studies, explores its relevance to each poet's ambition to recuperate the New World's lost histories, and provides a transnational poetics of understanding literary influence and textual simultaneity in the Americas. The study provides much needed in-depth ecocritical readings of the major poems of the three poets, insisting on the need for thoughtful regard for the challenge to human imagination and culture posed by nature's regenerative powers; nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of balancing the demands of social justice within the context of deep time; and the symptomatic dangers as well as healing potential of human self-consciousness in light of global environmental degradation.

442 pages, Hardcover

First published July 25, 2007

Reviews

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautifully written works of scholarship I have read in some time, and the clearest argument I have yet encountered for ecopoetics as central to the study of American culture more broadly (America here including South America and the Caribbean). All three poets interest me, at least to some extent, but what I liked best is that the readings of Neruda and Walcott were also to some extent re-readings of Whitman.

I read this book over the summer and it sent me back to Neruda, whose poetry I loved in my twenties, but which I've only glanced at in passing over the intervening years. I find I am still an admirer, but not able to get lost in his work anymore, only because I do not know Spanish and find myself less able to accept the translations as poetry. Sad to say, greater sensitivity to language sometimes translates into greater finickiness.

FYI: I am trying to judge these books relative to their scale and genre, so the stars I give in one category can't really be compared to those in another. A five-star chapbook is not necessarily more rewarding than a three-star collected poems (which may contain work from several five-star chapbooks), and a work of scholarship can be great and rewarding without being "better" than a merely good work of literature. I recommend this book without reservation, but will probably not be rereading or returning to it as often as I will to the poetry it discusses, even though individual volumes by Neruda and Walcott may get fewer stars from me. Judgment, finally, is for the birds. Well, I like birds too.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

plain language and solid explication. i take some issue with premises that handley uses - which makes his argument problematic for me. but useful for my own work & solid scholarship.