10/4/2023 0 Comments A son of the forest apess shmoop![]() ![]() Also, again, in reference to ancient Greek civilizations, the stars were not just lights but Constellations, as they are today, where couples and lovers are eternally encased because of their amorous exploits. The stars in Whitman’s time must have seemed like the last bastion of wilderness and purity. If it were completely illogical it may be even more truthful.įinally, we have a powerful sex scene beneath the stars where lovers rapturously enjoy each other. It is also pure and parallel to wilderness. It is a melting, melding existence here and it goes from sense to sense not rhetorically or dialectically. He speaks in senses, not in linear, symbolic rationality. The evidence was in their simple language that “was more authentic, because it was intuitive, unalienated and inarticulate” (Garrard 45). As Burroughs believed, Whitman couldn’t have had it any other way, this essentially being the assimilation of Nature and its animal consciousness.Īnother example of this Luddite harmony is Friedrich Schiller’s commentary on John Clare’s poetry, where he claims that ancient people did not differentiate between themselves and nature and were far less alienated from it. And is not clean or perfect, which makes it even more primordial. The ‘first nature’ delirium experienced in this poem is onset by a searching for it and when it comes, there is a realization that it good, “Renascent with grossest Nature or among animals” (Whitman 117). This “mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment,” could be the mentality of John Muir’s “Palaeolithic consciousness” or it could be what both Social Ecologists and Eco-Marxists would unhappily refer to Deep Ecologist’s “demands a return to a monistic, primal identification of humans and nature”, to which the former would consider a false monism because it is, “a dialectical perspective that envisages the evolution of human culture, or ‘second nature’, from ‘first nature’” (Garrard 21-29). However, the subject briefly pops up throughout the book. In Garrard’s Ecocriticism this idea is only hinted at, “The sublime provocation of the mountain scenery, and the near hysteria at the moment of ‘contact’ it enables, tends to belie the permanently threating proximity of that other wilderness, the human body” (Garrard 67). Just as it would be with some primordial Paleolithic dweller’s carnal lusts, a sort of wild, unadulterated passion that suffers no social neurosis-it is pure and unmarred by cultural notions and it takes action in “tremulous aching” (Whitman 117). It has no static or conforming body, only the confines of eddies and banks which tend to be especially fertile places, and there is a wild, uninhibited and primal quality to its formlessness and power. A river is a good image for wilderness and sexual impulse. Whitman uses a river image of coursing, palpitating lust that also conjures images of blood coursing through veins, “From pent-aching rivers/From that of myself without which I were nothing” (Whitman 116). Wilderness and wildness can be interchangeable in this case, as wildness inhabits wilderness as an inherent quality. Walt Whitman’s From Pent-Up Aching Rivers is a rhapsodic exultation of wilderness,but more specifically the wilderness of the human body. ![]()
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