History of My Reading/Spring Things 1967

First we read, then we write.  I did most of my writing in 1966-67, my third year at Knox College, on a white enameled metal kitchen table, the only suitable surface in my two rented rooms.  I wrote my academic papers there--the table otherwise piled with books and notes-- and my fiction, poems and plays, which were often likewise assembled from notes, handwritten pages with prior draft paragraphs stapled in place.  I typed them all on my gray portable typewriter, something very much like this Smith-Corona.

This was the first year, not only of college but of my life, that I lived alone.  My two room apartment was in a shabby wood frame building, and there was that questionable dip in the linoleum-covered kitchen floor, as well as the bathroom downstairs shared with scary old ladies.  But otherwise I enjoyed the place.

I still had my food service number at school so I ate there a lot, dinners and lunches, as well as patty melts in the Gizmo.  But I made coffee and tea in that kitchen, and got cereal and so on for breakfast, as well as Pecan Sandies and Chips Ahoy cookies, and possibly something as exotic as English Muffins (which were actually hard to find in a place like Galesburg.)  I probably did most of my grocery shopping at Higgins Diary.

 The bedroom was comfortable, with a double bed--the first time I had that at college: there's a certain luxury in a double bed all your own. I could spread out papers and books, and read and write there, as well as stretch myself sleeping.  There was at least one window in the bedroom near the bed, and the enduring image I have of that apartment is sitting on the bed, with a lacy curtain over the window open to spring air and light, sipping tea I'd made, with my little stereo playing "Retired Writer in the Sun" from the Donovan Mellow Yellow album.

I listened to music a lot.  Besides LPs I also had some 45 rpm records, like Beatles singles not yet on an album ( in the spring that would have included "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever.")  The 45 I remember playing repeatedly that spring was "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke.  Many years later, I would spend an evening with the member of that short-lived band who wrote it.

And of course I played my guitar, learning songs, writing songs.  I had occasional guests, especially early that fall, with some memorable if sometimes strange and poignant moments throughout the year.  But mostly it was a haven, my fortress of solitude.  Occasionally I would spend an entire day and night there without leaving, usually on a Sunday when there were no classes and the school dinners were notoriously skimpy.  The one thing I knew how to cook was spaghetti.  My grandmother had advised me on which ready-made sauces in jars were acceptable.

The deep 60s were beginning that school year, with their three most prominent characteristics: the music, Vietnam war protests, and the substance we called grass.

Audience for the spring 1967 antiwar event.  I may be hidden behind Bill
Thompson in the foreground right.  Leonard Borden photo.

The music I'll get into in more detail in a later post, but I do recall the dance tunes at parties that spring included the Stones "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday." Other songs we heard a lot--on the Gizmo Jukebox and elsewhere that spring-- were the Buffalo Springfield "For What It's Worth,"  Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" and the Turtles "Happy Together."

Wendy Saul reading. L. Borden photo.

There was an anti-war reading that spring in front of Old Main, with people sitting on the grass to hear.  Leonard Borden remembers that it was organized by Steve Goldberg, who had returned from Vietnam where he'd been posted with the International Volunteer Service.  Leonard figures it was late April or early May. He took a number of photos of the event.  They show Sam Moon, Wendy Saul, Dennis Stepanek and Goldberg reading, and Rick Clinebell singing.  Many others are visible in the crowd, including professors Howard Wilson, John Stipp and Miki Hane.  I read a poem, "Things To Do Instead of the Army," dedicated to Valjean.  More about that later.

As for grass, I probably would have caught on sooner to the increasingly open--if nevertheless furtive--smoking of the weed had I not been in an isolated apartment, but I was only becoming aware of it on campus (as opposed to the publicized use elsewhere) in the spring.

In late May, the second Siwasher of the year came out (it's the one with the psychedelic poster cover by James Campbell) that included a story I'd written, "the continuing adventures of the incredible hairyman." The story included an account of a series of "heightened perceptions" which the narrator claimed was "not like a drug."  But readers knew better.  Clearly I was a "head," and had probably dropped LSD.

It wasn't true, yet.  The first time I smoked a joint was after the story came out.  I sat on the floor with Neil Gaston and Chuck Goodman in their apartment, as they separated the seeds and rolled it, an operation they conducted literally on a copy of the Siwasher with this story in it, which I could see was open to the page where my story began.

That's partly why I thought I was being put on.  Neil and Chuck began to act high, but I didn't feel a thing.  Later I understood that this sometimes happened the first time.

That issue of the Siwasher featured a story by J. Mark Brooks, who also wrote a column for the Student that year.  It includes poems by Leonard Borden, Nicholas Brockunier, James Campbell, Julia Fonda, Candi Lange, Alison McClure, W.R. Peterson, Gerry Roe, Wendy Saul, Dennis Stepanek and me.

Peter Overton and Erica Overberger. L. Borden photo

There were photos by Jack Herbig, and photos of artworks by Mary Borden, Jack Brown, Dorie Campbell, James Campbell, ceramics by the future famous Tom Collins, Don Hansen, Peter Overton, Jane Seamans and Susan Walsh.  Gerry Roe was the editor.

Late that spring, I ran into Geroe in the Oak Room.  He seemed hesitant but finally said he'd decided to name not one editor for the Siwasher for the following year, but two: me and Wendy Saul.  I said, great.  He seemed relieved.  My first editorial meeting with Wendy was equally brief and easy.  She asked how we were going to split the editorial work, apart from selecting manuscripts which was more of a team effort.  I said, you take the first issue and I'll take the second.  She said, great.  And though we were both involved in both issues, that's pretty much what we did.

As for my story in the spring 67 issue, at this remove it seems to me the best thing I published--and probably the best I wrote--that school year.  But I didn't feel that way then.  I remember Sam Moon approaching me to talk about it, but I dismissed it as an entertainment--not my serious writing. (Perhaps I'd heard of Graham Greene dividing his fiction that way.)

The story starts with the protagonist passing a music store, when a mail truck stops, delivers a package to him that turns out to be a bomb.  That is literally how the story started in life--I was passing Butz Music House in Greensburg, resisting the temptation to go in and buy sheet music I couldn't actually read, when I had that fantasy.

"The Incredible Hairyman" by Jack Herbig
scanned from the Siwasher Vol. 45 #2 The
photo title came after my story, though I'm
not sure how Jack knew about it before it
was published.

The rest of the story collects other events and fantasies, some of them set at Seton Hill College in Greensburg, where the "Scottish castles" were almost literally that, for several of the city's most wealthy citizens in the 19th century were Scots, and the main college building had been a castle-like home.  These buildings had an
air of the fantastic.

This section contains a line I'd wanted to get into a story for awhile--the observation of the view of a young woman walking away: "her closely hipped levis swinging him alternate winks."  I actually thought of it on that particular campus.  I don't know about "closely hipped," probably "tight" would do, but the "swinging him alternate winks" seemed something Updike would have liked.

The style of the story combines the artifacts I clung to for psychic survival at the time: certain music (the Beatles) and movies (again the Beatles, as well as--and especially--the British comedy "Morgan!": the first two lines of the song about the Putney duck more or less quote one of David Warner's lines in the movie) and superhero comic books, mostly Spiderman and Daredevil.

But now I see that the story is more than that. It expresses certain illusions and disillusions of the time.  The protagonist's interactions with a psychologist and his hospitalization at the end reflect both the protagonist of Morgan! (subtitled "A Suitable Case for Treatment") and an earlier iconic character, Holden Caulfield.  Though the protagonist's descriptions of the hospital at the end reflects some of my own experience being hospitalized the previous winter, his vocabulary suggests Holden, and it was meant to.  Morgan and Holden were two alienated guys, two disillusioned dudes.

I have a similar impression about my pieces published in the Knox Student.  My column that year was called "Revolver" (Beatles reference of course), and under that marque as well as otherwise, I wrote many earnest and serious expositions on student issues, while attempting to apply McLuhan to everything.  But the columns I like now are the more poetic ones, and especially the ones that employ my Joycean/Lennonesque word play.

I'd written a few the year before--at first it was the way I recast familiar names that got attention.  But I refined the style each time, until several I published in 1967--one an account of a Student Affairs meeting (called the "prudent repairs comite"), the other on the Anderson House women's dorm controversy--I still find funny.   To come up with a more absurd name than Sharvey Umbeck was a challenge but I think I did okay with "Shafty Farfetch."  Though that was only one of his alternates (which included "Sharpy" and "Sharkey".)  I recast Valjean McLenighan as "palgeorge mccartneyism," which is funnier if you know who George Pal was (producer of some of the classic 1950s sci-fi movies like War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide), and see immediately the McCartney/McCarthyism collision, which also reflects on McCartney's pal George.  Anyway, these columns make me laugh out loud (as opposed to cringing), a nice bonus after more than 50 years.

Bill Dean--relaxing after a performance?
Photo by Leonard Borden

The first production of a play I wrote happened in the Studio Theatre that spring. It was called By the Sea By the Sea By the Sea By the Sea  or The Samuel Morse Songbook.  Ric Newman directed it.  Unfortunately I can't find a program that tells me who else was involved in the production.  As I've written elsewhere, its high point was a pantomime scene--done to the entire Beatles song "The Word"--of a group of elderly demonstrators being arrested by a motorcycle cop, played by Bill Dean, who came into the theatre, up a ramp and onto the stage, riding his actual motorcycle.

"Sunshine Superman" by Jack Herbig. Scanned
from the Siwasher 1967.  The title refers to
a song by British invader Donovan.

The play reflected my major obsessions of the year: partially digested McLuhan, and the continuing British invasion of my heart.  I played with McLuhanish ideas on media and perception; for example, the characters suddenly break into a television interview.  But the British invasion stuff--Beatles, Morgan!, Beyond the Fringe etc. was embarrassingly prominent.  I couldn't seem to believe a line could be funny unless delivered with an English accent.  But then, I wasn't the only one at the time who was smitten.  The American culture--especially youth culture-- had been undergoing this for several years, and it was soon to get even more pronounced.  So the audience laughed, and seemed pleased by the play's good spirits and antic disposition (one of the characters was The Great Dane, also known, of course, as Hairyman.)

Spring brought with it the annual awards.  I took first in the Bookfellow Library Contest--and it's because I catalogued my books to enter it, and those pages survived, that I now can identify the books I had then.  And I won something at least in poetry, though the Student article on the matter isn't entirely clear.  Henry Rago, nearing his final year as editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, was the judge.   I was reading more poetry and trying to assimilate it (I loved James Wright, and had books by Bly, Corso, Creeley, Ginsberg, Lorca, Levertov, Snyder, Lowell and Kenneth Patchen as well as Cummings, Hart Crane, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Stevens, Williams, Whitman,  D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas) but I can't say much good about my poems in the Siwasher, except they're a bit better than the year before.  Maybe one good metaphor.

Sam Moon reading, Howard Wilson in
foreground.  Leonard Borden photo.

What wasn't reflected in those poems was my growing interest in spoken word poetry, partly influenced by McLuhan's suggestion of a return to sound and oral tradition, partly by the readings of poets who came to campus, especially the more dramatic readers like Robert Bly. That tendency would get even stronger in the coming year, when I discovered the Liverpool Poets who wrote their poems to be read before audiences at jazz and rock clubs.  But even that spring, public readings were becoming more frequent and pointed as part of protests.  I already had Bly's collection of A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War which he probably brought with him to Knox.

I combined these interests in the poem I read at the protest/teach-in on the Old Main lawn, called "Things To Do Instead of the Army."  The direct inspiration in a number of ways was Gary Snyder.  Among the work he read at Knox were several poems called Things to Do.  (He published three in Poetry magazine: "Things To Do in Seattle", "...in San Francisco," and "..on a Ship At Sea.")

Rick Clinebell singing, Steve Goldberg watching.
Leonard Borden photo.

At Knox he remarked that these poems were both particular and universal; they were his particular experiences, but they were the kind of things anyone could do and write about.  Though he may not have said so, they were also especially effective when read out loud to an audience.

The "Things To Do"--which is a kind of list that everybody makes, as well as a catalog of possible experiences, like a guidebook to having a good time somewhere--grabbed my imagination, especially as I was already thinking about the oral and even mythic dimensions of reading poetry in public.  It had that very McLuhanesque quality of participation, because the audience is part of it.

I said some of these things in a short Revolver column that appeared in the last Student issue of that spring.  I asserted that the "Things To Do" poem could be a legitimate poetic form, like the sonnet or lyric.  (For the record, Sam Moon disagreed with me, and curiously Snyder did not publish these poems in any of his books that I know, especially not in his Mountains and Rivers Without End sequence he announced them as being part of.  But since then, at least one other published poet has tried one: Dan Albergotti, whose poem "Things To Do in the Belly of the Whale" was featured in the Writers Almanac in 2015.)

The Beatles bicycling in Nassau in Help!

My column also included the first few lines and several of the last lines of "Things To Do Instead of the Army,"  maybe half of the poem I read.  Like previous Things To Do poems I'd written, it includes things I'd actually done, or someone else had, though this one sometimes reflected my experiences in ways I wasn't even conscious of.  (The first line is "bicycle riding in nassau," which I doubt I consciously associated with a scene in one of my touchstone movies.  Then again, maybe I did intend this.)

 But otherwise, through odd proposals it tries to imaginatively suggest that there are alternatives that make more sense that going to war, as something we're just supposed to do next.  It was one attempt to break out of the apparent logic of Vietnam and the draft that adherents repeated, often with undisguised condescension.

I'm not sure if I wrote that column because I'd caught wind of what else the Student was publishing in what appears to be a four page issue, but a goodly amount of its inside space was taken up with two attacks on a person never named.  That person was me.  I can imagine the bewilderment of readers who weren't on the inside of this reference, and had no idea of who was the subject of a fable about an imitator who went too far.  The shorter of the two pieces came right out and used the word "plagiarism."

The complaint stemmed not just from general observations, including the Things To Do poems I'd published, but a specific line in one of them. It was in "Things To Do in Iowa City," which was about the Gentle Tuesday event I attended, as did other Knox students and faculty, that featured Allen Ginsberg.  I referred to a "quaint and magical house."  I had in fact read that combination of words on a piece of paper posted on the bulletin board in the Seymour Union, advertising a house for rent.  I don't recall seeing any names attached to this paper.

David Warner in Morgan!

This was the era of the found poem, the pop pastiche, the collage. (I was later to use verbatim a promotional paragraph from American Chickle that appeared in my mailbox, in What's Happening, Baby Jesus.)  I did what writers have been doing forever: I repositioned those words--those anonymous words-- in another context.  (I hasten to add that I have more rigorous standards for non-fiction.)

Whether or not this use of these three words in a poem is in any sense plagiaristic, according to the mores of that time or any other, is debatable.  (I assume they weren't claiming copyright on "and.")
 Unfortunately the veiled accusations appeared in the last issue of the year, and couldn't be debated in its pages or anywhere else.  And by the next fall it was forgotten.  I note, however, that one of these pieces begins beside the ads for the local movie theaters.  Now (that is, then) playing at the West: Morgan!

So this quaint and magical year ended, but on a high note: in early June (as I've written about earlier) I spotted Bill Thompson turn the corner purposefully and head towards the record store in downtown Galesburg.  And I knew why.  The latest Beatles record must have just arrived, and so an hour later we were back at his rented house, listening to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

(I might mention in this context that this particular record includes a song by John Lennon in which the lyrics are almost entirely taken from a circus poster on his wall.)

And so the summer began.  Before I left Knox, I once again had an assured place to live in the fall, and once again had my choice of summer jobs.  And once again, none of it happened.

History of My Reading/ This Dancing Balloon with Emerson and Thoreau

In the Knox College spring term of 1967, I took a 16th Century English Literature course from Mr. Brady.  At that time we were both on the Faculty Committee for Student Affairs, and our interactions there could be described as inflaming mutual frustration.  Our conflicts would become oddly defined in public in the upcoming fall term.  But whatever bad feelings there might have been at this point did not spill into this course.

I have two surviving papers from this course: one short, the other longer.  I got an A on both.  Brady even included a pun in his comments on the short paper, which was on a poem by Thomas Wyatt, in which a central metaphor was a filesmith's file.  Along with the grade, Brady wrote: "Far superior to the rank and file."  (He did not however get my joking reference to a contemporary novel I was enthusiastic about: Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.) On my longer paper on Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, he disapproved of the "staccato style," but concluded "it's a very good job."  

Truth is I didn't much care for 16th century literature--but it is interesting that the approach I took to the Faerie Queene was to focus on "innocence as the essence of ideal love," carrying on a theme I followed in 20th century writer Scott Fitzgerald in winter term.  One paragraph is worth quoting to indicate my thoughts and feelings on the subject at that time, and for years later:

"Innocence, openness, gentlenesss, are the qualities of love that make it what it is--the conciliator of disparate elements in human experience.  It must often be a fostered innocence, deliberate, treasured.  And it does not always promise perfection, for love blends the mortal and the immortal, but is not wholly of either.  It is poignant."

The chief element of this course that I remember is an assigned book: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis, particularly the first two chapters, on Courtly Love and on Allegory.  Impressions of these lasted beyond the course.

Now I come to the course on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau taught by Douglas Wilson in spring 1967.  The opportunity to read and study these two writers has had perhaps the most lasting effect on my life of any literature course in college.  I can't imagine my life if I hadn't read them that tumultuous spring.  They were a necessary connection to nearly everything that came before, and nearly everything that would come after.

As with the Walt Whitman/Wallace Stevens course the spring before, Doug Wilson's enthusiasm infused this experience.  I can't read any of these writers--Whitman, Stevens, Emerson or Thoreau--without thinking of Doug Wilson.

My 1967 copy, upon which I scrawled
an Emerson sentence: "Why should I vapor
and play the philosopher, instead of
balancing the best I can this dancing
balloon?"  Good question. My
rueful answer: grades.

But even before his knowledge and enthusiasm was displayed in the classroom, Wilson made this course memorable by the choice of books we used as texts.

Emerson's best known works were his essays, and Thoreau's was Walden.  But the specific books Wilson chose both broadened the view of these writers, and placed their work in context.

Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Riverside paperback edited by Stephen E. Whicher, placed Emerson's major essays in the context of his journal entries surrounding the times of their composition.  The book also included Emerson's poems, which Wilson did not neglect in class.  We probably were assigned the Prentice-Hall volume of Emerson criticism, also edited by Stephen Whicher, along with Milton Konovitz.

Similarly, the Norton Critical Editions paperback of Walden and Civil Disobedience included not only the full texts but excerpts from Thoreau's journals, plus reviews and critical essays, ranging from Thoreau's contemporaries (including George Eliot and Emerson) to modern writers and critics, including Van Wyck Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Sherman Paul and E.B. White.

Providing further context was what for me was the most valuable addition: H.D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal, selected and edited by Laurence Stapleton (Dover, which kept Thoreau's entire published journals in print for years, along with other Thoreau books.)  How thoroughly I consumed this volume (for this class and a later independent studies) is indicated by the profusion of underlinings and check marks throughout.  The idea behind the selection was to highlight entries--some of them quite long--that illuminate Thoreau as consciously a writer.

These kinds of contexts not only informed the main texts but made the course more involving, more personal, and more of an adventure.

Unlike Whitman and Stevens,  Emerson and Thoreau came from the same place at the same historical moment--in fact they were close friends for years, and the younger Thoreau even lived for awhile in the Emerson household.  That historical moment involved the Transcendentalist movement, so we had Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists (Signet paperback) as background (My copy has underlining only in the introduction and first chapter.)

My copy of Thoreau's book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, dates from this time, and it may have been an assigned text.  I also acquired The Portable Thoreau that spring.

My feeling for Emerson and Thoreau was genuine during the course, but my sense of them in history and literary history comes later, as well as the obviously inaccessible knowledge of their role in my personal history.  Surviving papers show concerns somewhat derived from academic questions that were probably prominent at that moment, and an approach that still derives largely from philosophical analysis.

About history: today I see Emerson and Thoreau partly in historical context--a context I can feel, imaginatively, that I could not back then.  My feel for this history begins with imagining the historical contexts of my parents and grandparents generation, and the generation before that.  That takes me into the latter 19th century.  The Civil War era was not of much interest to me when I was young.  I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the French & Indian war was fought, and in a town named after a general of the American Revolution.  That period was somewhat alive. In grade school I greatly admired Thomas Jefferson.  But even this period was merely "long ago," along with Davy Crockett and Robin Hood.

Even in college, historical periods were discrete and unconnected coalitions of facts and personalities.  In literature I was interested in the writer, not the period. I recall Mr. Wilson asking the class at one of our first Emerson/Thoreau meetings, who was President in the 50s?  I immediately said Eisenhower.  Of course he meant the 1850s.  But that combination of numbers meant nothing to me.  I was interested in what Thoreau and Emerson had to say to me NOW.  We were the Now Generation, after all.  But part of it was a failure of imagination because of a lack of experience: i.e. I was young.   Some of my contemporaries in college had that historical sense.  I did not. As I used to say in the 1990s, I got interested in history when I'd had some.

 A short paper wound its way through Emerson's essay on Art, with reference to contemporary trends in art, of which I actually knew little.  My final paper on Emerson was more ambitious, returning to the theme of innocence (footnotes include references to a book called Radical Innocence by Ihab Hassan, though I have no memory of it--some credit Hassan with the term "postmodernism"), the nature of good and evil, and Transcendentalism vs. existentialism.  The paper is interesting but mostly an emotional mess, clearly written with a distracted mind and a broken heart. It marks the low point of my spring affair, as well as a surfeit of other influences--the aftereffects of campus visits by Gary Snyder and John Cage among them.

 After this course at Knox, I acquired various collections of Emerson, including several old hardbacks: a Greystone Press edition of essays, the Modern Library abridgement of his journals, and a Chelsea Classics edition of Representative Men.   

To a paperback edition of Thoreau: The Major Essays (Dutton), I added new editions of some late Thoreau works: Faith in a Seed (Island Press 1993, edited by Bradley P. Dean), which calls itself Thoreau's Last Manuscript, at least until Wild Fruits:Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript (Norton 1999, also edited by Bradley P. Dean.)  I also got a few more books on the transcendentalists,  including Philip F. Gura's 2007 history, American Transcendentalism.

I also received (as review copies) several in the series of Yale University Press annotated Thoreau volumes, but I didn't care for the format (two columns of text, with annotations on both sides of them, plus a lot of white space.)  I did hold onto one of them--I to Myself, a selection from the journals.

But my major new adventure into Emerson and Thoreau began when I read a review by John Banville in the New York Review of Books of December 3, 2009. The review began with the greatest opening sentence of any review I've ever read, and quite possibly my favorite sentence ever.  It is: "Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence."

I've been wrapping my head around that ever since.

The review was of First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson.  This slim book also became one of my favorites.  And it introduced me to Richardson as biographer.

Over the next year or so I read his big three: Emerson: The Mind on Fire  (U. of CA 1995), Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (U. of CA 1986) and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin 2007.)  They led me as well to Richardson's selections of William James essays and of Emerson's essays, lectures and poems.  All three of the biographies are excellent in approach and as writing.

Emerson and Thoreau continue as living influences among contemporary American writers of various kinds, including the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, the one fictionist whose books I buy immediately on publication.  In his Science in Washington trilogy (which he more recently edited into a single volume, Green Earth), one of his principal characters stumbled on a website called Emerson for the Day, and so quotations from Emerson and Thoreau became part of the text. (That website didn't actually exist, but for some years afterwards it did, because of those books.  I did a version of it on this site for awhile.) Then when Robinson visited Arcata several years ago, he advised his audience to read an entry in Thoreau's journals every morning, as he does.

There's much more that could be said about the influence of Emerson and Thoreau, and I will have a little more in my post on the upcoming summer of 67. But I will say this much here: in retrospect, it is evident that for me, Emerson and Thoreau were both a bridge from earlier literary enthusiasms, and a counter-example.  They were an American version of the English Romantics, and therefore a link to all that echoed in the Romantics (Wordsworth's "something more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,/And rolls through all things...")

But Emerson and certainly Thoreau went beyond the pastoral identification with innocence as in Spenser or even Shakespeare, to reclaim nature itself and the beauty and essentiality of the wild in the world and in the human soul ("In wildness is the preservation of the world"--Thoreau.) That notion links them forward to poet-ecologist Gary Snyder and ecologist-poet Paul Shepard, and back even farther than English literature goes, to the Native American and other Indigenous and original cultures developed in the far past.

The Daily Lear

verse and drawing by Edward Lear

Cromer in Norfolk, England