A. ARTISTIC AND LITERARY USES 



1. THE VALUE OF NATURAL AREAS 

 TO LITERATURE AND ART 



By Selden Lincoln Whitcomb 



Some few early American poets wrote 

 of the skylark and the nightingale. 

 They followed the easy path of inherited 

 literary tradition, and did not seem to 

 realize the wealth of new natural ma- 

 terial at their very doors. Other poets, 

 however, very soon discovered the 

 poetic values of the whippoorwill, the 

 passenger pigeon, and the ruby-throated 

 humming-bird. Freneau, poet of the 

 American Revolution, has a well known 

 poem on the honeysuckle. A little 

 later Bryant's poem on the yellow violet 

 almost marks an epoch in the poetic 

 treatment of American flowers. Alex- 

 ander ^Yilson may be considered, in a 

 sense, as the last of the pioneers among 

 the American ■ writers _ on American 

 nature. In his poetry, as well as in 

 his letters and his Americcm Ornithol- 

 ogy, he has left wonderful records of 

 his personal observations of birds, 

 plants, and landscapes over a very 

 large section of the region east of the 

 Mississippi River.' 



From the days of Wilson to the pres- 

 ent time, there has been, on the part 

 of American writers, an alert and 

 continuous interest in the varied as- 

 pects of American nature. Perhaps 

 no literature is richer than ours in the 

 literary presentation of local nature. 

 The "nature essay" is a very charac- 

 teristic and practically indigenous 

 literary type in this country. As 

 American territory expanded, our 

 writers accompanied or soon followed 



iFor a fairly extended treatment of "Nature in 

 Early American Literature," see the writer 8 article 

 in The Sewanee Review, 1894. 



the pioneers of the new regions. Our 

 literature now offers us entire volumes 

 of nature lore from the region Where 

 Rolls the Oregon (Dallas Lore Sharp) 

 to that of A Florida Sketch-Book (Brad- 

 ford Torrey) and from The Maine 

 Woods (Thoreau) to The Land of Little 

 Rain (Mary Austin). Dr. Neil E. 

 Stevens has an interesting article in 

 The Scientific Monthly for February, 

 1921, on "The Botany of the New Eng- 

 land Poets." There is abundance of 

 material for analogous articles— on the 

 botany or the zoology of writers— for 

 every section, 3^cs, for every state of 

 the Union. 



The student of American literature 

 welcomes any reasonable movement 

 to preserve, in as nearly the original 

 state as possible, as many as possible 

 of the regions which have been observed, 

 loved, and described by our authors. 

 The present writer has visited the site 

 of Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden 

 Pond, and has followed the path of 

 Thoreau, with Cape Cod in his hand, 

 for miles and miles along the Cape. 

 (Incidentally, as the writer lay on high 

 land tracing the route from the book, 

 an unsuspicious fox came trotting to 

 within two yards or so of him.) Man- 

 kato, Minnesota, is a typical and beau- 

 tiful prairie town and it was the western 

 limit of Thoreau's only western trip. 

 Mankato has a wonderful system of 

 natural parks. The student of litera- 

 ture hopes that a section of prairie or 

 woodland, known to have been visited 

 by Thoreau, may yet be located and 



preserved. 



Among other places of somewhat 

 similar interest in American literary 

 biography, in the Middle West, these 

 may be suggested: haunts in Wisconfiin. 



