For a recent issue of The Poetry Review, I wrote an essay on the relationship between wilderness and poetic bewilderment looking in particular at poems by Mark Doty. The essay isn’t available online, but I thought I would make an adapted version available to subscribers, and talk a bit about my reasons for exploring this topic, which is wonder adjacent.
In April 2020, on a late-evening walk through Central Park, I watched as three strangers measured the North Meadow by streetlamp light. By next morning, white tents had bloomed like mushrooms after rain, and the park’s entrance was a triage center, all wilderness replaced by a grim circus: the COVID-19 field hospital, a desperate, albeit ingenious, answer for relieving overtaxed hospitals. On that walk, the last that I would take there for months, I spotted a hawk in a pine’s lower branches—an omen, though of what, I couldn’t be sure.
In his missive to the Wildlife Research Center known as the “Wilderness Letter,” Wallace Stegner warned that “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”[i] He had in mind those landscapes of the American West that do not easily lend themselves to simile, whose topographies appear in silent contest with the eye. The Badlands, Kings Canyon, Yosemite under snow. His vision plays to a distinctly American sensibility, a conservationist’s reverence for the natural world inflected by a reverse Manifest Destiny, an appetite to be conquered by the wild.
I am fascinated by the competing impulses to explore, document, and catalog nature while at once wishing to be lost in it, relinquishing those very same desires for structure and control. It seems to me a decidedly human duality that echoes across subjects. But the reality remains that even by only driving to the “edge and look[ing] in,” as Stegner advised, we risk what another brilliant American ecologist, Aldo Leopold, noted as one of the self-defeating paradoxes of conservation: that in order to cherish this wilderness, we must “see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”[ii]
That urban environments conscript the mind to streets and pathways which can only be negotiated, never imagined on one’s own, is only one example of the psychic curtailment Stegner seems to have been warning against, and it, in turn, is only symbolic of a greater, more dangerous imaginative failure: the unwillingness to believe in a world worth valuing beyond immediate utility. And that refusal of tyrannic utility, that most ancient resistance, seems to me the beating heart of poetry. It’s what underlies W.H. Auden’s declaration, however ironic, that “Poetry makes nothing happen,” in a poem dedicated to the memory of Yeats.
The fact that wilderness and bewilderment share an etymology should come as no surprise: to bewilder means to cause to lose one’s sense of where one is and derives