It’s an unobtrusive little painting, not 5 by 10 inches, depicting a drab town under a blustery sky. Not something anyone would take a second look at, but for poet Elizabeth Bishop, it meant the world.
The world, that is, of Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she had lived happily before her mother was carried off permanently to a mental asylum.
Bishop immortalized this small oil, painted by her great-uncle George Hutchinson and handed down by her aunt, in her own literary musing simply entitled “Poem.” “It’s a deep and complex attempt to get back to that blissful first five years of her life,” says Stanford English professor John Felstiner. “It moved me so much because of the way she reflects on the painting to dig into her personal past as she tries to find what has been lost and what can been regained.”
The beauty of the poem led Felstiner to wonder: where was the actual image, which thousands of people had heard of but probably only a handful had seen? That started him on a six-month quest to locate the painting, which is now reprinted in color in his latest book, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (Yale University Press, 2009).
Hutchinson’s oil represents but one of 60 color and black-and-white images Felstiner has painstakingly collected for the volume, an appreciative analysis of how poets from the Romantics through Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the contemporary Gary Snyder found their inspiration to speak to and for the natural world. The visuals serve as a kind of slide show to accompany his graceful investigation, often providing a springboard for him to explore poets’ history, artistic process and ways of looking at place, be it urban, suburban or rural.
The larger purpose of the book is to make us fall in love with nature poetry so that we may fall in love with nature itself again. For Felstiner, the author of several critical texts on poetry and translations including Translating Neruda: The Way to Machu Picchu, this re-enchantment with the world is critical for our environmental salvation. “The choices we make now or fail to make, and those foisted on us, determine whether we will subsist on a livable or steadily degraded planet,” he writes in his introduction.
Each image has its story, not only in relationship to the poet, but to Felstiner himself, who had to sleuth his way to most of them. The book was already well under way when he began gathering visuals to accompany lectures in his Introduction to Humanities course for freshmen.
“I started with the portraits of poets and landscapes that had inspired them as a way to bring their work to life,” he says. From there, he brought in nature-oriented art and photographs that related to their writings, whether the poets had known of the images or not. He also collected photos of several poets’ first drafts, with their glaringly unceremonious strikeouts and misspellings, to show students “the working of the artistic mind.”
Eventually, Felstiner realized that the incorporation of visuals would add a unique dimension to his book. That meant getting good-quality photos of the originals—and slogging through the time-consuming and frequently expensive process of obtaining permissions from rights holders. It was a daunting trek.
Securing the rights to reprint Bishop’s Nova Scotia dreamland, for example, led Felstiner to the poet’s executor, Alice Methfessel, in Carmel, Calif., who invited him for a visit in 2007. It was only after making an offer to restore the painting, which was covered with years of grime, that he mustered up the courage to ask Methfessel if she would let him use the painting in his book. “Thankfully, she said yes,” he says.
The initial encounter with Methfessel also had its poetic delights. “Alice had placed the painting on a table, and we spent some time going back and forth between the image and the poem, trying to see not only what Bishop saw, but also what she changed,” Felstiner says. “For instance, we noticed that the two geese she talks about being in the water are not in the water. The poet is giving us the ‘virtual truth,’ the deeper reality of the landscape that’s in her own memory.”
Another famous image the professor decided to track down was the 18th-century Chinese carved lapis lazuli stone given to William Butler Yeats by a young poet in 1936. The stone had inspired Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli,” penned shortly before his death, in which he writes tenderly of the scene depicted in the carving—two robed Chinese philosophers climbing a mountain. “He uses it as a means to reflect on themes of war, art and the individual,” Felstiner says of the Yeats work.
Searching in the literature and online, Felstiner located the 12.5-inch-high stone in an exhibit of the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. “My sister happened to travel there, and she made a fine snapshot,” he says. After countless emails and permissions requests, Felstiner persuaded the library to make fresh photographs for him, and Yeats’s descendants agreed to let him publish them.
Felstiner also undertook a quest to find the Chinese landscape paintings that had stunned poet Gary Snyder as a child, feeding his own musings on the mountain ranges of the northern United States in poems such as “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” The paintings, Snyder said in a 1977 interview, “blew my mind. My shock of recognition was very simple: ‘It looks just like the Cascades.’”
The images he had seen were, according to the poet, in the “Seattle art museum.” “I knew of an Asian art museum in Seattle, so I checked to see if they had any scrolls in their collection from around 1940, about when Gary would have seen them,” Felstiner says. He found only one that matched Snyder’s memory, an 18th-century painting entitled Islands, Mountains, Houses, Bridge by Guan Huai. “This had the waterfalls, pines, clouds and mist that Snyder specifically referred to as looking a lot like the landscape of Washington,” he says.
Felstiner sent a copy to Snyder, then 76, in 2006. “He said it in fact could have been the one that ‘blew his mind,’” the professor says, smiling. The image now appears in Can Poetry Save the Earth? in both color and black and white. “With the help of an artist, a poet sees the world in a fresher, brighter, deeper and more spiritual way,” Felstiner says of the contribution the visuals make to his book. “These images, in turn, give us an eye onto the mind and vision of the poet.”
Felstiner, whose work on the book was supported by a small grant from the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, continued bringing nature poetry to life this past winter through his course Poetry and Environmental Awareness. “All of this work is really intended for younger people,” he emphasizes. “They are the ones who will inherit our environmental problems—and will have the responsibility to do something about it. I can only hope that a volume such as mine will provide them with some inspiration toward that end.”
MARGUERITE RIGOGLIOSO is a Bay Area writer.
