New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott

This title offers a groundbreaking look at three major poets. This ecocritical and comparative study plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of three of the Americas’ most ambitious and epic-minded poets. From Walt Whitman’s call for a poetry of New World possibility, to Pablo Neruda’s invocation of an ‘American love’, to Derek Walcott’s poetic ironies of an American epic, the adamic imagination of their poetry invokes the foundational powers of language before a natural world already transformed by human violence. George B. Handley explores the ecocritical foundations of American and Latin American studies, considers the relevance of ecology to each poet’s ambition to recuperate the New World’s lost histories, and provides a transnational poetics of understanding literary influence and textual simultaneity in the Americas. In their nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of balancing the demands of social justice within the context of deep time, these readings expose the symptomatic dangers as well as the healing potential of human self-consciousness in light of global environmental degradation.