‘Come Roam With Me Columbia’s Forests’: Representations of the Forest in Alexander Wilson’s The Foresters
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.09.2019.05Keywords:
Romanticism, epistemological hunting, Native Americans, destruction of nature, wilderness, early American RepublicAbstract
Scottish-born naturalist Alexander Wilson, best known for his multi-volume record of the work he did as America’s first ornithologist, American Ornithology (published 1808–1814), is also worthy of recognition for his long poem The Foresters, a semi-autobiographical work in which he recounts the journey he took on foot from Pennsylvania to Niagara Falls in 1804. In his poetic treatment of the forest, Wilson contrasts the traditional view of the wilderness (as evident in a typical natural history of the time) with a more nuanced or even apparently contradictory Romantic view of wild nature as sublime and potentially supernatural. The poem, whatever its literary merit, contains the kernel of what Wilson would explore in later writings: the beauty as well as the fragility of the forest and the wilderness; their destruction and his role in that destruction.
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