Shifting Ground

Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the 19th century, so has our idea of landscape, with a contemplation of wild nature giving way to an understanding of "Nature" as a human construction. Here Bonnie Costello reads six 20th-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it. Showing how these poets' landscapes respond to the sense of constant change, and to the disruption and acceleration of life characteristic of modern experience, Costello's work reveals the special role of poetry in teaching us to dwell on "shifting ground". A comprehensive exploration of a powerful dynamic in American poetry, "Shifting Ground" ranges from the sly subversions of Robert Frost's "Directive" to the vertiginous "temporal space" of John Ashbery's "Haunted Landscape". Sustained readings of dozens of major poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore open perspectives on landscape as metaphor in these canonical moderns, while chapters on Amy Clampitt, A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery map the fluctuating terrain or postmodern poetry.