SOURCE: A review of Landfall and First Light, in Parnassus, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1984, pp. 331–41.

In the following essay, Askins discusses the difficulty facing poets who still write poetry of nature, and argues that although Wagoner succeeds as a nature poet, his poems lack outstanding and memorable phrases.

the substantial words are in the ground and sea, they are in the air, they are in you. 

Walt Whitman

Ever since Emerson announced to a burgeoning Democracy that “in the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows,” nature poetry in America has been permeated with an overriding optimism difficult to discard. According to the New World poet/priest, nature calmed, healed, and inspired with a God-like generosity. Not surprisingly, much of the poetry of the American Renaissance and beyond often muddied the distinction between God and nature, as the poets sought to...