The New World? Of course it wasn’t new, least of all to the estimated 54 million native inhabitants in the hemisphere, nor did it prove to be younger than the Old World, as some naturalists would theorize in the wake of 1492.¹ These anachronisms have resulted in understandable uneasiness or downright displeasure with this term. Edmundo O’Gorman, for example, insists that the term “New World” merely invites European settlement: “The concept of a ‘new world’ . . . refers to an entity which is a world only in so far as it is capable of transforming itself into a replica...

To write with an adamic imagination like Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott brings attendant risks, especially the prospect of denuding a place of its history, both human and natural, in order to facilitate the perception of newness. Longings for Eden tend to lay the ground for the decimation of peoples aswell as of the landscape that appears to lie inwait for despoliation. However, it is important to be able to distinguish brazen acts of erasure from a more genuine and honest reckoning with the past and, of equal importance, with what has inevitably and irrevocably fallen into historical oblivion. This is...

Between his 1605 publication of part 1 of Don Quixote and the 1615 publication of his promised part 2, Cervantes was beaten to the punch. An unknown author, Avellaneda by pen name, published a faux part 2 of the Quixote just one year before Cervantes. Instead of being stifled, Cervantes took full advantage of this crisis of authenticity. Knowing full well that his book questions the very notion of authenticity and thus leaves him vulnerable to imitation, he pleads in his prologue to part 2 for readerly patience and generosity. Finding the author’s hand is a matter of forsaking the...

The figure of Adam appeals to a desire for innocence in apprehending and naming the world so as to ensure a New World originality and authenticity. Such yearning for a complete break from the Old World has paradoxically fostered a Hegelian belief in the inevitable and utterly reliable directive of Western history and a paradoxical lack of interest in social and environmental particulars. Of these three New World poets there is no doubt that Whitman is the most attracted to this kind of Hegelian thinking. He is, indeed, a troubling tale of two poets: the poet who captured the spirit...

Pablo Neruda was born in Parral in the southern region of Chile, an area that Neruda insists in his Memorias was analogous to the American Wild West. The area, known as La Araucanía, is also called La Frontera and is named after the monkey puzzle tree used by the Mapuche Indians for its nutritious nut, pehuen. It is important not to understate the influence of the frontier experience on Neruda’s poetic imagination. It is a land that, despite considerable modernization, still contains areas where Mapuche influence predominates, and it is a region of extraordinary natural beauty: intense rainfall, dense humidity...

Neruda began to search the roots of his own autobiography at the same time that he became more aware of the greatest threat to the survival of human community: the rise of fascism, World War II, and the birth of the cold war. This was the context, of course, in which the modernist hope in the redeeming powers of art was threatened. Roberto González Echevarría notes that “while these developments produced an existentialist gloom in post-war Europe and some regions of Latin America and the United States, neither Neruda nor Carpentier . . . fell prey to its doleful allure....

Derek Walcott’s poetics of the environment developed in the context of a small geographical space of extraordinary beauty. Born in 1930 on the island of St. Lucia, he was offered a dual education in his youth; his mother and other mentors and teachers exposed him to the great poetic traditions of English, European, and American literature while he and his friend Dunstan St. Omer drew inspiration from the raw and untamed qualities of the St. Lucian landscape and its local populace (Baugh 10). From his earliest contacts with the beaches, hillsides, and backstreets of the island, Walcott and St. Omer...

If poetry is the ideal medium for seeking a conceptual balance between natural and human histories, it also runs the risk, as the discussion in the last chapter implied, that it will always need to historicize and humanize nature. It may be insufficient, in other words, on its own to reach for an adamic apprehension of nature, or what Walcott calls in Omeros the “light beyond metaphor.” If painting is less metaphorical than poetry, it is at least more capable of seeing light without historical echoes. This raises the possibility that a partnership between the two can establish a deeper...

Derek Walcott’s persistent interest in visual art is just one of the many facets of a wide-ranging eclecticism that is characteristic of his New World poetics. This poetics democratically cannibalizes multiple influences in the name of simplifying the poet’s elemental adamic contact with the natural world. While Walcott’s poetry has always been difficult to define in terms of periodization and style, those who believe that this is a flaw in his poetry typically know little about the various strands of Caribbean culture that make its culture so difficult to place within neat chronologies of “isms” and manifestoes or so difficult...