Seemingly at odds with Whitman’s guiding interest in undomesticated nature, gardens nonetheless form a nodal point of his ecopoetics. This talk reveals how throughout Leaves of Grass, gardens matter as material geographies that crystallize a core concern of Whitman’s work—how to live in and with the nonhuman world. In the nineteenth century, gardens signified genteel culture, based on nature’s control, ornamentation, and ownership. Whitman instead turns gardens into liminal realms of wildness, work, and mobility, recasting them as utopian sites of ecological and social possibility. Surprisingly, his transformed, transformative gardens profoundly resonate with environmentally insightful discussions of horticulture that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have resurfaced in the twenty-first. However, unlike environmentalists then and now, Whitman refrains from suggesting that such natural-cultural spaces provide a solution to the conflicts between ecological perspectives and the democratic ideals they serve to negotiate. Instead, he leaves the tensions and incongruities inherent to gardens fully intact.

Biography

Christine Gerhardt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany. She is the author of A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World (2014), winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Book Award. She is also the author of a monograph on the Reconstruction period in American novels (2003), editor of the Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century (2018), and co-editor of Environmental Imaginaries on the Move (2016) and Religion in the United States (2011). Her work has appeared in Profession, ESQ, the Emily Dickinson Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, Poroi, and Forum for Modern Language Studies.