"A Good Word for Winter"

THE winters of New England can be bitter, and the climate has a bite only rarely felt in England since the harsh winters of the late seventeenth century. The snow tends to lie on the ground longer in the Atlantic northwest, so that the land thaws instead of gradually blossoming. The first American settlers were not slow to notice this fact, and the season has, I believe, become involved in American writing in a unique way. The snows of winter have become part of the ground of the American imagination, a white screen across which questions of origins and cultural differences have played. As Myra Reynolds pointed out in a pioneering study of eighteenth-century attitudes toward nature, a use of winter scenes can be linked to a developing interest in the natural world evident as early as 1725, around which date three poems on the subject appeared in England, including the first version of James Thomson's Winter.' Thomson's descriptions of the season center on the sublime in its terrible and catastrophic modes: winter creates what Ralph Cohen calls the collapse of form and the distortion of the familiar shapes of things.2 This process can at times be liberating, offering a clearing of the ground in which Earth's universal Face, deep-hid, and chill, / Is one wild dazzling Waste, that buries wide / The Works of Man. It is this possibility of renewal in

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Word (group theory · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Philosophy