Fronting the Atlantic

IN 1959, when awarded Emerson-Thoreau medal by American Academy of Arts and Sciences, T. S. Eliot designated himself New England poet-as is my elder contemporary, Robert Frost, and as is my junior contemporary, Robert Lowell. Eliot spoke of being influenced by emotionally charged New England landscape and concluded by hoping that his remarks would shed some light upon poem I am about to read, The Dry Salvages.'1 Discouraged, perhaps, by Eliot's well-known strictures against more than one New England writer, few have pursued poet's provocative hint that he should be read not as a rebel against the New England genius but as its continuator, to cite Eliot on Henry James.2 Considerable evidence that Eliot does fill that role is apparent, however, in many similarities between The Dry Salvages and Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod. Although comparison between these works is suggested by precise recording of New England coastal landscape in both, if we except a few words by F. 0. Matthiessen on authors' mutual New England heritage,3 Eliot has never been seen as a continuator of anything in Thoreau. Yet

Archaeology · Cape · Geography · American Environmental and Regional History · Geology · Oceanography