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Birds and Poets : with Other Papers
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142 pages, Paperback
First published February 26, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 11, 2020
This is my third volume of the collected essays of the naturalist John Burroughs, the contemporary of John Muir, friend to Walt Whitman and rambler of American byways, the first being Wake-Robin, and the second, the marvelous Winter Sunshine (reviewed here on GR).
This book, whose leading essay is 'Birds and Poets,' thinks deeply into the ways poets consider, and resemble--or don't--the singers they write about. I love Burroughs' unhurried rambling essays, the way he unpacks something that strikes his attention. If in our time , we consider someone a deep thinker if they have two thoughts on a subject instead of one, Burroughs will continue to follow a thread until it has yielded up all its juice.
And it's a marvelous picture of America in the 1870s, when these essays were written, full of rich thoughts and impressions and ideas. In the first essay, his discussion of poets was marred by some of the exemplars, but it was wonderful to think of the poets themselves as birds, and the various ways their song can be described or captured in literature. "Shelley's poem is perhaps better-known, and has a high reputation among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the lark's song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can."
Ha.
The description of the various birdsongs led me to a website that will let you actually listen to the songs described--however I found Burroughs's ear and experience far outstripping my own naive hearing. But any writer who is looking for better ways to describe what birds do: besides "twitter" and "chirp," "sing" and "warble" would do well to look at the richness of description by Burroughs and the poets.
The second essay, "Touches of Nature," talks about Nature as the rough, savage, creative, vital, overwhelming force which governs the world... this is not pretty pastoralia. How nature plays no favorites--" Wherever Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another, she has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of what she has done. Nature says to the cat, "Cathc the mouse," and she equips her for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says to the mouse, "Be wary, the cat is watching for you." Nature takes care that none of her creatures have smooth sailing, the whole voyage at last.
"Man thinks himself at the top, and tat the immense display and prodigality of Nature are for him. But they are no more for him than they are for the birds and beasts, and he is no more at the top than they are."
Here he explores the hornet's nest: ""The hornet was the fist paper maker, a nd holds the original patent. The paper it makes it about like that of the newspaper, nearly as firm, and made of essentially the same material... and there is news on it , too, if one could make out the characters... When I stopped the entrance with cotton, there was no commotion or excitement, as there would have been in the case of yellow-jackets. Those outside went to pulling, and those inside went to pushing and chewing. Only once did one of the outsiders come down and look me suspiciously in the face, and inquire very plainly what my business might be hip there. I bowed my head, being at the top of a 20 foot ladder, and had nothing to say."
Part of "touches of Nature" talks about the savagery of boys, of their natural affinity to war (sadly he has little to say about girls--in this his idol, Whitman, was far more encompassing.)
This volume was more specifically literary than the first two, and I loved the way he described a cow 'losing her cud'--can barely picture that--and how desolate and forlorn she'd been, having lost that sweet reverie, until the farmer concocted a new one for her out of birch bark. "Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, never lost your cud and wandered days and weeks without being able to start a single thought or an image that tasted good. --your literary appetite dull or all gone, and the conviction daily growing that it was all over with you in that direction? A little elder-bark, something fresh and bitter form the woods, is about the best thing you can take."
Other essays include "April," rich especially in description of scent, of mud and earth and water, "Spring poems"
But my favorite, "Our Rural Divinity," concerns cows. How wonderful to even contemplate cows! Their effect on landscape, where they like to feed, the sound of her lowing ( four kinds that he's determined), his descriptions always painterly and full of emotion. I loved his treatment of three cows he owned when he lived smack dab in the heart of Washington DC--a time when they just let the cattle loose in the city to find their own grazing and the cows would find their way home at milking time. Right past the Treasury and the Capital building." I know I'll always remember his good cow, which he admits he was stupid enough to have sold, thinking he would find a better one.
Two essays, Before Genius and Before Beauty both boil down to the same thing--that there needs to be earthiness and vitality to the person and to the artistic work before you talk about either one. Without that earthy, robust quality, what comes from it will never be truly Genius or truly Beauty. What a Whitman guy. So the essays on his contemprararies Emerson and Whitman too take up that theme. He admired rock-ribbed, prolific Emerson, but felt he didn't have enough joy in him, enough mischief and spark, where Whitman was the one true poet America produced--the vastness of his embracep--he admired Emerson but idolized Whitman, the poet and the man and the work were all of a piece as well. To know the man was to know the poet, there was no division between what he thought and wrote and his own spirit.
I categorize Burroughs as one of my "Insomnia Companions"--special books which speak quietly on unsettled nights, whose rationality and comradeship bring great comfort.
This book, whose leading essay is 'Birds and Poets,' thinks deeply into the ways poets consider, and resemble--or don't--the singers they write about. I love Burroughs' unhurried rambling essays, the way he unpacks something that strikes his attention. If in our time , we consider someone a deep thinker if they have two thoughts on a subject instead of one, Burroughs will continue to follow a thread until it has yielded up all its juice.
And it's a marvelous picture of America in the 1870s, when these essays were written, full of rich thoughts and impressions and ideas. In the first essay, his discussion of poets was marred by some of the exemplars, but it was wonderful to think of the poets themselves as birds, and the various ways their song can be described or captured in literature. "Shelley's poem is perhaps better-known, and has a high reputation among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the lark's song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can."
Ha.
The description of the various birdsongs led me to a website that will let you actually listen to the songs described--however I found Burroughs's ear and experience far outstripping my own naive hearing. But any writer who is looking for better ways to describe what birds do: besides "twitter" and "chirp," "sing" and "warble" would do well to look at the richness of description by Burroughs and the poets.
The second essay, "Touches of Nature," talks about Nature as the rough, savage, creative, vital, overwhelming force which governs the world... this is not pretty pastoralia. How nature plays no favorites--" Wherever Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another, she has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of what she has done. Nature says to the cat, "Cathc the mouse," and she equips her for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says to the mouse, "Be wary, the cat is watching for you." Nature takes care that none of her creatures have smooth sailing, the whole voyage at last.
"Man thinks himself at the top, and tat the immense display and prodigality of Nature are for him. But they are no more for him than they are for the birds and beasts, and he is no more at the top than they are."
Here he explores the hornet's nest: ""The hornet was the fist paper maker, a nd holds the original patent. The paper it makes it about like that of the newspaper, nearly as firm, and made of essentially the same material... and there is news on it , too, if one could make out the characters... When I stopped the entrance with cotton, there was no commotion or excitement, as there would have been in the case of yellow-jackets. Those outside went to pulling, and those inside went to pushing and chewing. Only once did one of the outsiders come down and look me suspiciously in the face, and inquire very plainly what my business might be hip there. I bowed my head, being at the top of a 20 foot ladder, and had nothing to say."
Part of "touches of Nature" talks about the savagery of boys, of their natural affinity to war (sadly he has little to say about girls--in this his idol, Whitman, was far more encompassing.)
This volume was more specifically literary than the first two, and I loved the way he described a cow 'losing her cud'--can barely picture that--and how desolate and forlorn she'd been, having lost that sweet reverie, until the farmer concocted a new one for her out of birch bark. "Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, never lost your cud and wandered days and weeks without being able to start a single thought or an image that tasted good. --your literary appetite dull or all gone, and the conviction daily growing that it was all over with you in that direction? A little elder-bark, something fresh and bitter form the woods, is about the best thing you can take."
Other essays include "April," rich especially in description of scent, of mud and earth and water, "Spring poems"
But my favorite, "Our Rural Divinity," concerns cows. How wonderful to even contemplate cows! Their effect on landscape, where they like to feed, the sound of her lowing ( four kinds that he's determined), his descriptions always painterly and full of emotion. I loved his treatment of three cows he owned when he lived smack dab in the heart of Washington DC--a time when they just let the cattle loose in the city to find their own grazing and the cows would find their way home at milking time. Right past the Treasury and the Capital building." I know I'll always remember his good cow, which he admits he was stupid enough to have sold, thinking he would find a better one.
Two essays, Before Genius and Before Beauty both boil down to the same thing--that there needs to be earthiness and vitality to the person and to the artistic work before you talk about either one. Without that earthy, robust quality, what comes from it will never be truly Genius or truly Beauty. What a Whitman guy. So the essays on his contemprararies Emerson and Whitman too take up that theme. He admired rock-ribbed, prolific Emerson, but felt he didn't have enough joy in him, enough mischief and spark, where Whitman was the one true poet America produced--the vastness of his embracep--he admired Emerson but idolized Whitman, the poet and the man and the work were all of a piece as well. To know the man was to know the poet, there was no division between what he thought and wrote and his own spirit.
I categorize Burroughs as one of my "Insomnia Companions"--special books which speak quietly on unsettled nights, whose rationality and comradeship bring great comfort.
August 26, 2020
4.5 stars & 5/10 hearts. I really enjoyed 3/4 of this book. The descriptions of spring & the birds—I FELT spring, heard the birds, almost smelled the breeze... it came so alive!! And as always, it’s just full of beautiful and tangy descriptions. I didn’t agree some of the book—evolution/Mother Nature, etc; and the last two chapters were somewhat dull and also contained a couple mentions of reproduction/sex (Walt Whitman’s chapter); but they also had some really good parts, and overall I really enjoyed 9/10 of the book.
A Favourite Quote: “‘The critic's great error,’ says Heine, ‘lies in asking, “What ought the artist to do?” It would be far more correct to ask, “What does the artist intend?”’”
A Favourite Beautiful Quote: “Our April is, in fact, a kind of Alpine summer, full of such contrasts and touches of wild, delicate beauty as no other season affords. The deluded citizen fancies there is nothing enjoyable in the country till June, and so misses the freshest, tenderest part.... What midsummer sweetness half so distracting as its brisk sub-acid flavor, and what splendor of full-leaved June can stir the blood like the best of leafless April?”
A Favourite Humorous Quote: “Shelley's poem is perhaps better known, and has a higher reputation among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the lark's song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can.”
A Favourite Quote: “‘The critic's great error,’ says Heine, ‘lies in asking, “What ought the artist to do?” It would be far more correct to ask, “What does the artist intend?”’”
A Favourite Beautiful Quote: “Our April is, in fact, a kind of Alpine summer, full of such contrasts and touches of wild, delicate beauty as no other season affords. The deluded citizen fancies there is nothing enjoyable in the country till June, and so misses the freshest, tenderest part.... What midsummer sweetness half so distracting as its brisk sub-acid flavor, and what splendor of full-leaved June can stir the blood like the best of leafless April?”
A Favourite Humorous Quote: “Shelley's poem is perhaps better known, and has a higher reputation among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the lark's song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can.”
August 10, 2019
3 1/2 stars
December 30, 2012
"Birds and Poets, with Other Papers," published in 1877, is the third John Burroughs book I've read. A collection of six essays, I enjoyed the times given for the return of certain migratory birds to the Catskills as May or June, whereas today climate change has moved the arrivals to March/April. Burroughs description of the Passenger Pigeon, in all it's glory as America's most numerous bird (now extinct) was a wistful read. Finally, on a more pleasant note, his description of "street" cattle, feeding on the commons of Washington DC was quite humorous!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews