In the past, for aeons, as Leo Marx writes in The Machine in the Garden, dreams of withdrawing “from the great world [to] begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape” had been a genre of pure fantasy, “a poetic theme, not to be confused with the way poets did in fact live.” But in America by the late 1700s, “the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditional literary context….The effect of the American environment…was to break down commonsense distinctions between art and life.” In this infinite new place, land of the literal, you could live this fantasy.
