"His aim is to tally Nature": Burroughs, Whitman, and the Conflicting Discourses of Natural History

In his essay collection Ways of Nature, nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs divides natural history into two factions, the “scientific naturalist” and the “essay-naturalist,” but he is unable to sort Walt... [ view full abstract ]

In his essay collection Ways of Nature, nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs divides natural history into two factions, the “scientific naturalist” and the “essay-naturalist,” but he is unable to sort Walt Whitman neatly into either the literary or scientific camps. 

I suggest that Burroughs remarks on a fundamental aim of Whitman’s poetry, the collapsing of the human and more-than-human dichotomy. Utilizing free verse, parataxis, and verbal conflations of affective and scientific discourses, Whitman’s poetics articulate a subject embedded in the world it intends to represent. These techniques, called “unliterary” by many of Whitman’s contemporaries, complicate the supposedly observational, objective stance presumed by the “scientific naturalist.” Ultimately, these complications create a space for an interdisciplinary brand of natural history necessary in the 21st century for sustained environmental consciousness and praxis.