Existing comment:
Song of the Redwood Tree:
The poet Walt Whitman traveled west but never visited California. His "Song of the Redwood-Tree" (1874) was written as he mused upon the global activity descending on Pacific ports, the man-over-nature lessons of the timber trade, and development of the western empire as a sign of a rising new society. He simultaneously celebrated and bemoaned the martyrdom of the great trees being sacrificed to this "manifest destiny." The poem was published in Harper's in February 1874. In these page proofs, Whitman changes "over a" to "two," matching Frederick Law Olmsted's similar observation of 200 feet as the estimated height of old-growth redwoods. |