Those pioneer hopes, homage stained with arrogance or contempt, the names of our states have long since lost the furtive tang of accident. They have become what they never could be at first, inevitable. Think how many pay dubious respect to the tribes slaughtered, driven off, forced onto agencies (as reservations once were called), or who, having no immunity against smallpox or measles, did not survive the encounter with trapper or trader: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, with perhaps fifteen more taken from Indian words. Think of the names that courted the favor of kings or queens (Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana), or acknowledged a founder's father (Pennsylvania) or a founding father (Washington). As soon as a thing is named, it begins to acquire associations that divide it from what it was named for. Who thinks now of Hampshire, Jersey, or York?

Of all these, can "Florida" really be the prettiest? If so, it will always be so, no matter how overrun with shopping malls and pasteboard houses it becomes. Elizabeth Bishop's was the Florida of the late thirties, though – undeveloped, larval, not yet emerging from the 1925 crash of the land boom (which ruined John Berryman's father). This was the South beyond the South, a land with an atmosphere no less seductive than the gauzy, hand-colored views of Egypt, Samarkand, or Japan, all places once of Western reverie and bemusement. Depression Florida was still in touch with the days when Henry Flagler, one of the founders of Standard Oil, reorganized and extended the state's east-coast rail lines, having already started to build his giant mirage-like hotels, the Disney Worlds of their day.

During his America tour in 1904-1905, Henry James felt he had to see that peninsula of the "velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the cheap and easy exoticism." He stayed, almost as a matter of course, at Flagler's Ponce de León in St. Augustine. This grandiose example of "Moorish" architecture, filled with Tiffany glass, was otherwise as up-to-date as the poured concrete it was made from. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts trained south in private railway cars, when Florida was the winter destination of those who summered in Newport or beside Long Island Sound (The Age of Innocence has its St. Augustine scenes). Henry Plant, another railroad baron, built a verandah onto his Tampa Bay Hotel more majestic than the Grand Union's more famous one in Saratoga. Plant's Moorish extravaganza saw, in its heyday, performances by Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, and Anna Pavlova. Surrounding everything was that air of strangeness, of otherness, of things newly seen and yet always known, a place slightly hostile to human presence. Normally the most buttoned-up of writers, James comically grasped after adequate images: "I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms, which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the riddle of the universe." The flora's oddity, its vacant and humid sulkiness, its erotic silkiness, had fascinated and appalled the first explorers. Elizabeth Bishop might have understood:

The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrove roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.

("Florida")

Portraits of Florida, its beauty almost too beautiful, often risk a shallow, shoreline prettiness, the preciousness of the postcard, whose penny purpose is always to incite a twinge of jealousy. Bishop's poem instead recalls the "brackish water," the skeletons of dead mangroves, swamps pummeled as if by cannon. Her poem contains people only at its edges: those "ancient cannon-balls," though merely a simile, have the memory of conquest behind them (her "green hummocks" mark her as a tourist – the locals call them hammocks); the turtle skulls have "round eye-sockets / twice the size of a man's"; the lists of shells and alligator calls are those of a naturalist; and in the "gray rag of rotted calico," in the very mention of "obbligatos" or a "post-card," there is evidence of an absence. This is Bishop's characteristic strategy, to make the margins the center, and concentrate only on what can be seen (making more intense what cannot be seen, merely implied). Civilization, already encroaching acre by acre on a prehistoric Florida, here just gnaws at the borders.

In Bishop's day (she lived in Key West off and on from 1936 to 1949), primeval nature had already been pushed back. Today you have to go farther to see it; yet, even in my sprawling north Florida town, cattle graze beside shopping malls, sandhill cranes stalk the university feed lot, flocks of ibises browse the verge of mall retention-ponds, and every body of water bigger than a bathtub seems to boast its alligator – glowering, patient, inhuman. When an alligator has seen enough of you, has decided you are larger than its appetite, it sinks back into its watery home with an air of condescension.

William Bartram, tramping through Florida in the 1770's, mentioned that the "noise of the crocodiles kept me awake the greater part of the night" (he used "crocodile" and "alligator" indiscriminately). Bishop's alligator, with its bold calls of war and warning, is reduced to a whimper after dark, when it "speaks in the throat / of the Indian Princess" (what some critics have called a buried or mythic figure, but which is also a flowering shrub). One of the alligator's calls is a throaty growl, a "speaking in the throat." Does Bishop mean the gator tells of the land's lavish beauty, of which the flower is a convenient symbol – with a sidelong glance, perhaps, at real Indian princesses, who might once have provided objects of longing for a lovesick reptile? Or is that gator whimpering into the throat of the flower or skeletal girl – out of fear, desire, or merely sudden shyness, to make common cause or merely to seduce it, trying to speak to what cannot reply?

If the last, the alligator mimics the poet's condition, and burden – here, where people have been swept aside (Bishop is never all that comfortable with people), this touching and hopeless encounter reminds us that the natural world can never answer the poet. The impasse is reminiscent of the more complicated exchange in "Cirque d'Hiver" (the poem printed just before "Florida" in North and South), where the speaker watches a toy ballerina ignoring the mechanical circus horse she rides. In the end, speaker and horse stare at each other, saying with a certain dry fatalism, "Well, we have come this far." This gloomy admission contains a resistant and battered pride.

Bishop's Linnaean habits hint at the scientific curiosity that did not drive early exploration so much as hitch a ride with it. Joseph Banks in his long journey on Cook's Endeavour and Darwin in his prowl aboard the Beagle had the smallest roles in a general land rush, partly to discover and record new plants and animals, mainly to claim them as property and ship them around like baggage – tea bushes were hauled from China to India, breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the Caribbean plantations (where the slaves loathed the taste). Pure science does not like to recall its impure beginnings – the very observations that secured our knowledge often condemned, or began the ruin of what they observed. In every discovery lies the seed of destruction: we are grateful that Audubon saw Cuvier's kinglet, the carbonated warbler, Townsend's bunting, and the blue mountain warbler. Perhaps he mistook what he saw, or perhaps to paint them he killed some of the last survivors. In any case, no naturalist has ever seen them again.

Gold miners used to believe their occupation more noble than any conducted in cities, because metal had been left in the ground by God – by mining it every man partook of the divine. The conquistadors were little different: their rape of the land (think of the old meaning, seizure) was of the very image of Paradise – Bishop's tropical poems contain some of the explorers' astonishment at boundless fertility (now we know better the fragility of such flora). Even James caught the whisper of Paradise rediscovered: "Was not the train itself rumbling straight into that fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its warm, heroic, amorous air?"

The casual, florid, uncontrollable growth, unlike anything in the Old World, fostered myths of eternal youth, though perhaps explorers were misled when they encountered tribes where few lived to great age. Behind such tales shimmers the branching river of Eden, where Adam and Eve might have lived into a monstrous dotage. The Fountain of Youth, like the city of El Dorado, proved a frustrating, ever-receding will-o'-the-wisp (the fountain was almost certainly the invention of later writers, something Ponce de León had never heard of). Much of Florida's later imagery and iconography pays homage to eternal youth and eternal riches; to the romantic idea that amid such plenty no one has to work, because there are always fish to jump into your net and fruit to be plucked.

It was once said of an English cricket star, late in his career, that the "legend has become a myth." A reader may feel, reading poems about Florida, that the myths have been rubbed into ghostliness, referring not to living tradition, but to tradition's tradition, the ghost of a ghost – even myths grow old, in a world forever new. What have they been replaced by? Walt Disney, perhaps:

His world's over that way,

suitably for a peninsula where
the cozy mythologies we've
swindled ourselves with, on
taking things easy, might even
come true: sun-kissed nakedness
on the beach, year-round, guilt-free
hibiscus and oranges, fountains
welling up through the limestone,
the rumor of Ponce de León, having
found the one he was looking for,

living at ease in, some say
Boca Raton, others Cádiz.

(Amy Clampitt, "Discovery")

Of course it was naive to read into the abundant flora and fauna a prelapsarian innocence, or believe the natives were noble savages avant la letter. But then it is easy to reject notions whose premises we do not share.

When the Pilgrims were washing their shirts in the elbow of Cape Cod, whose beaches they quickly abandoned (you cannot farm on sand), Spaniards had been settled for three generations on the coast of Florida. Ponce de León had claimed the land for Spain in 1513. By 1564 the French had built a fort at the mouth of the St. Johns; but the Spanish soon overran the Florida coast, murdered them, and erected Jesuit missions inland, religion as so often proving no impediment to bad behavior. Little remains of that early Spanish occupation, apart from the faux city of St. Augustine and place names that litter the maps. Of the natives the Spanish tried to convert, nothing but beads, buried potsherds, and a few names survive.

Florida was nearly uninhabitable before air conditioning, so its traditions are thin as pie crust (Nature's remittance men, we are a state of renters, not rentiers). Few houses are more than a hundred years old, the missions and ranches of Spanish occupation having long since become, with almost no exceptions, mere archeology. If everything seems makeshift, Florida owes its impermanent, elusive nature – the bleached and rotting billboards, the hotels like Moorish castles or Potemkin villages, the houses bespotted with mildew, the trees hung with shrouds of Spanish moss – to its vulnerability, hurricanes sweeping in from the Gulf or the Caribbean, occasionally wiping a beach clean of houses, like a slate.

This world's "cozy mythologies" and corrupted innocence are clearest in poems that compare Florida present to the Florida vanished (each generation repays with nostalgia what its parents would have thought chintzy and modern, another kind of loss). Donald Justice was born in Miami, perhaps the only poet of reputation born in the state, and so suffered its losses as no tourist or latecomer could. (He once said at a reading there, "I miss Miami when I'm away, and," following a pause, "I miss it when I'm here.") "Childhood" ends with a memory of the outskirts of the city, where, after the collapse of the boom, planned developments had never been built:

                                        And everywhere
The fine sand burning into the bare heels
With which I learn to crush, going home,
The giant sandspurs of the vacant lots.
Iridescences of mosquito hawks
Glimmer above brief puddles filled with skies,
Tropical and changeless. And sometimes,
Where the city halts, the cracked sidewalks
Lead to a coral archway still spanning
The entrance to some wilderness of palmetto —

Forlorn suburbs, but with golden names!

Those then unfinished suburbs, identified in a note as Buena Vista, Opa-Locka, and others, now lie well within the city limits. In another poem, a sonnet drawing on Henry James's notebooks, the aging author relaxes at a hotel in California, having crossed the American continent (on the same visit that produced his mournful travelogue The American Scene). He has come home and yet not found a home to come to, a European who has lost faith in the newness of the American enterprise: "Not that he foresees immediate disaster, / Only a sort of freshness being lost — / Or should he go on calling it Innocence?" There again is that loss of American innocence.

One of Justice's students wrote a pendant sonnet based on James's journey to Florida, using (as did his teacher) some of James's phrases. This tangle of licensed homage and clandestine borrowing betrays how innocence may be invented in the language of guilt:

And even at the moment one resolved
Not to come back, the scent of fruit and flowers
Brought on a sadness as the past dissolved:
Arcades, courts, arches, fountains, lordly towers . . .

The shore of sunset and the palms, meanwhile —
Late shade giving over to greater shade —
What were they? With what did they have to do?
It was like a myriad pictures of the Nile,
But with a History yet to be made,
A world already lost that was still new.

(Joe Bolton, "Florida Twilight, 1905")

Here the buildings vanish at sunset, architecture laid down tentatively on pristine Nature. The odor of those flowers brings on the sadness of a present unable to make terms with the past: that world always new, but now always lost, too.

This alien and exotic world had to be found before it was lost; though Florida appeared in many poems before the twentieth century, few poets had actually seen the place. The earliest poetic references are to a land encountered in books and therefore already part historical fiction, however begemmed and begummed with fact. One hears the distant echo of those early tales in James's lament that, even in his day, the "novelists improvise, with the aid of the historians, a romantic local past of costume and compliment and swordplay and gallantry and passion." So, Thomas Greepe, perhaps the first in a long line of fantasists, in 1587:

Then homeward as their course did lie,
At sundry Iles they put a shore:
Their former wantes for to supply,
With victuales and fresh water store.
At Florida they did ariue:
Saint Augustine for to atchiue;

or Anne Dowriche, in 1589: "'Great matters moue our minde against the King of Spaine, / For he hath taken Florida, and late our sister slaine.'" Nathaniel Baxter, in 1606, absorbed this pastoral state within a convenient pastoral mythology:

These foure followed blessed Cynthia,
To view the gardens of Hesperida.
With many another honourable Dame,
Blessed Phileta, Clara, Candida;
These lodge within the house of Cynthia,
Within the Lande of Terra Florida.

Such were the purposes of polemical statecraft or enchanted allegory to which the shores of Florida could be put. Only gradually did it become, in poems, a land lush to the point of surfeit. Laurence Eusden, in 1722: "But let th'Italian Canvass vital glow, / And FLORIDA her woven Plumage show" ("woven Plumage" is a delicious touch). Ebenezer Elliott, in 1818, knew how, in search of the sublime, to employ the Keatsian strain:

There is a lovely vision in her soul,
Delicious as the gale of Florida
Which, over fragrance, bears the tiny bird,
The feather'd bee, dipp'd in the morning — Aye,
But she is human! and Reality
Shall wake her from that dream, to agonize.

So, more haplessly, in out-of-date Augustan couplets, did the American poet John Pierpont, in 1829:

Hear yon poetic pilgrim of the west,
Chant Music's praise, and to her power attest.
Who now, in Florida's untrodden woods,
Bedecks, with vines of jessamine, her floods,
And flowery bridges o'er them loosely throws.

Such observation, which may not have been firsthand, reveals the familiarity with local flora and fauna necessary for backdrops to a modern mythos. (James asked, about Florida, "what the play would have been without the scenery.") Distance did not prevent poets, especially those lounging comfortably across an ocean, from continuing to apply that scenery to romantic venture. Here in 1838 is Robert Southey, the poet laureate, who when young wanted to emigrate with Coleridge to the banks of the Susquehanna:

But he to Florida's disastrous shores
In evil hour his gallant comrades led,
Through savage woods and swamps, and hostile tribes,
The Apalachian arrows, and the snares
Of wilier foes, hunger, and thirst, and toil.

Even the young Tennyson provided lines keen on the invasion of the frigid north by the lushness of a passive south: "Ev'n as the warm gulf-stream of Florida / Floats far away into the Northern seas / The lavish growths of southern Mexico."

Amid so much of serious purpose, however ill favored or ill formed, I cannot bear to omit a Byronic satire that pours cold water on such romantic effusions. The American poet John Townsend Trowbridge, in 1878:

He had come down at first as far as Florida,
And seen the alligator and flamingo;
Then, passing on to regions somewhat torrider,
Reached the French-negro side of San Domingo,
And learned a little of the curious lingo
The people speak there, but conceived no mighty
Love for those Black Republicans of Hayti.

The politics are suspect now, but torrider and Florida makes you want to read the rhyme royal of the whole epic, called "Guy Vernon." Not until relatively late did poems about the Sunshine State, as it now styles itself save themselves from embarrassment; and even then there was ample scope for disaster. Paul Laurence Dunbar plumbed the depths of humiliation in racial dialect: "Florida is lovely, she's de fines' lan' / Evah seed de sunlight f'om de Mastah's han', / 'Ceptin' fu' de varmints an' huh fleas an' san'." Langston Hughes's "Florida Road Workers" and a number of brief poems by William Carlos Williams are, if possible, even worse.

For the better part of three centuries, then, Florida existed almost entirely outside firsthand knowledge, a tabula rasa on which the poetic imagination might inscribe itself. Like all lands imagined, it was Narcissus's pool: if you looked too deeply, at last you saw yourself. Eventually poets who had seen this absurd, sandy peninsula began to describe it, at times blinded by the beauty of subtropics ever more tropical, using it as so many Jamesian backdrops:

Here has my salient faith annealed me.
Out of the valley, past the ample crib
To skies impartial, that do not disown me
Nor claim me, either, by Adam's spine — nor rib.

The oar plash, and the meteorite's white arch
Concur with wrist and bicep. In the moon
That now has sunk I strike a single march
To heaven or hades — to an equally frugal noon.

(Hart Crane, "Key West")

This might as well be Finland as Florida. Most of Crane's "Key West: An Island Sheaf" shows little interest in the place, except as it can be turned into archly mythic fantasy (he was not an abstraction blooded, as R. P. Blackmur said of Stevens, but an abstraction that bled to death). His gift was never one for observation and detail; but here he seems like a steamshovel, clearing the swamps for a gimcrack strip-mall of his own design.

Sometimes it is hard to see beyond such florid surrounds; in views so lushly baroque, the language may be infected – infested! – by what it would describe:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean
To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs

Poor white the soil like talcum mixed with grit
But up came polymorphous green

No sooner fertilized than clipped
Where glimmerings from buried nozzles rose

And honey gravel driveways led
To the perpetual readiness of tombs

(James Merrill, "Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-of-War")

You want to say, How lovely! And then you think, How sad! Merrill's eye is always being caught by something, his very language an act of flaunting possession; yet Nature's tangled bank and Palm Beach's clipped lawns threaten to become mere show, playing endless matinées. If the reader is suspicious of splendor so indulged, so indulged in, that is what Florida offers: excess without guilt, sin without price. When the exotic is your address, it's difficult not to recognize the there there; but the words may become immersed in the vacuous sensuality on ready display – then there's no more than there there. The sensuality of language necessarily holds life at a distance – the artist cannot embrace the model while he paints.

Gaze is a fraught term in criticism now, one perhaps impossible to restore to innocence; yet consider Elizabeth Bishop's coolly calculating appraisal of her surroundings:

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

("The Bight")

The ribs protrude and glare, seemingly the bones of some great prehistoric creature – is that sunlit reflection or a hostile stare? If the latter, the observer cannot escape being seen, and how easily Bishop turns the view back upon herself while fending it off – she has it both ways, a hardboiled reporter with a heart of Spanish moss. The pilings seem about to go up in flame; the poor water cannot wet anything. And then the scent of gas – how adroitly the poet lets that faint whiff of danger (or suicide) linger, only to turn it into a joke. The mortal thoughts shadow the comic antics that follow:

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.

For all Bishop's lightness, these lines are haunted by fatality, as if she could not help trying to ease life's tragedy with a few humorous asides, or dampen its comedy by reminding us of the tragic. Her clownish pelicans crash about like the Marx Brothers and in the end get little for their labors. Her observations, more standoffish than Merrill's or Crane's, suggest how much of a poem's inner life is created entirely by imagery. Bishop does not fail to see through the exotic to a deeper discontent – or, in that vulnerable way of hers, be seen despite the exotic for what she is.

Other poets have applied the wry and detached view to darker, more Lowellesque scenes:

Six girls round the pool in Stranglers' weather,
tanning; then three; then one (my favourite!),
every so often misting herself
or taking a drink of ice water from a plastic beaker.

Only the pool shark ever swam,
humming, vacuuming debris, cleverly avoiding its tail.
The white undersides of the mockingbirds
flashed green when they flew over.

(Michael Hofmann, "Freebird")

The Stranglers are a British punk band, though the poet may be thinking of the murders of female undergraduates about that time. This would be an innocent appreciation of youth and beauty, if the observer did not linger so long. The girl misting herself is damp with the promise of eros. On a beach such scenes might be different, but the speaker is probably unseen, perhaps peeping through his blinds:

The frat boy overhead gave it to his sorority girl
     steamhammer-style.
Someone turned up the Lynyrd Skynyrd,
the number with the seven-minute instrumental coda.
Her little screams petered out, inachevée.

Those unapproachable sirens, that sorority girl taken "steamhammer-style," her modest yelps of pleasure not quite reaching climax, make the surrounding loneliness all the lonelier. The speaker's detachment becomes a kind of longing – though his sardonic and amused judgments embrace the soul with Terentian generosity ("Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto"), this is life lived almost without hope (the darkness is in the form of observation), not despite the surrounding narcissism and sexual congress, but because of them.

One who lives in a state of Nature, which is rarely a state of grace, may be tempted to discover there the hidden layers of the self (I once heard a poet say that walking on a swampy Florida prairie was like walking in the Unconscious), to read into landscape his own tortured predicament:

When I poked the wet, mahogany mud,
it felt like something human I had my hand on,
as if the earth were a girl's black-haired head
being lifted up in a great clatter that ebbed
and flowed, like sea foam or a red sky or pain
obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel.

(Henri Cole, "Medusa")

Here the creation myth has been spliced into a myth more troubling. (Wasn't Freud an adept of the sailor's splice?) At first that seems to be Eve rising from the mortal mud, created from virgin earth as Adam was; but the title shoulders the meaning aside. The black hair must be snakes, the great clatter that of the wood storks the poem has already mentioned. This is a woman part animal, one you cannot look upon without dying – an inversion of birth, where you cannot look upon your mother without being born. The poem ends on that vulgar and unromantic "flesh tunnel," sexual pleasure set at one with the nature surrounding it, but made merely flesh, mortal and a little disgusting. The line that precedes this passage now makes sense: "as if freedom meant proximity to danger" (all sorts of dangers tremble within sex, from Medusa's stare to AIDS). Cole's poems are often about a love once called unnatural: here lies the secret, the turn – perhaps the flesh tunnel is not a woman's after all. Flora and fauna have been pressed into service, the poem set deep into its own humorless pain, darkly wounded, finding no solace in revelation.

What unites these uses (or abuses) of local mythos is how they have been determined by outsiders, those who have only visited, those who have come and found an uneasy home amid the otherness. Florida lay beyond the reach of the original thirteen colonies – it was foreign ground until 1821. For decades after, much of it remained terra incognita. The original inhabitants had been almost entirely killed off by disease, and the lower Creeks (later called Seminoles) who moved there in the early eighteenth century found a primeval emptiness. The noxious, mosquito-infested swamps kept settlement slow (disease was a problem throughout the Caribbean – during the Spanish-American War, yellow fever and malaria killed more soldiers than enemy guns).

Whitman felt the lure of this strange, exotic place, part of and yet somehow separate from that great poem, America:

A lesser proof than old Voltaire's, yet greater,
Proof of this present time, and thee, thy broad expanse,
     America,
To my plain Northern hut, in outside clouds and snow,
Brought safely for a thousand miles o'er land and tide,
Some three days since on their own soil live-sprouting,
Now here their sweetness through my room unfolding,
A bunch of orange buds by mail from Florida.

Here we have a Whitman surprised, tender, curious, content to know strange places from afar, not the blowhard who pretended, however compellingly, to have been places where he'd never set foot. (The "hut" has been humbly reduced for his audience, but how fast the mails were in those days!) In the Calamus poems, he wrote, "Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down." This might seem a fraud genial enough, as he'd never been within five hundred miles of the state; yet consider this longer fantasy:

O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and
     evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things — all moving things and the
     trees where I was born — the grains, plants, rivers,
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow,
     distant, over flats of silvery sands or through swamps,
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the
     Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the
     Sabine,
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to
     haunt their banks again,
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the
     Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through
     pleasant openings or dense forests.

This is "Walt Whitman," not Walt Whitman. Though it is tempting to dismiss his wish to embrace multitudes, these fictions pay homage to the depths of that most wishful of intelligences, idealizing and credulous at once. In such lines some essence of Florida has been seen and acknowledged, not allowed to exist merely as exotic (or erotic) detail, but absorbed within a private philosophy that allows it new form. If Florida has been read through the poet's imagination, the poet has been read through Florida's.

This is the key to three poets who, having borrowed Florida's myths, have transformed them into purloined goods, as if Circe's pigs were given Circe's power: Stevens, Rimbaud, and Coleridge. In them Florida is purified but altered, until what emerges is the mutability of art, what it could not be without the superaddition of such myth:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

(Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West")

As late as 1890, Key West was the largest city in Florida – Stevens made annual winter "jaunts" there through the twenties and thirties. The singer may be singing only what she hears in the ocean and wind. Her song is not the same as theirs, and – a canny observation, this – the singer may even drown out the sea. Here we have Stevens's version of the complex relation between the artist and his material. The sea is "merely a place by which she walked to sing," yet her song recreates it ("the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song"). This suggests, not just the artist's dependence on the world, but his ability to make it seem that the world has been created by him. If the poem accomplished only so much, it might be enough; yet, as in much of his major work, Stevens considers the subject afresh:

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Stevens could make a metaphysical poem out of a pig and a whistle, it sometimes seems; but the world beyond intrudes upon this poem more deeply than usual in his work. His vistas often seem those of the smoke-filled study, though apparently written down in a smoke-filled insurance office. (How curious the metaphor, when he writes from Long Key, "The whole place: it is an island, is no larger than the grounds on which the Hartford Fire has its building.") Stevens, who rarely left the borders of his country, found in Key West the symbol of that world the artist worked to control. In such isolated, out-of-the-way habitations – trains did not reach Key West until 1912, and the tracks were blown down in 1935 – art makes order, the order that is the world, from the disorder of the world.

Such fantasy could be pressed farther. It's common to pine for distant places, ones impossible to reach, the blood stirring with a longing that cannot be satisfied, common to feel some magnetic affinity to a place you've never visited (more frequent, I suspect, when travel was expensive). Few regions in our country, apart from the West, have borne such a share of unfulfilled desire as Florida.

I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas,
where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
in human skins! and rainbows stretched like bridles
under the seas' horizon with glaucous herds!

I have seen the enormous swamps seething,
traps where a whole Leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm,
and distances cataracting down into abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
where the giant snakes, devoured by vermin,
fall from the twisted trees with black odours!

(Rimbaud, "The Drunken Boat", tr. Oliver Bernard,
his prose gloss arranged here as poetry)

It is as if Rimbaud, only sixteen when he wrote this, had bought a whole rack of postcards, so well does he reproduce Florida's penny-ante images. The sea voyages of "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" and further back of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" lie behind the romantic longing here. Those who cannot escape their home often dream of such journeys; but the maturity of Rimbaud's immature imagination (how Stevens would have loved a poem spoken by a boat) has, again, that further turn, not taking for granted the original impulse – in the end the boat wants to sail back to Europe. Florida becomes not just the longed-for destination, but the exotic from which one must at last come home.

James saw what was at the heart of this retreat, why one might flee what had been desired: "Even round about me the vagueness was still an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the vagueness was sweet, being scented and flowered and fruited; above all, the vagueness was somehow consciously and confessedly weak." If you stay too long among the lotus-eaters, at last you have to eat the lotus, too:

All the succulence of the admirable pale-skinned orange and the huge sun-warmed grape-fruit, plucked from the low bough, where it fairly bumps your cheek for solicitation, and partaken of, on the spot, as the immortal ladies of Cranford partook of dessert.

This surfeiting banquet, this pliant vagueness, of which Florida has more than its share, prove ever tractable to the poet's design.

What separates the strongest poems that have used this giant semi-colon lying under the East Coast, this ornate bracket, from the mere stuff of journals or journalists, from the self-regarding or self-inflamed? The ability, not just to succumb to seductive myth, but to transform it. Coleridge, who once longed to live in America as part of a society of Pantisocrats, used Bartram's Travels to feed his vision of a place wholly other (as Shakespeare used reports of the Bermudas as background for The Tempest). His dream vision, famously incomplete, its transcription interrupted by the mysterious visitor from Porlock, suggests in its interior bafflings the ways by which the poet, both insatiable and a perfectionist, managed his failures by not taking himself to account for them.

Coleridge's compressive imagination drew from many sources simultaneously, if one trusts the patient detective work in John Livingston Lowes's classic The Road to Xanadu. Amid the quieter passages of Bartram's journals (those in which he was not fending off alligators trying to overturn his canoe), the poet found descriptions of the fountains and disappearing rivers common in northern Florida. From these scanty sources he made his Xanadu:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.

("Kubla Khan")

These are neither the most memorable nor most carefully written lines in Coleridge's vision, showing every sign of half-hearted (or half-heated) composition – the repetition of momently, the clumsy wording at line end (often to secure the rhyme), the wounded syntax and half-comic phrasing (those fast thick pants, those dancing rocks). Only in the passage's last lines does the writing have the confidence of sources absorbed and converted – there we have Florida no longer, but something, if not measureless, then very difficult to measure.

Florida has gone from a vague report, used like a mirror, to the scientific account (Bartram was Florida's Joseph Banks) altered and distorted and rearranged, emerging almost as a dream of itself: one paradise has begotten another. The state's characteristic vagueness here disappears into the mists of some place even more distant. What has been lost in the reaches of Xanadu is that Florida that is only itself:

Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.
On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.
The mosquitoes
go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.
After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh
until the moon rises.
Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,
and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks
too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest
post-card of itself.

(Bishop, "Florida")

How different Coleridge's dreams from what Bishop saw – her cooler eye, which celebrates the darker character of this somewhat absurd place, has all the virtues that lie beneath ambition. Sometimes the still waters of modesty may be deepest, after all.

Not many miles north of Lake George, where Bartram saw that geyserlike fountain, was the Alachua savannah, which he visited some days later. On the shores of that swampy expanse, two years before the poet died, the Treaty of Payne's Landing was signed, a document riddled with bad faith and outright lies. There followed the Second Seminole War, the death of the great chief Osceola, and the forced removal of most Seminoles to the Indian Territory. The swamps allowed a remnant band a place of concealment. Coleridge's poem is devoid of real history, and that is the danger of using sources without taking them beyond their word.

Yet poetry, too, is a kind of bad faith. In our own visions, our own dreamed privacies, there is much a place cannot take into account, or render us responsible for. How else would a name, bequeathed merely because Ponce de León first spied the land on or about Easter Sunday (in Spanish, Pascua Florida, the Feast of the Flowers), still seem so beautifully appropriate? Florida did not have to grow into its name, because it was already all that its name could ask it to become.

Parnassus: Poetry in Review
Volume 28, No. 1 & No. 2

Publisher & Editor: Herbert Leibowitz
Co-Editor: Ben Downing
Associate Editor: Miles Becker
Assistant Editors:
Adam L. Dressler, Joseph Kreutziger, Quinn Latimer,
Craig Teicher, Kevin Vaughn


© 2005 by Poetry in Review Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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