Case 4.1

Untermeyer, Louis. "Adirondack Cycle". New York: Random House, 1929. in The Poetry Quartos

SPEC PS3541.N72 A7 1929.

“Adirondack Cycle” were the first poems to use the Adirondack landscape itself as a metaphor. It is able not only to present the reader with a picture of Adirondack beauty, but also to ask us to question what it means to be a human in nature. Untermeyer creates juxtaposition between the surety of nature’s constant growth and the insecurities of human development with age: “His days and nights/Grow aimless and obscure/As the weed writes/Its confident signature”. Untermeyer uses phrases like this to ask why humanity cannot go through life with the same deliberateness as that exists in the natural world.