Could taking a walk transform a person into a poet? Probably not. But it may be worth a try. Perhaps there’s a connection between the rhythm of footsteps and the cadence of verse. Poets tend to be walkers. Writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mary Oliver, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walt Whitman have found their muse while afoot. William Wordsworth is said to have logged 175,000 walking miles in his lifetime, and Henry David Thoreau would spend three or four afternoon hours afield during his most productive writing decades.
Poet’s Seat Tower
Such were my thoughts several years ago as I stood atop Poet’s Seat Tower in Greenfield, Massachusetts on a cold, blustery spring day. I’d come to the square brownstone shaft with arched openings on a lark, having seen a sign on I-91 while returning from a college visit to my son. A short hike from a muddy parking lot and a climb to the open third story was rewarded by spectacular views. I saw the town and Connecticut River below, and distant, lumpy ridges of mountains in three directions, including the majestic Berkshires. It was a prospect sure to generate images and metaphors worthy of poetry.
Although built decades after his death, the tower is named for local nineteenth century poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman who found inspiration here. “Dank fens of cedar;” he wrote, “hemlock-branches gray / With tress and trail of mosses ringing wet . . .”
A lawyer, amateur botanist, and lover of nature who liked to ramble in the woods, Tuckerman’s work was admired by literary giants Hawthorne and Tennyson, but little read in his time. He remains obscure despite meriting seventeen pages in a Library of America anthology. I alone among a clutch of visitors scribbled a few notes while enjoying the view that day. On the walls was some bright graffiti that veered toward poetic.
Having been to the tower, I started finding other places not far from home dedicated to peripatetic poets. There was nothing comparable for other professions or avocations. I found no banker, doctor, electrician or business executive towers or walks. About that time, Stanford University researchers reported that walking boosted creative thought and inspiration. Science had at last caught up to poetry.
Poets’ Walk Park
Once owned by the wealthy and famous Astor and Delano families and now by The Scenic Hudson Land Trust, Poets’ Walk Park along the banks of the Hudson River in Red Hook, New York is said to have once been strolled by literary luminaries Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck and Jack Kerouac. On a bright autumn day, my wife Mary and I took a path winding through sunstruck meadows separated by copses of trees forming outdoor rooms. At a rustic pavilion facing west high above the broad river, the Catskills’ formed an irregular horizon of mysterious slate-blue shadows. Mesmerized by forested hills against the sky, I recalled Bryant’s line that “. . . far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills, / with all their growth of woods, silent and stern . . .”
The trail then descended into a dense forest of yellow and red tinted leaves. It wound through a ravine along a chatty stream tumbling over rocks. The small valley resonated with birdsong punctuated by the plop of falling hickory nuts. From manicured landscape to wild woodland, from distant vistas to the intimacy of blooming asters and goldenrod, the connection between poetry and landscape could not be clearer.
Urban Walking
Poetic inspiration is not limited to natural landscapes, and Wallace Stevens’ nearly two-and-a-half mile walk between home and his office at the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co. is a prime example. Walking along heavily traveled streets, he passed homes and businesses, apartment buildings, a major hospital, and the gothic brownstone Asylum Hill Congregational Church with its spire needling the sky. Reading complex and tedious legal documents at work, the taciturn Stevens often composed poetry in his head while he walked. He wrote notes on scraps of paper and handed them to his secretary for typing. He never learned to drive and preferred solitary strolls.
It’s easy to follow the literal and imaginative footsteps of this premier twentieth century poet because a group called The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens has marked the way with thirteen pink granite stones, each inscribed with a stanza from his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I’ve taken the route more than once, savoring the sounds, scents and sights of an in-town amble. You can feel the rhythm of the city just as he did, changing strides at street crossings, encountering the geometry of architecture and shadow, and hearing the bustle of cars and the rumble of trucks. I like the sweep of lawns fronting West End mansions so I paused on a corner of Asylum Avenue and read stanza IX: “When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.”
Central Park
Another urban Poets’ Walk, also called the Literary Walk, is the south end of the promenade in New York’s Central Park known as the Mall. It’s a broad, paved path often crowded with people and vendors. Shaded by a quadruple row of stately American elms, there are statues of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare and Fitz-Green Halleck. Placed atop high pedestals, their expressions are as stolid as the bronze in which they are cast. Although many poets have made their way around Central Park, the south end of the Mall is a place of honor, if not a regular haunt for inspiration.
Long time city resident Halleck, who also visited the Hudson Valley Poets’ Walk, was very popular in his time and over 30,000 fans were present for dedication of his statue by President Rutherford B. Hayes ten years after the poet’s death in 1877. Today he is barely remembered, his memory boosted mostly by his connection to these landscapes he knew.
Trail Poetry
Places regularly walked by poets are not often marked for the public to follow, but posting poetry on hiking trails and in parks is increasingly popular. There’s been trail poetry at Prince Gallitzin State Park in Pennsylvania, Niquette Bay State Park in Vermont, Olympic National Park in Washington, Greenway Meadows Park in New Jersey, and on land trust properties in Leverett, Massachusetts. Poems have been posted in West Hartford, Connecticut parks, and once adorned streets in Takoma Park, Maryland. On a recent day, I took the poetry trail closest to home, on the Finch Brook Preserve in Wolcott, Connecticut.
The thickly forested two-and-half mile Finch Brook Trail makes stream crossings and loops through mucky lowlands where the path is dotted with rocks iridescently upholstered in green moss. Among dense patches of ferns, Mary and I spied two deer leaping through the woods, their white tails waving like handkerchiefs. Climbing to higher ground, the trail is shaded by oak, tulip, sassafras, and fungus-doomed sprouts of chestnut. But what makes the hike special are several poems in weathered wooden frames placed at intervals along the trail. Attached to large trees, it’s hard to resist the designation “poet-tree.”
We encountered the first poem tacked to a large red maple just after crossing Finch Brook. The sound of rushing water supplied perfect energy for Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” and after a second reading we picked up our step to his irresistible rhythm.
Afoot and light hearted I take to the open road.
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Next we came upon Maya Angelou’s “A Brave Startling Truth” in a deeply mossy area where the ground was covered with princess pine. As we climbed onto higher ground we found Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.” Further on, there was a poem by Robert Frost and also one of my own.
I tried measuring the rhythm of our walking against the movement of posted words. The poems caused us to stop, pause, listen, look around, and think. Reading became a bodily experience. Poetry brought new meaning to the woods and the woods invested the words with an existence transcending paper and print.
Poetic Mindfulness
Poetry heightens awareness. It helps us see common things in new ways and provides a portal to emotions and sensory experiences not readily visible. You can amplify experience by walking where poets did not fear to tread. Discover poems along woodland trails and beside city sidewalks. Entire new worlds open when we find the right words.
