The concept of nature and stewardship in the life and writings of William Gilmore Simms

by Ensley, Eric William

In “Stewardship and Patria in Simms’s Frontier Poetry,” James E. Kibler explores Simms's connections between stewardship for the land and the necessity of staying in one place. Although limited by its focus on a small amount of Simms’s frontier poetry, Kibler touches on Simms’s ideas concerning the proper stewardship of nature. These ideas would benefit from an in-depth study including a more comprehensive range of Simms’s works as well as biographical information. My thesis conclusively demonstrates that Simms, although sometimes promoting nature as a primeval Eden to be preserved, believed that people should develop nature to further beautify their societies—white civilization’s radical engineering of nature, such as clearing forests to make fields, became bad only when driven by greed. Diametrically opposed to the view of nature and society as mutually exclusive, Simms believed in a well-ordered alliance between people, their communities, and nature.