milton in yosemite: PARADISE LOST AND THE NATIONAL PARKS IDEA

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Stoll, Mark

ABSTRACT

"Milton in Yosemite" investigates the reasons why certain English and American visitors to Yosemite so often described the valley in religious terms, particularly in terms of an Eden. Reformed Protestantism developed a peculiarly strong nostalgia for Eden that John Milton gave a powerful form in Paradise Lost. The poem's influence on Reformed culture in England and America reached Yosemite via three important paths: landscape architecture, landscape art, and literature. Paradise Lost had an especially large impact on the thought and works of John Muir. The conventions of the Miltonic Eden established in the nineteenth century continue to inform the dominant ways Americans envision Yosemite and the national parks today-for example, in the continued popularity of the work of Ansel Adams.

DESPERATE TO ROUSE public opinion against plans to drown Yosemite National Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley under a reservoir, John Muir penned some of his most passionate and often-quoted lines. The arguments of dam proponents, he thundered,

are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden-so much of the very best Eden fruit going to waste ... .

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple as ever been consecrated by the heart of man.1

Repeatedly drawn to the intensity and power of these fiery words, scholars have made much of the way Muir demonized his opponents and likened the valley to the Garden of Eden.2 They have left unremarked, though, that Muir alluded here not to Genesis directly, but to John Milton's Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, but not in Genesis, Satan took the guise of the serpent for the purpose of destroying Eden, and with his insistent arguments incited in Eve the same fatal pride and desire that led to his own fall from Heaven to Hell. Quite naturally did Muir draw on Miltonic images to defend the valley from human destruction and exploitation, for Yosemite resembled Milton's description of Eden as much as did any place in America, and even the world. Not only to Muir: in the half-century after the first tourists visited Yosemite Valley, when writers, poets, painters, photographers, and even park designers and creators portrayed Yosemite or invested it with spiritual qualities, Milton's Eden provided their model and inspiration. Paradise Lost stands in special relation to Yosemite and the national parks.

A century ago, Muir could still expect his readers to recognize allusions to Milton. By and large they shared his cultural background: Reformed Protestants (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Unitarians) with Calvinist roots in Puritan New England, Scotland, and England. New Englanders and their descendants formed Muir's core readership; the publisher of most of his books, Houghton Mifflin, was in Boston, capital of the old Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts.3 Far more than other Americans, Reformed Protestants knew and loved Milton's Paradise Lost.' The lush, loving description of Eden in this Puritan epic gave them such a vivid mental image of Paradise, which Yosemite strongly resembled, that Milton can be said to have invested the valley with a peculiarly powerful sanctity. Through a sort of elective affinity, Reformed Protestants delighted in Milton and Muir and the holy landscape of Yosemite National Park.

We of the twenty-first century, who know little of him or his greatest work, glimpse him but rarely, but the spirit of John Milton haunts Yosemite Park still. There is a bit of Paradise Lost in the best-loved images of the valley, like those of Ansel Adams, the iconic photographer of the national parks who has taken the iconic photographs of this iconic park (see figure i). A New York Times art critic once perceptively (if ironically) called his 1974 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art "trophies brought back from Eden."5 Descendant of Puritans, Adams gave his prints a sermonic quality. Close friend Nancy Newhall noted that "there has always been a touch of the New England preacher about Ansel."6 Although of a generation more familiar with Emerson than Milton, Adams still preached Yosemite as "a national shrine," one of those special places where "the clear realities of Nature seen with the inner eye of the spirit reveal the ultimate echo of God." Compared to the "enormous spiritual and inspirational value" of such natural areas, "no works of man of any kind [have] consequential value." As Eden, Yosemite Valley called up religious feelings and became a place to worship, a temple made by divine hands.7 The park as shrine, cathedral, or holy place has become such a commonplace that, for example, Oxford University Press chose a photo of the valley as the paperback cover art for John Gatta's Making Nature Sacred, and David Robertson called his book about Yosemite art and literature West of Eden.8 In all of this, there are clear ultimate echoes of John Milton, and beyond him, of John Calvin.