Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)For humanity the Earth's Poles have been mythological in both concept and fact. Our obsession with them has been discussed in several outstanding books that explore the place of the Arctic and Antarctica in the human imagination. An excellent place to start any investigation of this issue is Eric G. Wilson's "The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination." Wilson asserts that near the end of the eighteenth century scientists, writers, mystics, and others combined to reinterpret ice, glaciers, and cold places as something beyond a traditional wasteland, indeed, a place of romance and spirituality.
While much of this reinterpretation represented wishful or even wrongheaded thinking, the romantic imagination inspired by it energized Western Civilization's quest to explore it. Focused on the literary heritage of ice as mythical place, Wilson offers a convergence of crystallography, esoteric glaciology, group psychology, and polar exploration into a portrait of an age and its fascination with frozen phenomena. His principal characters are the many writers, poets, artists, and popularizers who created an aura about the ice of the Poles that prompted Western Civilization to engage in its exploration and subjugation. There is less in this book about Frederick Cook, Robert Peary, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and other explorers than there is about romantic writers who popularized the endeavor.
"The Spiritual History of Ice" represents an interesting approach, offering a literary turn in the analysis of polar exploration. Like many other such efforts at postmodern analysis, however, it is only partially successful. No doubt, Wilson is correct in laying the popularization of the Poles at the feet of the great communicators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there is more at play here. Much of the exploration was motivated not by romance but by a hardheaded quest for economic gain. The search for the Northwest Passage, which actually did not exist but had long been hypothesized, prompted a lion's share of effort in the Arctic in the nineteenth century. All of the romanticization of Thoreau, Poe, Emerson, Shelley, or anyone else cannot overcome the basic fact that expeditions were pursued for a practical reason.
Still there is a real value to this work, showing especially the relationship between the act of exploration and the belief system that fostered it. "The Spiritual History of Ice" serves as a useful analysis of this relationship.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination
At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated that ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. At the same time, several Romantic figures-including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson, and Thoreau-challenged tradi-tional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. In this engaging literary history, Eric Wilson explores the secret history of ice and the romantic imagination inspired by it. The result is a fascinating explor-ation into the Romantic imagination and its intersection with crystallography, the glaciology of the Alps, and polar exploration.
