1 For examples of such scholarship, see Armitage; Azelvandre; Berry; Fuldner, Evolving and “Good Work”; Jack; Jackson; Kates; Kirschenmann; Kohlstedt; Linstrom, Introduction, “‘It,’” and Land; Linstrom and Rinn; Lowe; Minteer; Montmarquet; Morgan and Peters; Orr; Peters, “Every Farmer” and “Storying”; Peters and Morgan; Pihkala, Early Ecotheology and “Rediscovery”; Rinn; Sarver; Smith; Stempien and Linstrom; Stoll; Szarkowski; Thompson; Van Wieren; Williams; Wirzba.

My thanks to Matthew Wynn Sivils for his early encouragement and direction on this project, to Una Chaudhuri for her feedback on the introduction, to Patricia Crain for her feedback on an earlier iteration, to Michael Fiedorowicz for providing me with a scan of the corrected edition, and to John A. Stempien for introducing me to this gem of an artifact and to the world of Baileyana more generally, now fifteen years ago. Any errors or oversights remaining are mine alone.

1 Bailey wrote this word in ink, triple underlined, on a translucent sheet of onionskin wrapped around the chapbook’s cover, such that the word appears just below the title as viewed through the wrapper. Similar onionskin wrappers may be found on numerous books from Bailey’s home library, most of which are now in the collection of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum and Gardens in South Haven, Michigan. The title also appears on a title page and on the first page of the poem itself, separated from the first line of the poem by a single large fleuron. Section breaks in the poem are denoted by sets of three smaller fleurons (see fig. 1). Bailey’s name was not printed anywhere in the chapbook, but his signature appears on the title page of each of the copies I have consulted.

2 The stanza begins by quoting the first two lines of the New England Primer, a classic pedagogical text published in colonial New England but still used into the nineteenth century, such that it is not impossible a young Bailey may have encountered it at his rural two-room school or elsewhere in the frontier settlement of South Haven, Michigan, in the 1860s. The first three stanzas of Outlook, excised from the poem’s only known partial reprint (which concluded the 1949 biography of Bailey written by Andrew Denny Rodgers III), depict the Puritan worldview the speaker remembers inheriting in childhood, which his experiences will lead him to reject. This stanza also alludes to the Puritan doctrine of predestination and to the belief that, based on biblical genealogies and creation mythology, the earth was only six thousand years old. Early nineteenth-century geological studies showing a much older age for the planet reinforced biological theories of evolution that emerged later in the century, which in turn shaped Bailey’s early intellectual development, including his early encounter with Charles Darwin’s writing (Rodgers 11–13, 87–88).

3 This “goodness” of the earth would become a major theme in Bailey’s 1915 book The Holy Earth, in which chapters 2, 3, and 4 are titled “The earth is good,” “It is kindly,” and “The earth is holy,” respectively. The seventh chapter is titled “The brotherhood relation,” which lays out a theory, rooted in evolution, that humanity bears a kinship relation to the rest of the “living sensitive creation” (25). This echoes what he writes a few lines further down in Outlook, figuring humans as set “in one vast fellowhood” and “a kinship that encompasseth the universe.” Such “fellowhood” forms the basis of Bailey’s argument that humans, given our outsize ecological influence within these “kinship” relations, bear an ethical responsibility toward the well-being of life generally (drawing together “man and brute and wood,” as he states it here—animal and vegetal). In the light of Darwinian evolution, he considered these kinship relations literally. This framework would redefine “goodness” in ecocentric terms to reflect a responsiveness to and sense of responsibility toward the full more-than-human world, rendering it a “bio-centric” rather than a “man-centred” value, as he puts it in The Holy Earth (25). The aim was less to sanitize nature than to radically redefine goodness and redraw systems of morality.

4 The language of “kinds and races” here and elsewhere in the poem deserves attention. In The Outlook to Nature, Bailey critiques “the book dogma of ‘species’” (170–71) and raises the idea that science might move beyond studies of kinds, species, or races of organisms—groups that he argued were made for convenience and were, at a fundamental level, arbitrary, and even problematic insofar as they contributed to the “species bogey” that falsely considered species categories as “something fundamental” rather than just convenient descriptions of generalized observations (153, 154). In his 1896 article “The Philosophy of Species-Making,” Bailey had offered this succinct, relativist definition of the term “species”: “The unit in classification, designating an assemblage of organisms which, in the judgment of any writer, is so marked and so homogeneous that it can be conveniently spoken of as one thing” (457). In place of “the book dogma of ‘species,’” he advocates in The Outlook to Nature for a new kind of study centered on specific, individual animals or plants, and he makes the suggestion as part of his defense of the literary animal stories by William J. Long and Ernest Thompson Seton that had been attacked by John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt as part of the nature-faker controversy (170–72). The terms “tribes,” “kinds,” and “races” in this section of the poem make clear reference to the interspecies catalog of life-forms listed earlier in the same section, e.g., “beast and fin and feathered crew…man and brute and wood,” rather than to humans narrowly. This is in keeping with his usage in The Outlook to Nature, The Survival of the Unlike, and elsewhere.

Bailey’s understanding of such categories as ultimately arbitrary and permeable marked one of the ways he distanced himself from the social Darwinist views of many contemporaries; Armitage also notes the way in which Bailey’s emphasis on adaptation over strength as the mark of evolutionary fitness “repudiated the vision of nature red in tooth and claw promoted by social Darwinists” (105). Bailey’s unusual first name was inherited from his father, who was given it by Bailey’s abolitionist grandfather as a prophecy of racial liberation (“Call him Liberty—for all shall be free” [qtd. in Dorf 3–4; see Rodgers 6]), and Bailey’s views of human racialism seemed to cut against eugenic discourse and instead emphasized inherited abolitionist values of equality and tolerance. Bailey also aligned himself in the scientific community with the “Neo-Lamarckian” evolutionists, whom he considered closer to Darwin’s actual thought than the “Neo-Darwinians” led by August Weismann. Weismann’s germplasm theory helped lay the groundwork for the eugenics movement, and it was very specifically and vigorously opposed by Bailey (Survival 55–106). In the social realm, Bailey believed that universal access to education and improved living conditions were among the primary means of bettering society, and he seemed to think they were universally needed, across racial lines, for the best social progress (see, e.g., Linstrom 48–50).

5 In environmental literature, the term “dominion” is most often associated with the creation myths of Genesis, which are invoked either as the originating cultural cause of “our ecologic crisis” or as a resource for getting out of it (see, e.g., the classic critique in White, and the rebuttal in Berry 267–81). In The Holy Earth, Bailey invokes that narrative to consider the human “dominion” on the earth in terms of an ethical relationality and stewardship. The dual facts of the human species’ “bio-centric” kinship with all life and that same species’ vastly outsize ecospheric influence compared to any other, he argues, place upon humanity a unique responsibility to care for the rest of the web of life (25). He distances himself from the word’s domineering and selfish connotations when he writes, “Dominion does not carry personal ownership” (13), and “Man has dominion, but he has no commission to devastate” (18). In this passage of Outlook, such dominion is turned toward the self to contradict the inherited Puritanical theology of predestination alluded to in the poem’s first section. Still, for Bailey, such “redemption” appears to be an effect of outward-facing stewardship, and the “heaven” he invokes in this stanza should not be conflated with afterlife-oriented fundamentalist theology so much as with the social-gospel sense of the need to build the kingdom of God on earth (see Holy Earth 10–11).

6 Bailey added the semicolon in pencil.

7 This reference appears to be in conversation with the following passages in The Outlook to Nature:

“I read recently in a college paper that ‘the classics are the source of culture, all culture, and they always have been’; and again: ‘Greek, once considered the foundation of all culture, is fast dying out, and our whole system of education for the sake of culture and power is threatened with destruction by the ever-increasing flood of materialism in scientific courses, and of practicalism in the professional courses. The task of stemming this flood has given rise to the most vital and difficult problems of the modern university.’ I wish that we had more Greek, but I do not admit that Greek or any other group of subjects is the sole source of what we ought to know as ‘culture,’ nor that ‘materialism’ is a result of scientific courses, nor that ‘practicalism’ is any bar to the highest flights of thought; and it is strange that any person in these days should regard Greek as the one preëminent source of [reasoning] power. All education should lead to culture and to power…. When only Greek-minded men went to college, it was enough that Greek was taught; but now that physics-minded and physiology-minded and farm-minded men go to college, engineering and physiology and agriculture also should be taught” (99–100, 102).

8 Bailey replaced the word “science” with “prescience” in pencil, scribbling over the word “science” (see fig. 1).

9 This section of the poem, as previously published, began with the present third line, “We helpless gaze….” In the left-hand margin between the previous section and this one, on page 8, in pencil, Bailey wrote an insertion mark pointing toward the section break (see fig. 1). On a folded scrap of torn paper kept between pages 8 and 9, Bailey wrote, “Not too much do I look within / Within the barren circle of ones [sic] moods,” in pencil (see fig. 2). The scrap of paper was recently discovered by the collections manager John A. Stempien after having been long misplaced in the collections of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum and Gardens—my thanks to him for finding and sharing these lines late in the process of my work on this edition. Over the phone, he and I visually matched the scrap to the corrected copy of the chapbook by a small stain on page 9. The stain runs through several pages in either direction (see fig. 1) and also appears in all four quadrants of the folded scrap of paper.

The insertion mark floats ambiguously between the two sections, and some judgment for how to treat these lines is required of the editor. The folded scrap of paper contains enough space for many more lines of poetry, so one must consider the possibility that Bailey did intend to compose an entirely new section of the poem, to be set off on either end with fleurons, but never finished it. Clearly not enough to constitute an entire section as they stand, the two new lines work better thematically and poetically here than tacked onto the tight and conclusive quatrain ending the previous section. They bring the section that they introduce into line with every other section of the poem by presenting the first-person singular pronoun near the beginning and then developing a theme that proceeds from personal experience to universal insight—from hyperlocal and personal to global and cosmic. (The added lines, moreover, clarify the role of the personal in the poem broadly, and it may be significant that “look within” rhymes with no other line in the entire poem.) The “barren circle of one’s moods” gives a new, melancholic charge to the sentiment that “We helpless gaze unto the stars,” and that barren circle finds its counterpoint several lines later as the circle of “kinship” widens to the cosmic. Stylistically, “moods” may be intended as an imperfect rhyme with “brotherhood” and “understood,” with precedence in the very imperfect rhyme of “philosophies” and “silences” in lines 68 and 69 (and numerous instances of end rhymes occurring three or more lines apart). All this seems sufficient to justify placement after the section break.

I have supplied the apostrophe needed to make sense of “ones” as a possessive, and it is tempting to go further and add end punctuation, such as a dash or semicolon, to either or both of the new lines. While such punctuation would clarify the syntax of the stanza, each possibility would do so differently—e.g., should these two lines be read together as one thought juxtaposed with what follows (punctuation after the second line), or should the first line be read as one thought with the second line modifying the third (punctuation after the first line)? The fit will never be perfect, since the third-person “one’s” matches neither the first-person singular of the preceding line nor the first-person plural of the following. The meaning is ambiguous enough as Bailey left it that I have chosen here not to impose my own interpretation through additional clarifying punctuation.

10 To be “in signal,” or in communication, with Mars was an idea available to Bailey from various sources, whether in science fiction works like Robert D. Braine’s 1892 Messages from Mars by the Aid of the Telescope Plant, in which the advanced Martian “Oronites” with whom the protagonist learns to communicate live in a quasi-socialist rural society without cities (Crossley 58–65), or in the mystical eighteenth-century writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to communicate with deceased residents from many of the solar system’s planets through the spiritual realm in his work Other Planets. Confidence in intelligent life on Mars had already been popularized by Percival Lowell’s interpretation of Martian “canals” and “oases” in his first book, Mars (1895). For Bailey, the possibility inspired more than one moment of speculative poetry. In The Outlook to Nature, he writes:

“Worlds, like men, grow old and die. The marks of senility may even now be apparent in this earth of ours, which seems to us so young. With the receding and absorption of the waters, great areas have become deserts—perhaps the beginning of that great decline which must end in death. The moon seems to have run its span of life, and there is evidence that Mars is now far advanced upon that arid course which leads its inhabitants onward to extinction. It is conceivable that the planets will fall again into a central mass and thence again shoot forth to begin a new creation. We do not know whether this cosmos that we see is the first or the millionth!

“Oh Mars! Sister in the stellar void—

Thy course far run upon the great abyss—

Send us thy message!

What hast thou learned in thy great life,

What hopes are thine, what doubts removed,

What dost thou see beyond the veil,

What meaneth life and death?” (177–78)

11 Whenever Bailey specifies the meaning of the word “race” in his writing, used with the definite article in relation to humans (as opposed to the typically botanical sense mentioned in note 4, above), it is to refer to the “human race” rather than to any single racialized group. Compare Outlook’s second stanza, which equates the term through parallelism with “mankind,” or the second paragraph of The Holy Earth: “It is good to think of ourselves—of this teeming, tense, and aspiring human race—as a helpful and contributing part in the plan of a cosmos” (3). Bailey also had expressed his desire, when using masculine nouns like “mankind,” to be understood as referring to humanity broadly, as in this passage from The State and the Farmer (1908): “Throughout this writing, I intend the word man to include the farm woman: the language lacks a good word to imply them both” (175).

12 Bailey wrote “Spins” in pencil under the original first word of this line, which was “Lives.”

13 In the excerpt from the poem reproduced in Rodgers’s biography, this word is changed to “unbound.” The edit makes sense, continuing the theme of liberation from traditions “bound” in texts as the speaker turns instead to the presumably “unbound” book of nature (an especially common trope for Bailey in The Nature-Study Idea). However, I have not found evidence that the change in Rodgers’s edition was at Bailey’s request, it is not marked in the corrected edition, and Bailey uses the word “unbond” in two other poems published in his 1916 poetry collection, Wind and Weather (13, 200), so I have left it here. While the word does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, it does appear in writing from Bailey’s time to the present—whether describing the unbonding of pebbles from a gravel road or the chemical unbonding of molecules—as an online search with Google Books Ngram Viewer reveals.

14 The poem’s conclusion mirrors the conclusion of The Outlook to Nature, in the chapter “Evolution: The Quest of Truth.” The one-stanza poem at the end of that book, lightly edited, would become the title poem of Bailey’s 1916 collection Wind and Weather. While elsewhere in The Outlook to Nature Bailey advocated for “a generous discontent and a diligent unrest” as the necessary result of taking “nature [as] the norm” against which to judge society (7), in the conclusion Bailey is attempting to convey to religious skeptics of evolution the peace of accepting new truths revealed by scientific investigation:

“All beliefs, all doctrines, all creeds are mine. I want only the truth and the privilege to live in the great good world. Truth, and the quest of truth, are always safe. It is not my part to be anxious about destiny or about the universe. If my tiny opinions are outgrown, I shall wait, in patience and in hope.

“There is grateful release in letting the universe take care of itself. The universe is in better hands than mine. In these matters, I will substitute trust for faith. If I cannot remove the dandelions from the lawn, then I will love the dandelions. Where once were weeds are now golden coins, bees reveling in color, and the spring sunshine kissing the blossoms with lips of dew. It is so sweet and restful that I abide in peace.

“Passengers on the cosmic sea

We know not whence nor whither:

’Tis happiness enough to be

In tune with wind and weather.” (195)