A landscape’s meaning depends entirely on the observer’s frame

Evidence

Few men had ever viewed Long Island entire. One who had was Walt Whitman, who saw it as a “Sea-Beauty! stretch’d and basking! Isle of sweet brooks of drinking water—healthy air and soil! Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!” Now Moses saw it entire, and if he had written poetry once, he wrote park reports now, and brooks, healthy air, salty shore and breeze and brine meant parks. Standing on Montauk Point, where Long Island’s southern fluke ends in the steep bluffs plunging abruptly into the Atlantic, Whitman had said, “I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak.” Now Moses went to see Montauk, not with the eyes of the poet but with those of the park planner. “The Montauk peninsula,” he wrote, “is an extraordinary mass of clay, gravel and rock with high bluffs on the south shore and, back of the bluffs, kettleholes and rolling hills clothed with bayberry, shrubs and gnarled and twisted trees. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 749

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme in One Square Inch of Silence about how perception frames the value of a place, and to the standing interest in how the same land reads as sublime to one person and exploitable to another. — connects to: Mountain dawns transform the landscape into transcendent beauty that defies words — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 111
• DEFINE: The Whitman-vs-Moses contrast neatly demonstrates how the same terrain registers as poetry to one perceiver and as park acreage to another.