Formalist, Farmer, and Faithful
Timothy Murphy and the American Nature Writing Tradition
Timothy Murphy (1951-2018) had the envious ability to pick and choose from what he liked of two different worlds. Born in Minnesota and later in his life relocating to North Dakota, he cultivated typical rural pursuits: farming and hunting. Yet, surprisingly, he also attended Yale, studied under acclaimed poet Robert Penn Warren, and savored the classics of Western literature. He combined these worlds, which are often seen as conflicting, by writing poetry. As described by James R. Babb in the Foreword to Murphy’s book Hunter’s Log, the Midwesterner created “a working-day world in verse from someone who lives there and doesn’t simply visit on nice weekends.” In his subject matter, he fits squarely within the uniquely American tradition of nature writing. However, his occupation as a hunter and farmer offers us a new perspective on nature, one that wasn’t addressed by earlier Romantic-era writers.
Murphy is a place-based poet. His Yale mentor Robert Penn Warren, himself a proponent of rural life, encouraged Murphy to return to his home state. Murphy dramatizes this interaction in his poem, “Collateral”: “Go home, boy. Buy a farm. / Sink your toes in that rich soil / and grow yourself some roots.” Practically forcing Murphy’s hand, Warren refused to recommend him to an academic position. Murphy then returned home to Minnesota. He eventually began pig farming and started another manufacturing business in North Dakota while he worked on his poetry. His work reflects this conscious decision to root himself in the Midwest: his 2002 book Very Far North is an homage to North Dakota, his chosen rural home.
Long before Murphy, the American nature writing tradition arguably began with Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). These two, along with John Muir (1838-1914), were heavily involved in the New England transcendentalist movement, which emphasized the spiritual importance of nature. Transcendentalism led Thoreau to retreat from society, seeking solitude at Walden Pond. For Thoreau, leaving society was imperative in order to connect with nature. He viewed nature—as many people do today—as something separate, distinct from humanity.
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his essay Nature, which emphasized nature’s importance to the spiritual wellbeing of humankind. John Muir had a similar intuition while spending time among the redwood forests and in Yosemite Valley, California. His experiences in and writings about the American West led him to become the father of the National Parks. His activism brought about the preservation of Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks.
Thoreau’s, Emerson’s, and Muir’s writing involves a dichotomy between human society and pure nature. Their influential philosophy has even imprinted its legacy in American legislation. In the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness is defined as a place “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. More recent sensitivity to Native American history reveals that America was never a wilderness as so defined. Native Americans have been cultivating and tending what Europeans considered “wilderness” since time immemorial through prescribed burns and selective harvesting of wild plants. Wilderness, in that sense, is a myth.
A century later, Timothy Murphy arrives on the scene. He grew up accompanying his father on hunting trips from the age of eight. He experienced nature as “red in tooth and claw.” It was not something separate from him. A successful hunter requires intimate knowledge of nature and its creatures. Murphy expresses this in his poem “February”:
A coyote hides in a draw under a bale of straw, dreaming of gopher mounds on dusty lekking grounds where prairie chickens dance, newborn pronghorns prance and killdeers caterwaul. So hunters dream of fall.
Here is a precise and vivid language, an experiential familiarity with animal behavior, and a knowledge of appropriate terms—even such a strange word as “lekking” (which describes when male birds or mammals communally display their plumage and prowess during the breeding season).
How does Murphy fit in with the mainstream nature writing tradition? In what ways does he innovate? What does he reject and what does he retain? Murphy departs from the established nature writing tradition in three ways: 1) stylistically, he rejected free verse and returned to traditional poetic forms, 2) religiously, he espoused Catholicism as opposed to transcendentalism or Eastern religions, and 3) he presented a differing view of man’s place within, not outside of nature.
Considering Murphy’s style, it might be helpful to compare his work to one of his contemporaries. Free verse has been the dominant mode of English language poets for about a hundred years (after its introduction by transcendentalist Walt Whitman in the 19th century). Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was big on the poetry scene about the same time as Murphy was active. Her poems are characterized by their meditative quality, the preciousness of each life (human, animal, or plant), and a fluid free verse style. In an interview, she acknowledged the influence Whitman and Thoreau had on her work. Read one of her poems, “Snow Geese,” and then compare it to Murphy’s poem of the same name and on the same subject, “Snowgeese,” written for his friend Charles Beck, a painter and woodblock printer.
The flock is whorled like a translucent shell and intricate as the tubing of a horn, its embouchure, the soft foot of a snail lighting on sand, except the sand is corn, chisel ploughed and left to build the soil from which indebted farmers have been torn. I catch one note—a wild, wayfaring cry as snow geese splash into a glacial mere. Framed by moraines under a nacreous sky, they echo in the chamber of my ear. How does an ear rival your artist’s eye that sees what I can only hope to hear?
While Murphy’s poem is inspired by a woodcut print, they both describe the same instant of catching sight of something rare—a flock of snow geese. They both employ rhyme, but Oliver’s is a looser, rambling rhyme that pops up here and there. Murphy’s poem utilizes a stricter meter and rhyme scheme throughout its entirety (although the first stanza has some slant rhyme). Both poems rejoice in the instant of seeing a flock of snow geese. Oliver declares that “What matters / is that, when I saw them, / I saw them / as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly”. Murphy expresses a feeling of inadequacy: “How does an ear rival your artist’s eye / that sees what I can only hope to hear?” The difference is that Murphy’s poem feels more solid, more tangible than Oliver’s. Murphy brings up details of a farmer’s field of corn and uses specialized or literary terms to describe his scene: “mere”, “moraine”, “nacreous”. Oliver’s language feels diaphanous, floating on the ecstasy of a spiritual experience, and her words belong to the average person’s vocabulary. In her rhapsodic response to nature, she is falling squarely in line with Muir, Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson. Oliver ultimately renounces the scientific value of replicability. It “doesn’t matter” to her. Instead, Murphy concludes the poem with frustration or defeat. He bemoans his inability to be scientific, to adequately describe an event he has only seen artistically depicted.
So not only does Murphy differ from Oliver in stylistic choices, his underlying philosophy differs. Oliver credits Emerson and Thoreau. Their philosophy, as mentioned before, was New England transcendentalism. While transcendentalism can trace some of its inspiration from the mainstream of Christian tradition, it also borrowed from German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the Unitarian movement. Additionally, transcendentalists owed much to Eastern religions. In Walden, Thoreau relates reading the Bhagavad Gita, expressing a deep appreciation and regard for it. Emerson studied the Mahabharata, the Vedas, and the Ramayana. This was enough outside influence and alteration to make transcendentalism unorthodox by most accepted Christian standards.
The legacy of transcendentalism continues, as many modern day nature writers owe much to Eastern spirituality. For example, poet Gary Snyder (1930-present), is known for his interest in Zen Buddhism, and he spent several years studying the religion at temples in Japan. Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of The Snow Leopard, was also interested in Zen Buddhist teachings. In fact, many people in the nature writing sphere believe Christianity to be antithetical to environmental preservation. Lynn White’s seminal work, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, pinned the modern-day destruction of the environment on values rooted in medieval Christianity. This essay is now prescribed reading for undergraduate environmental science students (trust me, I had to read it).
Murphy’s work is philosophically influenced by his Catholicism. And despite his patent love for nature, he might not be what one would call an environmentalist and was certainly not an animal rights activist. He was politically conservative and a partner in a farm that produced 850,000 pigs a year. A farm of that scale is almost certainly a confined animal feeding operation, a livestock farming style criticized for its inhumane conditions and its pollution of air and water. Despite those strikes against him, hunters are known to be “a driving force behind many of our nation’s conservation efforts”. More than most people, hunters realize that our lives depend on the lives of other creatures around us. Even if they’re mainly interested in continuing a sport they love, hunters have a vested interested in preserving wildlife populations and habitats.
Murphy’s relationship with Catholicism was strained during the middle years of his life but as he grew older he returned to it, and his later work shows his deepening faith. His work Devotions, published in 2017, is dedicated to religious poetry, still expressed through the lens of his time spent in nature. These later poems emphasize his reaffirmed Catholic beliefs. He is a transcendentalist in the Christian sense of the word. Aware of the spiritual realities built into nature that point to a loving Creator, his work elevates the transcendentals of another kind: truth, beauty, and goodness. Consider his poem, “Soul of the North,” which beautifully describes a tundra landscape while alluding to the biblical Psalms:
Out of the wilds, I pray. Bound by my northern birth to fish, to hunt the earth and follow my forebears’ way, I mutter I have sinned, wander the grama grass, flourish awhile and pass whistling into the wind. As char swim to the clear tundra rivers that run under the midnight sun, as wolves follow the deer drawn from ford to ford, as clamorous geese in V’s throng to the thawing seas— all creatures of one accord— my soul thirsts for the Lord.
Again, Murphy demonstrates a deeply experiential knowledge of the habitats and creatures he describes. Who but a Northerner would know what grama grass is or could narrate so eloquently the magnetic migrations of char, wolves, and geese? Not only that, Murphy sees through the surface and lands on the same refrain of Psalm 42: “My soul thirsts for the Lord.” He alludes to the Catholic practice of confession: “I mutter I have sinned”. It is a beautiful poem that compares the wandering of a sinful human soul and its return toward God with the wanderings of migratory creatures that always know how to return home. He finds a spiritual truth within nature, demonstrating that God is evident in the metaphors of creation.
Another poem, “Missouri Breaks”, speaks to the transcendent hidden within Creation:
I am a trespasser on treeless ground, home to the sharptail and the furtive hun, and here the tallest thing for miles around is a small hunter shouldering his gun. A blooded dog quarters the feral rye, and my body’s long quarrel with my mind is silenced by a landscape and a sky legible as a Bible for the blind.
This poem seems to describe Murphy’s struggle to accept his faith. The opening stanza is unsettling. The speaker feels like a “trespasser”, the animals are “furtive”, and the focal point of the landscape is a hunter with a gun. It is almost as if Murphy is describing his first encounter with Catholicism, feeling alone, on the prowl for holes in the ideology. But once the game is caught—“A blooded dog quarters the feral rye”—clarity comes. His “body’s long quarrel with his mind” finally comes to a resolution when he can hear nature speak truth to him, as “legible as a Bible for the blind.” When Murphy sees this landscape and this sky, he reacts in the same way as King David in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God”.
Like in “Missouri Breaks” and many other poems, Murphy portrays this stern view of nature with a hunter’s clear-eyed grimness. As a hunter himself, Murphy participates in the wider ecological food web. He is no longer an onlooker. Much of the earlier nature writing tradition focused on the scenic grandeur of nature—such as Muir’s ecstatic descriptions of the beauty of Yosemite. And yet it forgets that man is also an animal. Forgetting our place within nature has led to some tragic misuses of it. Consider Murphy’s poem, “Mortal Stakes”:
Partridge flee to the headland straw when combines take their final lap. A vixen leaves a severed paw to free her foreleg from a trap. The killdeer, feigning a fractured wing, would lure me past the gravel flat where spotted chicks are cowering as though I were some feral cat. No strategy of fight or flight liberates me from instinct’s grip. I crave the whiskey’s amber light, the balm of ice against my lip. Salmon swimming toward a tarn fatten a grizzly in the foam. Racing into its flaming barn, the white-eyed mare is headed home.
This poem speaks to the grim realities of nature after the fall. Everything is tangled up. Human interference — personified through combines and traps—leads to animal suffering. Yet Murphy, as farmer, knows this is necessary. Without cornfields, humanity could not support its growing population. Without traps, we could not protect our chickens from thieving foxes. The final stanza shows that humans are not fully to blame as well. The grizzly bear also relies on death, on its yearly salmon feast. Salmon are considered a keystone species. The Washington Department of Natural Resources found that 137 species in the Pacific Northwest depend upon salmon. The death of salmon feeds ocean predators like orcas and their decaying bodies nourish riverine and mountain ecosystems far away from the vast seas. Thus, “Mortal Stakes” is a poetic description of ecological food webs and their vital violence.
Finally, consider his poem “Disenchantment Bay”.
Touch and go. Our Cessna bumped the sand, thumped its tundra tires, lifted as if on wires, banked over ice and rocked its wings to land. We pitched our camp hard by the Hubbard’s face, some sixty fathoms tall, a seven-mile-long wall seven leagues from Yakutat, our base. Crack! A blue serac tottered and gave. Stunned at the water’s edge, we fled our vantage ledge like oyster catchers skittering from a wave. Now separation has become my fear. What was does not console, what is, is past control— the disembodiment that looms so near. Detachment? So an ice cliff by the sea calves with a seismic crash of bergy bits and brash, choking a waterway with its debris. We clear the neap tide beach of glacial wrack, pace and mark the ground, then wave the Cessna round. Pilot, we bank on you to bear us back.
In this poem, Murphy employs alliteration and meter to describe a visit to a glacier. It is an awe-inspiring scene—one of violent beauty. He uses this experience to delve into psychological issues—separation, abandonment, lack of control. The final stanza takes on a religious tone. The word “Pilot” could easily be interpreted as a plea to God. Murphy chooses to trust in God to keep him safe within the dangers of Creation.
What Murphy has to offer is something different from the back-to-nature naiveté of Thoreau and Emerson. His Catholicism serves as a backdrop for his poetry, setting his work within the brokenness of the Fall. Thoreau and Emerson, at least in moments in their writings, seemed to believe that if we could just get back to the serenity of nature, society’s woes would be cured. Murphy, as a hunter, sees the sickness of death afflicting nature. Despite the goriness of his poetry, nature is still a source of hope and inspiration to him. It is savage in its beauty. It is as unpredictable and delightful as the God whom Murphy—and his reader—discovers on the wilds of the prairie.
*poetry quotations courtesy of Jennifer Reeser and the Literary Estate of Timothy Murphy
Marie Burdett is a poet, gardener, and MFA student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Her work has been published in Clayjar Review, Deep Wild Journal, and Light. She writes a Substack called The Foraged Fruit.
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What a pleasure to read this serious essay on Timothy Murphy’s work. His body of work is so large (and little known) that a smart new piece like yours helps us understand it better. Tim was a complicated and exuberant man. He was so short and slight that it seems odd to describe him as oversized, his spirit and ambitions were enormous. You have caught that aspect beautifully. Thank you.
Thanks for this. I first became acquainted with Timothy Murphy's work through Cynthia Haven's interview with him here: https://cynthialhaven.substack.com/p/my-life-as-farmer-and-hunter-gives
I am surprised to find he lived near Fargo, where I lived for a couple of years of my wandering life.