Paterson

One of the major themes throughout all five books of Paterson is the relationship between the natural landscape and the human body. Paterson’s connection to the world around him echoes the lineage of Transcendentalist ideas, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to his poetic heirs, including Walt Whitman. In the essay “Nature,” Emerson describes the narrator’s relationship to the landscape as being similar to an eyeball—all-seeing, absorbing everything around it without putting much back into the landscape or altering it in substantial ways. Similarly, Paterson walks through the landscape—more abstractly in other books, most concretely in Book 2—observing and absorbing what he sees around him. Paterson responds to an inquiry asking what he does for work by saying, “What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire occupation” (45). He answers this way even though, from other aspects of the narrative, the reader learns that he is a doctor and a poet. He considers this answer to be the most important one.

Additional connections between the body and the landscape recur between the man Paterson and the city Paterson. Early in Book 1, “Paterson lies in the valley under the