You see it especially in the paintings of
The mid-nineteenth century—that serene, beckoning
distance
As if they could not look too closely at what was near
Preferring instead that vista of promise
For which they became famous.
It wasn’t, to be sure, those cliched, too-contented
Objects of pastoral nor those
Mechanical obeisances to Poussin and Claude
That made the reviewers boast and declaim.
It was as the acolytes of natural sentiment
And limners of a momentous terrain that these painters
Were plausibly American.