“The Sea Belongs to You”: The Pacific Northwest Beach Poems by Richard Hugo
“The Sea Belongs to You”: The Pacific Northwest Beach Poems by Richard Hugo

Summary/Abstract: The poetry of Richard Hugo (1923-1982) often explores the transformative effect of the sea in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Navigating the descriptive extremes of inhumanist naturalism and confessional candor, his poems update the Wordsworthian exploration of the Romantic self in a natural setting as well as the representations of the private voice of the landscape poet, whose identity as an obsessive home-seeker in deserted spaces is constructed as well as questioned by his response to the dynamism and changeability of the coastal setting. Hugo’s poems, from early to late, project his thoughts onto the environment with the ambition to internalize the landscape and make sense of his feelings about the place, space, and himself. Drawing on criticism of Hugo’s work and recent studies of American travel and landscape poetry, the article argues that Hugo’s beach poems are a unique response to a tradition of American sea poetry that includes Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke. As Harold P. Simonson (1980, 150) explains, the landscape poet reaches the shores of the Pacific Northwest, “finding something of himself amid the barnacled rocks and oozing moss” while realizing, as Theodore Roethke (1962, 202) notes, that “his place, where sea and fresh water meet, / is important.” The Hugo beach poems work as the loci of the lyric transformation of the self toward self-acceptance while celebrating the rugged elemental beauty of the Northwestern coast.

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