Robin G. Schulze first reminds us that the natural landscape of America has always been foundational to its national character, in this particular instance, legitimizing claims to exceptionalism and engendering discourses of pragmatism, virility and moral purity as antidotes to, if not an inoculation against, the perceived decadence of fin de siècle Europe. However, through her comprehensive survey of the various intellectual and ideological arguments regarding nature study during the Progressive Era, this intimate correlation between nature and nation is shown to actually harbour the racist, sexist and nativist anxieties of white, middle-class and upper-class Americans that manifested in the proposed threat of physical and mental degeneration imminent during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In this sense, the “back-to-nature” movement at the centre of Schulze's study is best understood not as a regressive, nostalgic gesture by those attempting to resist the currents of modernity but rather as an integral tenet of American progress. This compulsion to move backwards in order to progress forwards encapsulates the profound juxtaposition, if not contradiction, at the centre of the various scientific, medical and educational discourses that Schulze identifies as responsible for the national narratives evoked by Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore in their editorial work and verse, as well as the extensive correspondence between them, that also help explain the complexity at the centre of their respective projects.

Monroe's early nature essays, written during the decade prior to her establishing and editing Poetry in 1912, are used by Schulze to document how she advocates a Turnerian vision of the poet as conquering pioneer. Monroe proposes that in the poet's struggle against the wilderness to find the “adequate word,” s/he lessens class and gender differences between individuals by creating poetry free of all conventions and traditions. Contrary to this progressive thinking, however, Monroe is incapable of escaping the cultural pressures of the period and Schulze foregrounds the darker forces operating within her turn “back to nature.” Monroe's call for a poetry based on a return to natural origins is inseparable from her racial anxieties, as the editor is shown to value the eugenic capabilities of the American outdoors as a means of preserving the virile health and racial integrity of the nation.

Developing on this theme, Pound's first contribution to Poetry is followed through its prolonged editing process. Using the correspondence between the poet and the editor of Poetry, and by charting the different arrangements the poems appear in, Pound's imagist practice can be seen emerging as an attempt to return poetry to its barest elements and have it as close to the “thing itself” as possible. Although his famous mantra to “make it new” is often considered a harbinger of modernism, Schulze suggests that Pound's imagism is really a search for a “clean” language and, therefore, inherently informed by regenerate discourses of cultural hygiene. Pound is shown to pose as a Progressive Era doctor inoculating the populace against racial decline, feminization and psychosocial disorders using poetry of a clean American idiom and concrete language as a form of vital exercise and antidote that enacts a hygienic mission.

In concluding her argument, Schulze concentrates on Moore's Darwinian poetics, an organic form of evolutionary self-protection that is the equivalent of an adaptive physiological response to the poet's immediate environment. While not as pronounced, in terms of race, eugenics or sexism, as either Monroe or Pound, her move “back to nature” is similarly informed by the negative aspects of her particular knowledge, in this case the social application of evolutionary biology. Although Moore champions difference, diversity and radical individuality, she believed that proximity to the primitive provided a cure against the enervating effects of cultural degeneration that threatened the nation's eugenic health.

Despite the focus on these three authors, German scientist Max Simon Nordau truly dominates this book, as his theories are blamed by Schulze for bringing the psycho-medical concept of degeneracy and its relation to fin de siècle art to American consciousness. His medicalization of literature through the notion of the eugenic hazards of degenerate art to the race made perfect sense to those predisposed to see the world in evolutionary terms. Monroe, Pound and Schulze are shown to evoke Nordau, to varying degrees, as they each propose that human progress lies in the acknowledgement of immutable natural laws, perceivable only through closeness to nature, that serve the national purpose of strengthening the American body and purifying the American mind against cultural and, by association, racial, sexual and gendered degeneration.

Ultimately, Schulze proposes a deceptively simple question that exposes the complexities and contradictions at the centre of this Progressive Era debate: can a desire to return “back to nature” ever be considered modern? Her answer is a resounding yes, but only when nature is considered a eugenic reservoir that ensures that Americans could maintain the racial, physical and mental strength to progress into the future. With its genuinely interdisciplinary approach, The Degenerate Muse is necessary reading for anyone interested in complicating a conventional ecocritical account of modernism's engagement with nature and understanding how an initial retreat was required to advance during a period when renewal through a return “back to nature” was necessary to “make it new.”