There is no such thing as the prairie. Not anymore. In Illinois, the “Prairie State,” .01 percent of the original prairie survives. It is hard to make a number like that meaningful without turning to other numbers. I could tell you, for instance, that before the settlers arrived, twenty-two million acres—two-thirds of the state’s landmass—was prairie. I could tell you that a little more than two thousand acres remain. Remnant prairies, they call them.
We must learn, then, to think of this as a devastated place. To look at it and see what has been lost. It is hard to do because there is so much here: roads and sewers, subdivisions and skyscrapers. We live among abundance. We live among ruins. We must learn to name this devastation, to be specific about what has been lost. What did it cost to put a city here—Chicago, the playground of modern architecture?
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In Harriet Monroe’s “Columbian Ode,” first delivered at the 1893 World’s Fair, the future founder of Poetry Magazine and biographer of John Wellborn Root…
