Greening The Lyre: Environmental Poetics And Ethics

Introduction

1 5 : Even the wolf, you know, Phaedrus, has a right to an advocate, as they say. : Do you be his advocate? It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. —, “Ktaadn”  The subject of this study is contemporary nature poetry. It should be noted, from the start, that all three of these terms are potential troublemakers. For example, the contemporary nature poem might simply refer to nature poetry published relatively recently. However , this kind of definition ignores the more athletic sense of contemporaneity , the idea that the poetry of a given era (here, the most “recent”) reflects a generalized attitude or mood that is more or less distinctive. The idea of contemporaneity is further complicated by correspondences between the present poetic dispensation and previous ones. Such correspondences belie claims to novelty (and especially “progress”). The term nature and the idea of the nature poem are equally thorny. The nature poem is traditionally and usefully distinguished from other types of poetry by virtue of its subject: the nonhuman aspects of the world around us. The problem with this kind of definition is that it risks dividing the human from the nonhuman along the familiar fault line of culture/nature. Such a dichotomy tends to mask human nature, the aspect of our existence that includes our lives lived as sheerly physical and physiological entities. The possibility of nature as a subject for poetry is entwined in the currents and crosscurrents of English literary history. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the evolution of Romanticism typically marks the transformation of nature from its merely scenic or ornamental role in neoclassical poetry (when it appears at all) toward something like the subject or focus of much poetic endeavor.1 Thus we now recognize that in the years between, say,  (when Pope published “The Rape of the Lock”) and  (when Thomson’s The Seasons made its way into the world), the attitude of poetry toward nature changed dramatically. What is less clear is whether the development of a Romantic sensibility and its posture toward the nonhuman actually represent as radical a shift as this thumbnail history suggests. It can be argued, for example, that nature emerges in Romantic poetry less as an autonomous subject and more as simply the arena for the Romantic poet’s exploration of his or her imaginative consciousness. Nature did not appear as a poetic subject in its own right until the human role with respect to nonhuman nature began to be attenuated . Many factors contributed to this change: the rise of physical and biological sciences and the bodies of knowledge they contributed , the development of a geological and evolutionary sense of time that served to de-emphasize the importance of human experience and human history, and the gross degradation of the natural world, accelerated by the effects of industrialization and human population growth, that demonstrated the limits of our conceptions of nature and encouraged an understanding of nonhuman nature “on its own terms.”   The idea of nature as subject thus corresponds with the development of what may loosely be called an environmental perspective: the view that all beings, including humans, exist in complex relationship to their surroundings and are implicated in comprehensive physical and physiological processes. An environmental poetry is consequently distinguished from other types of “nature poetry” (especially Romantic nature poetry) to the extent that it reinforces and extends this perspective. In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell captures this distinction by articulating four criteria for the environmental text. They are: . The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. . The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. . Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. . Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. (‒) Inasmuch as contemporary nature poetry engages these positions, it assumes an environmental orientation. That is not to say, however, that all contemporary nature poems are environmental texts; rather, contemporary nature poetry consists of environmental poems as well as other types of nature poetry, including Romantic nature poetry written recently. Perhaps it is the case that all poetry is “environmental,” not necessarily in the specific sense of Buell’s definition, but...