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chapter one Things of the Earth Troubles in the relationships among physical objects, people, and abstractions haunt American ecopoetics from the nineteenth century down to the present time. For his part, Whitman follows Wordsworth in resistingthepersonificationof abstractions—treatingideasasif theywere people.1 And like Marx, he resists the treatment of people as if they were objects — the property of slave owners or cogs in the industrial machine — as well as the treatment of abstractions as reified objects. But problems arise in Leaves of Grass with the status of natural objects. The poet’s inclination to see himself reflected in nature frequently leads him into an Anglo-American poetic tradition in which the status of an objectappearstodependuponitsmetaphysicalorpsychologicalvalue.The spider of Jonathan Edwards,the waterfall of HenryVaughan,the waterfowl of William Cullen Bryant, the marsh hen of Sidney Lanier stand as signs of God’s power, glory, and grace. Their standing as earthly beings is sacrificed on the altar of allegory and metaphor. Even Wordsworth’s daffodils, the bees of Emerson and Dickinson,OliverWendell Holmes’s chambered nautilus , Marianne Moore’s paper nautilus, and Theodore Roethke’s rose ultimately serve as grist for the metaphysical mill, representing some aspect of the poet’s identity, some imposition of ego upon the face of nature. Notwithstanding strictures against the pathetic fallacy in literary theory and against anthropomorphism in science, personification and other tropes of imposition persist not only in twentieth-century poetry but even in scientifically informed nonfiction prose, in such influential works as Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for which the central metaphors of the earth’s body and the health of the landscape are keys to an activist rhetoric (see Killingsworth and Palmer, Ecospeak, chapter 2). Such tropes no doubt reinforce human identity with the earth, but we mightdowelltorecallthattheetymologyof thewordtropesuggests“aturning ”and that turning away is the characteristic action of hysteria,according to Freud, a neurosis in which something is denied that eventually comes to haunt the hysterical subject. What may be denied here is that in extracting personal meaning from earthly objects or treating them as poetic property Q upon which to build the “more stately mansions” of metaphysics, nature poetry turns away from the earth. It aligns ideologically with the extractive industries that overexploit precious minerals, water, and soil, only to find the“environmental problems”of toxicity and scarcity cropping up later like the return of the repressed in the psychoanalytic model (see Killingsworth and Palmer,“The Discourse of ‘Environmentalist Hysteria’”). To some extent,as a human art poetry cannot avoid participating in this kind of extractive or acquisitive discourse. Perhaps the most we can ask is that ecopoetics seek a heightened consciousness, a reconsideration of verbal practices that involve categorizing, naming, or identifying with natural objects.At several moments in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856), Whitman arrives at this point, pausing to consider his relationship to the earth as a poet and a human being. He comes face to face with certain phenomena in nature that cause him to admit his puzzlement and incapacity, even terror. His poetic response anticipates a recent theoretical trend in literary and cultural studies — the consideration of things as a category distinct from physical objects, abstractions, and people. Itistheunspeakablenessof thingsthatWhitmanmostcommonlydramatizes during these arresting moments. Things suggest the unspeakable in at least two senses that many of us learned directly from our parents. For the unspeakable in the sense of cognitive incapacity, for example, I had in myownhouseholdmystepfather’sendlessstreamof fumblingsfortheright word — the thingamabob,the whatchamacallit,the doohickey — the thing whose name cannot be recalled in the heat of activity, as in“Hand me that thing on the work bench.” For the unspeakable in the sense of unfit to be named for fear of moral or social impropriety, I had my mother’s usage. For her,as for the parents of manyAmerican children,“thing”was a euphemism for the body’s “private parts,” as in the hesitant instruction to “tell the doctor about your . . . ah . . . thing.”The“thingamabob”and the“ah . . . thing”form an ironic pair in a memory I have of my mother stifling a laugh when a woman pulled in next to us at a gas station,the lid of her car’s trunk swinging wide open, and complained loudly to the attendant, “I can’t get my thing down.” A third sense of the unspeakable thing is one I gleaned not from home but from excursions into Eastern mysticism and Beat...

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