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Part IV: Envisioning the Earth
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
18 9 IV • Envisioning the Earth In their shared fascination with the natural world, Dickinson and Whitman reached far beyond the more immediate levels of small, local, and regional phenomena. Both poets tried to bring all of “this earth” into their work, with an urgency that, for all their baffling differences of form, voice, and perspective, merits a critical comparison. In particular, when they wrote about earthly matters on the largest scale, they did more than turn to faraway countries and continents and thus imaginatively crisscross the globe. While Dickinson’s “Vision[s] of the World Cashmere ,” of “Brazilian Pampas,” of Teneriffe’s “Retreating Mountain !” testify to lasting transnational yearnings, and Whitman’s catalogues seek to democratically embrace the world’s diverse places even as they threaten to tip over into colonializing fantasies , they also share a global perspective in a more literal sense, insofar as both imagine the globe as one interconnected physical entity. In this chapter I discuss how Dickinson and Whitman imagine the whole earth, both as the largest possible place that forms the basis of a global, interrelated web of nonhuman and human life, and as an autonomous cosmic entity, a celestial body moving in space as its own peculiar realm of existence. Specifically, I hope to show that the global is the realm where they “envision” the earth, engaging imaginative perspectives that allow them to grant nature and human-nature interactions a quasi-physical presence, even though they cannot possibly be grasped or encompassed by the senses or experienced in their totality. Their mode of global envisioning, in the double sense of “visualizing” the earth as a material entity and of “picturing” or projecting the earth as a cosmic phenomenon, corresponds in crucial ways to formative proto-ecological ideas of the time that addressed global matters in new ways. This global vision is grounded, on the one hand, in tangible empirical perspectives on smaller scales, and, on the other hand, in speculative acts of creative imagination. Yet unlike the scientifically oriented proto- 19 0 • p a r t i v ecological publications of their time, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems, while deeply informed by the sciences, also imagine quasi-personal relationships with the entire earth, which both strengthens the experiential aspect that is so difficult to sustain on a global scale, and calls attention to the eco-ethical implications of such global poetic endeavors. Moreover, this relational quality also potentially counteracts grandiose and selfimportant gestures of imagining the world. In ecocriticism, the global scale has been considered a challenge because environmental consciousness and ethics are traditionally understood as evolving from more immediate realms of human living. People’s sense of place, in particular, seems to depend upon direct contact with and attachment to phenomena close to their home, so much so that geographer Yi-Fu Tuan famously warned that “[t]opophilia rings false when it is claimed for a large territory. A compact size scaled down to man’s biological needs and sense-bound capacities seems necessary” (Topophilia 101). More recently, Lawrence Buell still finds that “as environmental criticism moves to a global level of analysis, it understandably gets more multivocal , contentious, and fraught,” and that “[a]s scale and mobility expand , placeness tends to thin out” (The Future of Environmental Criticism 90, 91). And yet, as Buell himself, Greg Garrard, and others have noted, much is to be gained from a more focused critical attention to changing ideas about the globe—both regarding the social, economic, and political forces of globalization, including postcolonial and transnational movements , and in terms of seeing the earth as a living entity, or even a kind of Gaia superorganism, that is essentially stable and self-sustaining (see Garrard 161–75).1 For an ecocritical analysis of Dickinson’s and Whitman’s earth poetry, it is constructive to consider to what extent a global outlook, especially one that is environmentally oriented, was already part of their cultural moment. A new, proto-ecological interest in the earth’s dynamic interconnectedness , and in life on earth as one great whole, can be traced back at least to the early nineteenth century, when the older, holistic endeavors of natural theology and natural history were reframed by more decidedly empirical natural sciences, and when geography, long committed to describing the earth, came of age as a scientific discipline. It is especially productive to consider Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in relation to the ways in which scientific publications on global processes, too...