A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World

Conclusion

2 2 1 i Conclusion The main point of the readings I have offered here is that Dickinson’s and Whitman’s widely divergent bodies of poetry share a fundamental interest in imagining more equitable relationships with the natural world, an interest that specifically responds to a number of nineteenth-century environmental discourses. In many ways their related poetic projects are so deeply resonant with the development of a modern environmental consciousness that they mark a foundational moment in the history of American environmental literature. Together, Dickinson and Whitman have contributed to the creation of a lyrical idiom that brings nature as autonomous subject matter, a nature-oriented aesthetic, and ethics into a dynamic interrelationship that propels the poetic speaker toward rethinking our conflicted ways of being in the world. As the previous chapters have demonstrated, reading them against their culture’s upsurge of proto-ecological sciences, natural history prose, and popular environmental concern reveals with particular saliency how their poems absorb and also revise the shifting environmental perspectives of their time. This is true even though, or precisely because, they do so in works whose significance reaches far beyond their eco-ethical implications. “‘Nature’ is what we see – / The Hill – the Afternoon – / Squirrel – Eclipse – the Bumble bee – ” (Fr721), Dickinson wrote, letting her lyrical definition of nature start out from the tension between the mind’s creative faculties and its embrace of the world’s physical diversity. The preceding chapters have shown that the green resonances of Dickinson’s and Whitman ’s poetry often begin with such a move of making room for sincere attentiveness to natural phenomena, in conjunction with their overarching concerns with perception, language, and the self. Both poets seek to talk about nature and human-nonhuman relationships as they are specific to particular natural and cultural contexts in a language “proportionate to Nature,” developing a differentiated poetics of place that is responsive to the environmental debates of their historical moment while reaching far beyond them. 222 • c o n c l u s i o n For example, on the microscale, Dickinson’s snapshots of seemingly “needless” creatures bring the language and perspectives of the emerging proto-ecological sciences together with sentimental discourses, forging an idiosyncratic poetic language that not only amplifies certain concerns of taxonomy, botany, and ornithology but also revises the limiting identification of women with (small) nature through an aesthetic that empowers the natural environment. Whitman’s poetry, too, echoes the time’s scientifically informed attention to previously overlooked life-forms, in numerous lines on weeds and insects that often serve as remedial gestures and link the speaker’s transcendental urge to a subtle critique of ecological myopia . At the same time, their quick gestures of noticing selected small phenomena also respond to the scientific challenge of dealing with a wealth of physiological detail by means of nuanced lyrical modes of their own. Similarly, on the local scale, their poems engage the descriptive mode of environmentally oriented nature essayists, in particular, and devise different yet related poetic descriptions of familiar naturescapes that relatively de-center the human observer. On the regional scale, they access their culture ’s conflicting narratives about how to relate to nature as resource or value and thus indirectly talk back to emerging conservationist debates. And on the global scale, they envision the earth in ways that face the challenge of making an unfathomably vast entity graspable by grounding their work in a more empirical understanding of nature’s smaller realms, as well as by imagining personal relationships with the earth, taking up perspectives of the time’s globally oriented scientists and conservationists. Across all scales, Dickinson and Whitman develop poetic strategies that connect the transcendent and metaphysical with the concrete, corporeal encounter between self and nature as it is specific to particular geographies, yielding a differentiated and environmentally resonant poetics of place that is an integral part of their overall aesthetic achievement. Throughout the previous chapters I have also argued that apart from their shared investment in turning toward specific natural phenomena and human-nature relations, the environmental resonance of Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry is vitally linked to how they face the ineffability of the nonhuman world. As Dickinson writes in the final stanza of her “definition ” of nature: Nature is what we know – Yet have no art to say – c o n c l u s i o n • 223 So impotent Our Wisdom...