Notes
Notes introduction 1. Though Auden’s infamous line is frequently quoted out of context, the rest of the poem in which it appears, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” does not settle for what the individual line claims. Poetry may not make things happen in the world of “executives,” but it “flows south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth” (82). Poetry is itself a “happening,” and even after his death, Yeats can “still persuade us to rejoice” (83). 2. Heaney, like Auden, deserves a qualification. In the context of his 1986 T. S. Eliot memorial lecture, Heaney argues that the effect of poetry is paradoxical, simultaneously useless at a practical level and catalytic at a deeper level: “Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed” (107). Poetry does not say, “‘Now a solution will take place,’ it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.” Poetry is “a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it” (108). 3. Latour and his colleagues in science studies trace the interwoven “networks” between “facts, power and discourse,” which have been segregated by conventional Western thought partly as a consequence of imagining that we have experienced the modern rupture between nature and culture. What we usually label “nature” and “culture” are actually intertwined with each other, Latour argues, and he positions himself against both realists and social constructionists in his theory of hybridity: “Yes, the scientific facts are indeed constructed, but they cannot be reduced to the social dimension because this dimension is populated by objects mobilized to construct it. Yes, those 187 188 s notes to pages 18–50 objects are real but they look so much like social actors that they cannot be reduced to the reality ‘out there’ invented by the philosophers of science . . . Is it our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society?” (6). Like Latour, the poets I examine treat nature as simultaneously real and constructed. 4. E. O. Wilson defines “biophilia” as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes . . . [T]o explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents . . . [T]o the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves” (1–2). Lawrence Buell defines the “environmental unconscious” as “a residual capacity (of individual humans, authors, texts, readers, communities) to awake to fuller apprehension of physical environment and one’s interdependence with it” (Writing 22). 1. wallace stevens, ecoaesthete 1 Poems are quoted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens and cited by page in the text. 2. Deconstructionists such as J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Riddel (in his later work, after he “converted” from New Criticism) gravitate toward Stevens, whose work they see as demonstrating the tendency of language to fragment and distance the signifier from reality. Riddel nearly sounds as if he is parodying deconstruction (perhaps a fault of the newly converted) in his discussion of Stevens’s concept of “decreation,” “one dimension of which is the turning of language . . . back upon itself . . . [The search for the center of reality] is a search, of course, that must repeatedly bring into question all other centers . . . and ultimately bring into question the idea of a center itself, until in the centerless center of the imaginative activity, of the poem speaking itself, we understand the significance of the poetry of ‘play’” (85–86). Jacqueline Brogan attempts to...
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