Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language by Scott Knickerbocker (review)

If Ursula Heise could make the claim, already years ago in a 2006 issue of Contemporary Literature, that the publication of several introductory volumes on ecocriticism constituted a “significant shift” demonstrating the discipline’s maturation from an “emergent and marginal field into a fully recognized research area,” the importance of ecocritical investigations in literary studies has only solidified since then. A recent addition to the field is Scott Knickerbocker’s examination of the aesthetic dimension of poetic language in the work of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath—the respective subjects of four individual chapters—and a few selected others. The study is a welcome supplement to Stevens criticism in that it extends the extant connections between Stevens’ poetry and the expanding field of ecocriticism, and allows us to reconsider the poet through an alternative lens.

Knickerbocker’s book reactivates the early ecocritical debate about aesthetics vs. ethics in an attempt to reconcile the merits of artificial, poetic language—too easily dismissed as apolitical and reactionary—with the predominantly realist or mimetic mode of nature-writing. The author aims to redress “the oppositional stance of first-wave ecocriticism against textuality” (3) by tracing what he calls the “sensuous poesis” (2) in the writings of a number of modern and contemporary American poets. This “sensuous poesis” seeks to reveal the beauty of nature via a paradoxical reveling in artificial language and a concurrent dismissal of the realist mode. It follows through on what Oscar Wilde suggested in “The Decay of Lying”—that “All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.” There is no such idealization or reification of nature in Knickerbocker’s selection of texts: the poets discussed “resist strict realism and foreground the figurative nature of ecocentrism” (9).

One of the best illustrations (although absent from Knickerbocker’s study) is Stevens’ verbal acrobatics in “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” whose opening lines display the workings of “sensuous poesis” with a vengeance: “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” ( CPP60). The carefully constructed, artificial nature of these lines, with their conspicuous alliterations, assonances, and repetitive internal rhyme, evoke the sensuous, pleasurable materiality of words and sounds while at the same time defamiliarizing us from the natural scene depicted. In suggesting that the artifice of poetic language is “simultaneously real and constructed, natural and artificial” (35), Stevens’ poetics deconstruct age-old oppositions between real/ imagined and nature/culture. Thus, in Knickerbocker’s reading, they “enact the difficulty of clearly segregating nature and the imagination” (28).

The author’s insistence on “ecopoetics,” rather than on the sterner-sounding ecocriticism, as a central concept for his study, is certainly productive in reading Stevens. Although Stevens is retroactively enlisted as a “proto-ecological modernist” (35), it would be a stretch to read him from the overtly politicized, ecocentric framework of the early 1990s. Still, it is not altogether clear how Knickerbocker’s own theory of a “sensuous poesis” fits into current evolutions in the field of ecocriticism. As the author rightly contends, most ecocritics used to overlook the aesthetic dimension of poetry, leading to Neil Evernden’s quip that “Environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning” (qtd. in Knickerbocker 3). But surely this has been emended in recent years? Unfortunately, the sort of mature ecocritical scholarship hailed by Heise seems to be a blind spot in this book.

Knickerbocker’s assessment of Stevens’ career is similarly lacking in a nuanced historical perspective. He sticks largely to criticism from the 1980s and ’90s. His bibliography also has a few inexplicable gaps. Considering his insistence on the romantic elements in Stevens’ work, which he explicitly links to Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Emerson, it is odd to find no references to Harold Bloom. Likewise, the historicist turn in Stevens criticism is neglected (no James Longenbach, no Alan Filreis), which leads to questionable and needlessly contradictory accounts of the poet’s life and work. Knickerbocker...