Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics by Kevin Hutchings (review)

Kevin Hutchings. Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics. Montreal and Kingston: M cGill-Q ueen’s University Press, 2002. xiv + 2 0 pp. $27.95'. With the appearance of Kevin Hutchings’ Imagining Nature the type of Blake “greening” begun in the special issue of Studies in Romanticism dedicated to “Green Romanticism” has blossomed into a fully extended ecocriticism. By analyzing “Blake’s [well-founded] suspicion of contempo­ rary concepts of nature” (4), Hutchings traces the “the major ethical and environmental implications of Blake’s organic human cosmology” (36) and achieves with clarity and coherence his design “to find some common ground between socially and environmentally oriented ways of reading Blake’s still-relevant poetry” (206). From its opening survey of the state of ecocriticism within Blake Studies to its closing confrontation with actual human practices, Imagining Nature manifests a passionate energy hard to resist. As well, this author successfully maintains a critical generosity while engaging a wide range of primary and secondary works brought to bear on Blake’s complicated views of nature, the self, and society. This generosity establishes a dialogic dynamism as a vehicle for perhaps the most satisfying discussion of Blake’s analysis of the natural world written in decades. The first chapter, which undertakes an analysis of “William Blake and the Natural World,” immediately confronts the “equivocal and contradic­ tory” (37) attitudes embedded across the spectrum of Blakean modes of expression. Initially, the chapter traverses somewhat familiar terrain, focussing on Blake’s response to industrialism, yet subsequent analysis of antinomianism during the last decade of the Eighteenth Century provides Blake “a grounding in proximate nature” (59). Such “hylozoism” (63), which resists emergent enlightenment ideology, humanizes teleology, creating a “relatively non-abstract universe within which [Blake’s] readers might feel a sense of unalienated community with all things” (67). Hutchings further contextualizes the Blakean assertion that “everything that lives is holy” in a superb discussion of environmental ethics and the historical roots of animal rights activism, which connects “the abuse of any living creature” to a broader “structural pathology in the larger systemic whole” (72). While briefly evoking Blake’s “unabashedly anthropomorphic” (67) approach to natural process in the first chapter, Hutchings’ second chapter explores its implications through The Book of Thel, where anthropomor­ phic construction combines with natural economy to reveal “a relational universe” with which “the very identity of each living thing is infinitely 176 |Lussier deferred in context” (89). This view addresses the “common critical con­ sensus” regarding Blake’s stance on “natural processes” as oppressively cyclic, since Blake’s alternative cosmos resists a “mechanistic paradigm of nature” (93). This corrective analysis comes sharply into view in the extended comparison between Thel and Erasmus Darwin’s The Economy of Vegetation, which dismantles in exemplary fashion Darwin’s projection of a “gendered economy of human relations” (99) onto what Blake called the “Glass of Nature,” where apparent “natural harmony” actually reflects “a complex web of social oppression” (101). The historical and textual evi­ dence establishes an “ambivalent or liminist” dimension that re-emerges across “the entire Blakean canon” (113) to define a dynamic, interactive, relativist cosmos. This more expansive analysis of Blake’s implicate universe is examined in ‘“The Nature of Infinity’: Milton’s Environmental Poetics” (Chapter Three), which seeks to make sense “of Blake’s strange attribution of a dis­ tinctly prophetic utterance to the realm of non-human nature” (116). The range of scholarship and sharpness of critical discernment brought to bear on this seemingly simply critical aspiration (passing through a re-examina­ tion of Blake’s relationship to Newton, the renovation of time and space, the alignment of Newtonianism with Satanic tyranny, and the alternative physics implied by the dynamic aspects of the vortex) are impressive and thought-provoking. Focusing on Newton’s oft-overlooked mystical writings, rather than solely on the scientific treatises, broadens the range of Blakean resistance to “Newton’s privileging of static and immutable natural laws” (127). Rather than adhere to a clockwork mechanics, “time and space are by no means absolutes” (133) in Blake’s visionary cosmos, which evokes “different temporal cycles” (136) to provide temporality with relativistic dimensions. This insight, in turn, fuels Blake’s challenge...