Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

Conclusion: Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

CONCLUSION Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry sS The poems of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath clearly demonstrate the double nature of poetic form, which both restrains language from imposing itself on the natural world and reveals meaningful entanglements with that world. For all of these poets, the most meaningful contact with nature occurs through form, not by abol­ ishing form. Artifice, whether artistic or technological, comes naturally to humans; moreover, artifice is what connects us to the rest of nature. Their poems (and those of Dickinson and Hopkins before them), in their own ways, employ what I have termed “sensuous poesis” to perform the complex­ ity, mystery, and beauty of nature rather than merely represent it. Indeed, these poets (even the highly descriptive Bishop) take the paradoxical posi­ tion that mere realism is, as Stevens puts it, “a corruption of reality” (Opus Posthumous 166). For them, the artifice of poetic form foregrounds the most real relationship we have with the natural world, which is simultaneously distinct and inseparable from us. Three trends in contemporary American poetry not usually addressed in ecocriticism prove keenly illuminating in understanding poetic form as it relates to nature precisely because they have produced such unconventional nature poems: New Formalism, Language Poetry, and what I term “organic formalism.” These trends, most power­ fully the last, reveal that ecopoetics—the foregrounding of poetic artifice as a manifestation of our interrelation with the rest of nature—may unite what are otherwise disparate impulses within contemporary poetry. 159 160 s conclusion Still, the overall trend in mainstream American poetry seems to be away from poetic artifice. At this writing, of the four main poets discussed in this book, only Richard Wilbur still lives and writes. Unlike Wilbur’s work, which employs traditional form, much contemporary poetry takes the form of lineated prose. As contemporary poets themselves, New Formalists are clearly the exception (they include Annie Finch,Timothy Steele, Dana Gioia, Charles Martin, Vikram Seth, and Mark Jarman, among many others), since they work in traditional verse forms and/or meter and rhyme. Although one need not employ traditional prosody to be formally engaged—all poetry, and indeed language, of course, takes form—much free verse beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century has, as Robert Hass puts it, “lost its edge” (70). This is partly the result of the legacy of Romanticism, with its emphasis (in polemic if not in practice) on liberation from the seem­ ing constraints of form and the valorization of individual perception and experience—what John Keats derisively labeled the “egotistical sublime” in William Wordsworth. As a result of this legacy, much mainstream poetry tends toward confessionalism and subjectivity (the author as speaker of the poem), at the expense of formal scrupulousness. “In contemporary free­verse anecdotal poetry,” states Annie Finch, “the apparent sincerity of the indi­ vidual self, or soul, becomes the central transcendent poetic criterion, a site of spiritual fetishization. All other factors—form, diction, image, subject, tone—are subsumed in the service of this effect” (25–26). Even Ezra Pound, one of the instigators of the free verse movement, expressed reservations about the “dilution” and “general floppiness” to which much American free verse had already descended by the 1920s (qtd. in Carpenter 349). Still, most poets—with the major exception of New Formalists—continue to take for granted Pound’s earlier conflation of organic processes in nature with free verse. Traditional “symmetrical” poetic forms, by contrast, he considered too artificial to be associated with natural processes: “I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have cer­ tain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms” (9). Unfortunately, one conse­ quence (which Pound himself later feared) of such a formulation has been not just a rejection of meter and rhyme but also a resistance to the patterns and symmetries of form in general. Contemporary ecopoets especially strive to write poetry that appears organic, like nature, although what they mean by organic too often lacks Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry S 161 nature’s form. A. R. Ammons, for example, employs zigzagging lines in “Corsons Inlet” to emphasize the asymmetry and irregularity...