Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, Diane Kelsey McColley

November 16, 2009 at 5:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, Diane Kelsey McColley (Ashgate, 2007)

Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell addresses a wide range of ecological topoi – woods, waters, mining, agriculture, animal rights – as the point or points of investigation in each chapter. Diane Kelsey McColley performs a sequence of discrete but interconnected ‘readings’ of these topoi by assembling multiple contexts for them within seventeenth-century literature, ranging through a variety of texts from natural history to theology, economics to fiction, from agricultural tracts to personal correspondence, as well, of course, as the poetry of the book’s title. Initial and final chapters address Marvell and Milton respectively, arguing that the language they use is uniquely attentive to natural environments – it ‘asserts the life of nature and promotes the life of words that are rooted in the natural world. McColley shows how the texts are rooted in the contemporary epistemological debates that underpin her readings, including a brilliant reading of ‘hylozoic’ poetry, which is both literally and figuratively written on the matter or forests.

So McColley is good on the wood, but she is also attentive to the foliage of each individual tree. Poems are read in detail and with a pleasingly literal eye. McColley’s treatment, while wide-ranging, never digresses from the ecological matters in hand. Surprising prescient manifestations of modern ecological constructs are suggested, from animal rights in contemporary translations of Ovid, to permacultural frameworks in Walter Blith’s farming book, The English Improover, and, indeed, in Milton’s Eden.

But the book does not simply call attention to shared perspectives. Reading McColley’s description of the moral piety which encouraged activities such as mining and hunting, I was reminded of the comedic strangeness of Daniel Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in which he called the Lake District ‘barren and frightful’ – more to his taste was Preston: ‘populous, and fruitful’. It would be unthinkable for a post-Romantic travel writer to make such pronouncements, and McColley’s book gives an enlightening tour through contemporary practices and perspectives in all their foreignness. As such, the book is a salutary argument that ecocriticism need not be an anachronistic framework through which to ‘read’ the past, but that it provides a crucial means of access to the ways in which our predecessors approached and represented the natural world.

The book occasionally disappoints in its attempt to crystallize contemporary opposition to the poetic ideals for which McColley passionately argues. It seems churlish solemnly to accuse Robert Hooke of ‘carving up’ a louse for his groundbreaking and captivating Micrographia, in comparison with Andrew Marvell, who describes just such a tiny nit in Upon Appleton House. Does Marvell’s beautiful poem grant us closer access to the louse through praise (and not actually looking at it), than Hooke does in true scrutiny of its parts? In fact, Marvell’s fleas occur within the poem as emblems of emerging infinitesimal vision – Hooke’s flea is a real flea. When McColley pronounces,  ‘it is the argument of this book that people contemptuous of poetry’ should ‘deface and ravage’ the land, the isolated remark risks sounding complacent. People who work the land – the butchers and ploughmen, drainers of the fens and plunderers of woodland for lumber- are not, traditionally, equipped with the education, nor inculcated with a desire, to write about their ecology. (John Clare is perhaps the earliest Englishman whose capacity to write great poems about the land is matched by a genuine and unselfconscious intimacy with it.) They were people who truly knew and dwelled in, worked on and investigated the environments about which McColley, Milton and Marvell have written.

It is tiresome, for instance, to see John Wilkins’ artificial language repeatedly wheeled out to be flogged. John Ray, who worked on the project with Wilkins, acknowledged the flawed logic of its inductive reasoning: ‘What possible hope was there that a method of that sort would be satisfactory, and not manifestly imperfect and ridiculous? I frankly and openly admit that it was.’ It was a venture, and it failed. To contrast an attempt to tabulate linguistic units with the delicate filigree of poetic lexica wrought over lifetimes by Milton, Marvell, and others, seems wrong-headed and demeaning on both sides. To imply that Wilkins’ language is exemplary of the crack-brained schemes of the early Royal Society is simply wrong. Many of the gentlemen of the early Royal Society, as indeed McColley has shown, dedicated their lives to profoundly eco-sensitive and meaningful research. (Some of them are good writers, too.) While McColley’s argument that we can learn much from an attentiveness to our oikos expressed so beautifully by these poets rings true, nonetheless, the question of whose ‘version’ of the environment genuinely engenders understanding remains a vexed one.

Daisy Hildyard

 

Leave a Comment

Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think

November 16, 2009 at 5:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility, Scott Slovic (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008)

Scott Slovic is on a world mission to spread the word about ecocriticism and support emergent ASLE groups in all parts of the world. I received this book from him at the second ecocriticism conference to be held in China, where he told me that Africa is his next objective. This book collects essays either written away from home on such trips, or written for such far-flung conferences. It will already be clear that I am implicated in the first of two reservations I have about this book which I’ll air first.

Despite references to gas-guzzling SUVs, the issue of flying and ecocritical responsibility is answered simply by adopting the idea of ‘making it count’. I’ve stopped flying to the US ASLE conferences, but I’m writing this in Spain and I’m all too conscious that I’ve got to do better in this respect. This issue is not on the agenda of a book with this environmentally compromised title and it ought to be.

Second, Slovic’s all-inclusive approach to ecocritical dialogue is not extended to those who have rocked the boat most severely. Dana Phillips’ book The Truth of Ecology is a ‘grave failure’ of ‘witty slander’, and Michael Cohen’s essay ‘The Blues in the Green’ is dismissed as a ‘rant’, whilst William Cronon’s seminal essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ produces the amazing statement: ‘Sometimes it’s simply best for academics to stay in their offices and chatter to each other’. These spectacular home-goals confirm the criticism from Phillips and Cohen of complacency in the ecocritical establishment. Here, surely, engagement rather than retreat was called for.

In other respects this book does contain some radical stuff. More than once there is discussion of the failure of ecocritics to engage successfully with scientists and policy-makers. This culminates in an account of the failure of a gathering of such people to agree upon a press release from a millennium conference in Mexico City in January 2000. Some were uneasy with the discourse of ‘resistance’ and all disagreed on the priorities needed, claiming their own field as a higher form of concern (e.g. human poverty v endangered species; high-tech v low-tech solutions). Visits to India resulted in a correspondence with the Coca-Cola company about their privatisation of water resources for commercial production.

Nearer to home there are essays on ‘Gated Mountains’ and ‘Ecocriticism on and After 9/11’, plus a reflection on colleagues at his own university’s stem cell research. There are interesting thoughts about why the evidence of human-induced climate change has not resulted in life-style change and how to position the elegiac quality of much environmental concern. Throughout the book the author examines his own position, situating his own narrative in relation to those he is engaging. Thus this becomes a key text for references to ‘narrative scholarship’, the term which Slovic invented and offered to Ian Marshall to develop in Story Line (1998) and Peak Experiences (2003). Both Slovic and I thought that supporting ecocriticism in China, of all places, was important work and seeing Slovic in action one has to admit that, as the grace of these essays testifies, he does it well.

Terry Gifford

 

Leave a Comment

Can Fiction Save the Planet, Andrew Liston

November 16, 2009 at 5:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature. The Challenge of Ecocriticism, Axel Goodbody

(Palgrave, Macmillan 2008)

 

The central question of Axel Goodbody’s new book is whether literature can do anything for the ecological lobby. Goodbody’s topic is littérature engagée. He finds it in a wealth of examples stretching from the late 18th century, with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, to the 21st century, but his principle focus is the 20th century, and the subject matter is appropriately chosen for this diverse century. The works he assesses present a growing disquiet with the implications of the Enlightenment (principally Goethe), urban alienation in the wake of industrialization (Georg Kaiser), a Heideggerian reassessment of human relationships with environments (Oskar Loerke and Johannes Bobrowski), a yearning for a closer knowledge of the natural world (Otto Alscher and Horst Stern), and urban green utopian vision (Paul Gurk and Günter Seuren).

Goodbody’s work stands on its own. There are good reasons why Germans themselves avoid assessing their own green literature: Blut und Boden means that a lot of ecological writing reeks of Fascism. This attitude is changing, slowly, but still there is little to compare to Nature, Technology and Cultural Change. The other reason why the book is unusual is that ecological ideas only found a wide base of support from the early 70s onwards, and thus most ecocritical reviews tend to focus on the last 30-40 years. The major exception to this is the work of the Böhme brothers, which provides Goodbody with his conclusion: “Nature as a Cultural Project”. However, in the English language, nobody has so far set out to map the development of ecological ideas within German literature from Goethe to now.

That Goodbody succeeds in his endeavour is due firstly to his exhaustive scholarship. His breadth of reading means that Nature, Technology and Cultural Change is the perfect handbook for anyone engaged in analysing ecocritical writing in German. This is helped by his clarity: for example, even passages from notoriously tortuous writers, such as Adorno and Heidegger, seem almost lucid with his explanations. We also discover a range of possible answers (from different critics) to the question posed by my title. Literature can be seen metaphorically as ecology in that it evolves without design just as the biological world evolves without design (Peter Finke and Hubert Zapf). Apparently, literature can help us realise the full import of what we might rationally know but do not feel.  Alternatively, according to Odo Marquard, literature can be seen as compensation, cushioning the impact of rationalisation. Another value of the work is the foregrounding of little-read authors, such as Otto Alscher. Being a rabid Nazi, Alscher is perhaps unsurprisingly unpopular in contemporary Germany. Unfazed, Goodbody draws attention to Alscher’s ecologically important message of interaction and knowledge of our natural environment.

The book is not without its faults: the chapter on hunting is an uncharacteristically subjective rant. Faced with a wealth of literary and other cultural examples of the bloodthirstiness of humankind, Goodbody strains to interpret these as conditioning rather than reflection. What’s more, he wanders into conjecture about the psychology of hunter-gatherers, condemns Western hunters outright, and adopts a paternalistic attitude towards primitive hunters. But to concentrate too heavily on this aberration would be to do an injustice to a first rate piece of scholarship which investigates in depth the problematic and at times contradictory human attitudes towards nature. A quotation used by Goodbody sums this up concisely: “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is happy to salt away its pork. What is significant [...] is that the 2 statements [...] are connected by an and and not by a but.”

Andrew Liston

Leave a Comment

Review 3

June 1, 2009 at 11:34 am · Filed under Reviews

British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730-1837, Bridget Keegan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

It’s a mark of how far ecocriticism has developed that Bridget Keegan can produce an assessment of mostly eighteenth-century labouring-class poetry largely based on environmentally critical criteria, confident that her argument will be appreciated by period specialists and ecocritics alike. And although this book is aimed at specialists I would recommend it as an interesting comment on modern poetic and ecocritical conventions as well as on eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry. Keegan demonstrates that these poets can sustain the same sort of analysis applied by, for example, Jonathan Bate to Wordsworth, and effectively influence and expand the environmental literary canon.

Bridget Keegan has contributed significantly to this in her survey of a wide variety of poets, examining how non-human nature is experienced by labouring-class writers. She uses the elemental worlds of water, earth and wood as thematic structures for her discussion and elucidation of the labourerís relationship to poetic ambition, social order and political engagement. She has added to the evaluation of comparatively well known poets like Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, placing them continually in the poetic landscape familiar to us (that of Pope and Coleridge, for example), and has also introduced unfamiliar and interesting writers such as the Tees-side poet Anne Wilson, author of Teisa, and William Falconer, whose ‘popular epic’ The Shipwreck influenced ‘polite artists’, as Keegan calls them, as diverse as Byron and Turner. A thematic approach enables her to avoid the most obvious pitfalls of writing about labouring-class writing, namely that critics spend too long writing about the labouring and the class.

Her chosen writers are fairly fluidly grouped into elemental chapters, meaning that Keegan can reference Pope, Thomson or Cowper and still maintain the status of her nominated poet in that theme. Thus, the importance of rivers, ‘poetically and otherwise’ [98], as Keegan comments, can be illustrated by Pope’s Windsor Forest, but is amplified and argued by those closer to the water, Anne Wilson and John Clare among them. This technique permits a comprehensive discussion, drawing in the poets’ backgrounds, some detailed and fascinating analysis of their work in relation to the subject and establishing the poet in his or her contemporary niche, assuming they had one. Keegan can also engage present-day critical debate effectively because she can target the theme without having to be too writer-specific. So, although this is a small book – only about 200 pages – it is ambitious, covering the regional environments of these poets alongside ‘ways of thinking about the human place in nature’ [9], as she says, even hoping to deepen ‘our understanding of the history of environmental literature’ [192]. With sustainability and exploitation of human and non-human nature always in mind, Keegan can explore the more orthodox end of the debate, in her chapters on Bloomfield and eighteenth-century farming practices, or James Woodhouse’s resistance to garden elitism, in terms familiar to some readers: ‘engrossments and emparkments’ [39], and the moral imperative behind much eighteenth-century georgic, Christian stewardship; an ‘ethic of care and the compromises needed’ to make it work [23]. However, from Woodhouse onwards we begin to appreciate more closely how the thematic structure of the book – gardens, ‘prospects’, rivers and fens, the sea and woods – enables Keegan to emphasise the importance of experience in this poetry, which spoke to contemporary audiences and continues to impress us today with what she occasionally refers to as ‘modern’ environmental insight.

Keegan makes it clear that the proximity of ‘nature’ for a labouring poet didn’t make them any more environmentally minded than it would a middle-class poet [67-8]; however, proximity allowed these poets to demonstrate a different aesthetic response from the conventional ‘prospect’, pastoral/georgic, or nationalist/imperialist view. This is particularly obvious in the poetry of, for example, Ann Yearsley writing about her ‘prospects’ at Clifton Hill in Bristol, or Anne Wilson, who refuses locodescriptive convention in a ‘narrative of loss and disintegration of the feminine within the landscape’ [113]. Establishment poetry, much like other aesthetic responses to nature, privileged the visual over other senses. Keegan demonstrates how these poets were able, by virtue of their lack of any establishment, to evoke all the senses. Clare, especially, ‘engages sound, touch and even smell and taste’ [160], especially in his representation of an unstable landscape, the fens, ‘neither water nor earth’ [150], (and it could be argued that all labouring-class writing presents variations on a theme of stability). However, Keegan also offers poetic examples of the moral virtues of drainage – we are allowed to draw our own conclusions as she is always careful to point out how our ecocentric sensibilities would not let us dwell comfortably in early nineteenth-century farmland. In fact, if this book has a flaw it is that perhaps Keegan is too careful to remind us that we are no longer part of this poetic world, and frequently pulls up on some detail, especially with regard to the piety of a number of these poems, that might offend modern conventions. I’m inclined to wonder how much this matters – if we are to gain any insight, as Keegan has clearly demonstrated, and to apply that insight to our understanding of modern writing (and what is already becoming conventional in ecocriticism), then we need to be a bit more robust in our reading. Perhaps she is too kind to her readers: although she quotes Michael Branch’s encouragement to engage sympathetically with ‘those who came before us’ [5], Keegan doesn’t quite trust our willingness to do this – although her own passion and delight in this poetry shines through many pages. And although this is an ambitious and unusual approach to labouring-class poetry, Keegan’s humility is part of her delight – she is often in awe of their considerable achievements without any patronising. Her enthusiasm brings the writers to life, especially noticeable in those areas which cover the extreme and unfamiliar – the sea, ultimate instability for humankind, for example. She also manages, in this chapter, to link georgic ‘terms of art’ (nautical language) with Romantic sublimity and post-colonial politics – no mean feat. Bridget Keegan’s book is a thoughtful expression of considerable research, great love of the subject and sensitive critical insight, and should be required reading as a example of how environmental criticism can apply to any period, and probably any poet.

Sue Edney
Bath Spa University

Leave a Comment

Review 2

June 1, 2009 at 11:33 am · Filed under Reviews

‘What is the Earthly Paradise?’: Ecocritical Responses to the Caribbean, Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville (eds), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007

It may be that there is no other region in the world more dramatically affected by imperialism, migration, tourism, natural disasters or environmental degradation than the Caribbean Archipelago. Antonio Benítez-Rojo fittingly describes the birth of ‘the Atlantic’ as the result of ‘the copulation of Europe ―that insatiable solar bull― with the Caribbean archipelago […] all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth of the Atlantic: Columbus, Cabral, Cortés, de Soto, Hawkins, Drake’ (The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Durham:  Duke University Press, 1996: 5). Given this background, it is not surprising that there should be a growing number of publications dealing with the Caribbean environment, as well as increasing ecocritical discussions of the region. Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville’s volume aims to contribute to this flourishing debate by providing a double, interdisciplinary, focus.

Prefaced by David Dabydeen, writer and professor in The Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, What is the Earthly Paradise? comprises two sections. “Development: Environment in Practice” examines several environmental issues and developments such as conservation biology, ecotourism or ghettoisation. “Responses: Literature and Environment” discusses cultural responses to the Caribbean environment in the work of such well-known writers as V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Samuel Selvon, Patrick Chamoiseau, N.D. Williams, Shani Mootoo or Ramabai Espinet.  This double focus distinguishes the volume’s uniqueness, as well as its riskiness. The strong literary nature of Part II contrasts sharply with the more interdisciplinary character of the essays in Part I.  These diverse materials fail to forge a cogent narrative of the place of the Caribbean in ecocriticism and environmental studies, though maybe this is too precocious a demand given the newness of this field of inquiry.  Perhaps the most effective essays are those which are interdisciplinary within themselves, namely journalist Polly Pattullo’s ‘Beach, Bush, and Beautification: Tourism and the Environment in Dominica’ and geographer David Howard’s ‘A “Welcoming Planet”? Urban Literary Environments and the “Ghetto” in Kingston, Jamaica’, which combine discussions of literary and non-literary texts with ease. Thus, Pattullo compares tourists’ responses to Dominica’s wildness with those of Jean Rhys’s characters in Wide Sargasso Sea, Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s in The Orchid House, and with Rhys’s own reflections in her unfinished autobiography Smile Please.  Howard highlights the importance of literary representations in people’s understanding of space, examining a wide range of literary depictions of the Kingston ghetto.  The literary section of the volume favours first-generation male canonical authors of the Anglophone Caribbean. A more representative sample would include the work of younger authors from the Caribbean diaspora, since contemporary Caribbean writing also thrives in places like Toronto.

In its analysis of the relationship between the environment, culture, and literature, this collection of essays will appeal to a wide audience. It is a welcome contribution to the ecocritical study of the Caribbean and should stimulate further research in this field.

Lourdes López Ropero, University of Alicante, Spain

Leave a Comment

Review 1

June 1, 2009 at 11:27 am · Filed under Reviews

Louisa Gairn, Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) £50.00

This is a wide-ranging study that is rooted in a Scottish notion of ecology  – the holism of James Hutton’s notion of the earth as a ‘superorganism’ (1785), and Patrick Geddes’ use of the term ‘biocentric’ (1898). The ‘democratic’ empathy for animals in the poetry of Burns, carried in pocket of John Muir about the canyons, meadows and mountains of Yosemite, feeds into Muir’s ultimate notion of a ‘democratic’ National Park (still a controversial notion as applied to the Highlands). The richness of the Scottish weavings of science and literature before modern literature is hinted at here, but awaits another book to two.

Louisa Gairn’s focus is in tracing lines that lead out of Victorian explorations of the significance of Scottish land to the Scottish imagination in the work of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, via ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’s earth lyrics’, Edwin Muir’s and George Mackay Brown’s resistances to modernity’s displacements, the regional novels of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd, and the ‘delirium’ of realism in the Gaelic poetry of Duncan Ban MacIntyre, to the work of Kenneth White, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Findlay and the more ecologically self-conscious projects of John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Alan Warner. Gairn’s argument is that ‘Scottish literature constitutes a distinctive heritage of ecological thought which is both vitally relevant to international environmentalism and central to Scottish culture’.

What is gained through Gairn’s lively comparative approach is a refining of ecocritical concepts derived from a particularly distinctive intellectual debate. All of her imaginative writers have interesting things to say about the debates extending beyond their work. In this respect all ecocritics would gain from this book by being introduced, for example, to John Veitch’s The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry (1887), Kenneth White’s International Institute for Geopoetics (1989), Jamie’s notion of poetry as ‘a line of defence .. against the ecological threat’ (2001), or Burnside’s exemplification of Heidegger’s techne. An interesting feature of this book is the way its range of reference also connects it outwards as well as richly inwards, with ideas from Americans Emerson, Leopold, Cason, Snyder, Solnit and Leo Marx redefined in a Scottish context where land is always politically complex in its cultural as well as its physical presence.

I still am not convinced that George Mackay Brown’s work offers some kind of resistance to modernism’s alienations by retreating into an idealised past, although I accept that celebrations of Orkney life in the present may be argued as partially achieving this. In this respect the more complex poetry of Shetland’s Jen Hadfield may be a space for ecocritics to watch. One could easily argue that Sorely Maclean’s work deserves a chapter to itself, but that would be to simply acknowledge that there are many more books to be quarried out of the broad ground identified by this one. One day the work of David Craig will be recognised as of great ecocritical significance to his homeland. But these quibbles aside, this is an important and lively book for UK ecocriticism on the international stage, announcing a new generation of culturally rooted ecocritics. I just wish they could be a bit more evaluative in sifting the weak from the strong, the sentimental from the complex pastoral.

Terry Gifford

Leave a Comment

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.