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
