THE POETRY OF EARTH

THE POETRY OF EARTH

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

By John Keats

The Poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead

In summer luxury,—he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

The poetry of Earth is never dead, wrote John Keats in 1816. And poetry has not only lived up to the claim, it is more vital to us than it has ever been. Can poetry save the Earth? The Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate made the claim in The Song of the Earth that poetry could save the world. He may well be right. By Earth, I do not mean the planet, which will go on for as long as the sun continues to shine. I mean the natural world, of which we are both a part of and apart from, dependent and independent beings in ambiguous relation to our earthly home. ‘If poems touch our full humanness, can they quicken awareness and bolster respect for this ravaged resilient earth we live on? Can poems help, when the times demand environmental science and history, government leadership, corporate and consumer moderation, non-profit activism, local initiatives? Why call on the pleasures of poetry, when the time has come for an all-out response?’

Poetry is the music in nature. A poem may succeed in tuning your ears and turning your mind’s eye toward the music in the garden, the goodness in the world, and lead you to a future that is worth living in. The birds' song is poetry, and when, in the hot summer, the birds ‘hide in cooling trees’, the grasshoppers take over. We still have Poetry. We still have music. But the times are getting hotter… we need to hear nature’s music.

In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Here’s hoping. There are no finer lines to portray a complex, interlinked and multilayered society united by the devotion to the common good than those written by Dante as he describes the order of Paradise in The Comedy. Here, Dante portrays a society which achieves harmony by assigning all stations and valuing all activities according to the common end. The parts derive their significance and their character from the place they occupy within the whole, articulating such a unity of purpose in their interimbrication that they form seamlessly within the whole.

The problem is that, in a culture of separation and specialization, ‘the old union of beauty, goodness and truth is broken’, in the words of poet and critic Wendell Berry.

The world, which seems,

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, 'Dover Beach'

In our own time, humankind has destroyed wooded plains and valleys, polluted the seas and the rivers, poisoned the land and the air, damaged the hydrogeological and atmospheric systems, built on green spaces, and inflicted uncontrolled forms of urbanisation and industrialisation upon the land. To use an image employed by the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri in The Comedy, ('Paradise', XXII, 151), humankind has through ‘foul usury’ humiliated the Creation, that flower-bed that is our God given dwelling. For Dante, ‘despising Nature and her goodness’ is a violence against God. (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, and Inferno, canto XI, lines 46-48 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).There is nothing in the Bible which entitles human beings to exterminate or destroy or hold in contempt anything on Earth, quite the contrary. We may use the gifts of nature but have no right to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need but have no right to do any more than that. The Bible forbids usury and condemns great accumulations of property. As Dante argues, ‘the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere.’ (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XI, lines 109-11.) By taking more than we are entitled to, we are destroying our place within Creation and, as a result, are destroying our own Being.

Books on Dante have titles like Dante's Path (Schaub 2003) and The Soul’s Journey (Jones 1995), highlighting Dante’s emphasis on life as a journey, a path we must travel, however uncertain the terrain. 'In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood'. In these first two lines, Dante speaks in the first person, but speaks to all of us embarked on life’s journey. Dante’s Comedy tells the tale of a pilgrim who, lost in the darkness a wood, journeys forth to see the light of beatitude. The poem charts the ascent of mind, body and soul from the lower regions of egoistic desire to the height of the universal realm. The journey is a personal journey but is also a universal theme. Dante aims to convert those men and women who have strayed from the path and who are lost without hope in the dark woods of despair. So, of course, at a time of encroaching environmental threat, Dante is timely. (Critchley 2013).

‘It’s time for action!’ Will we do it?

The future is always uncertain. I am sceptical of all determinisms, biological, environmental, economic and ecological. I affirm the capacity of human beings to act as creative, knowledgeable and moral change agents to act in the historical process and make a difference for the better. Whilst such a view falls short of espousing the radical indeterminacy of the future, it does recognise the extent to which life is a creation.

There are no guarantees. We will make the path to journey’s end only by walking. And along the way, we will have to confront inequalities in power and resources, and the structures which generate those inequalities, and the acquisitive self-maximising individuals, the corporations and the governments who personify those structures. In the process, we replace the pecuniary motives which currently dominate human interaction with more gregarious and generous motives.

The Unfolding Cosmos

Felicity as the goal and natural term of all life The ‘comedy’ to which Dante’s Commedia refers is a happy end. We can see happiness as the end of all living things. The diversity of ways in which this idea has been presented has led to scepticism as to whether happiness is a meaningful term at all. Even worse, happiness can neither be measured nor quantified, the most heinous crime of all a world dominated by rational calculation. I would refer here to Aristotle’s eudaimonia as flourishing and well-being. Also relevant is Spinoza’s joy. For Spinoza, the wise and free person will avoid pain and aim necessarily ‘to act well and to rejoice’ (‘bene agere ac laetari’). To act well is fully to enjoy oneself, and fully to enjoy oneself is to act well: ‘there cannot be too much joy: it is always good: but melancholy is always bad’ (E Pt IV Prop XLII). The life of the free being is characterised by pleasure as conscious well-being and enjoyed activity, as distinct from particular pleasures in the limited sense of titillatio, pleasures which, in excess, disturb the balance and well-being of the whole organism.

Spinoza wrote of the need to develop ‘adequate ideas’, transcending our passive and unreflective dependence on sensory perception, the fallible workings of memory, imagination, language, and other such contingent, error-prone sources of ‘inadequate ideas’, in order to contemplate everything sub specie aeternitatis. This seems to demand an austerely intellectual appreciation of the world that seems more than, or less than, human. It demands too much of human beings, and too little.

The visionary materialism of William Blake

Kathleen Raine takes heart from an awareness that, at last, the assump­tions of materialism that have long dominated the modern Western world are being increasingly questioned and overthrown. According to another view — and we must remember that this is the view the Eastern world, in various forms, has held over mil­lennia — ‘nature’ is a system of appearances whose ground is con­sciousness itself. Science measures the phenomena which we perceive, and which Indian philosophical systems call maya. Maya has sometimes been termed illusion, but it is, more exactly, appear­ances. Blake used the word ‘visions’: this world, he wrote, ‘is one continued vision of fancy or imagination.’ But if the materialist premises are reversed, then ‘reality’ is not material fact but meaning itself. And it follows that in those civilizations grounded on this premise—our own included, up to the Renaissance—the arts, as expressions of the value-systems of a culture, have been held in high regard as expressions of knowledge of the highest order. Is not our human kingdom in its very nature a universe of meanings and values?For these are inherent in life itself, as such, the Vedantic sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss: being is consciousness, and the third term ananda (bliss) is the ultimate value of being and con­sciousness. We are made for beatitude, as the theologians would say; Freud, indeed, said something not dissimilar when he spoke of the fundamental nature of ‘the pleasure principle’ as the goal all seek. Plotinus wrote of ‘felicity’ as the goal and natural term of all life, and attributed it not only to man and animals but to plants also. Beatitude—felicity—is not an accident of being and consciousness: it is our very nature to seek, and to attain, joy; and it is for the arts to hold before us images of our eternal nature, through which we may awaken to, and grow towards, that reality which is our humanity itself.

Raine in McDonald 2003 173

Poet, artist and visionary William Blake defended this view of underlying reality in the teeth of the materialism of the scientific and industrial revolutions: ‘all that I see is vision’, he said, ‘to me this world is one con­tinued vision of imagination.’ Blake could be dismissed as an unrealistic poet and artist, except that he was on strong metaphysical ground, writing of the living sun:

‘What,’ it will be Questioned, ‘When the Sun rises, do you not see A round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning A Sight. I look thro' it and not with it.

Keynes, ed. 1966 617.

Blake sees the spiritual and aesthetic qualities of plants and objects within Nature’s interconnected and seamless web of life. Blake’s poems allow clods of mud and pebbles to speak and flowers to feel. Blake's ecological sensibility here stands in complete contrast to those who lack the vision to see any horizon beyond this fallen world of callous cash payment, those who can see only with the eyes of the miser, for whom ‘a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way’ (793).

‘I look thro' it and not with it.’ Blake looks ‘through and not with’ the eye. Plato also looked through and not with the eye. The innumerable multitude of beings, being themselves rather than objects in a lifeless mech­anism, can only do the same. The world is not dead matter but ‘an epiphany of life which not only has, but is, being, consciousness and bliss?’ The real is, ultimately, not an object but a Person. Raine explains what this means: ‘A "Person" in this sense not by a human act of personification of something in its innate reality neither living nor conscious; but rather human "persons" are a manifestation in multitude of the single Person of Being itself, from which consciousness and meaning are inseparable, these being innate qualities of life itself, as such.’ (Raine 2011).

This refers to ‘life’ not as a property of matter, but life as experienced.

In his holistic approach to nature, Blake comes close to the positions of contemporary ecologists and the emphasis upon the interdependence and interconnection of all things, unity in diversity and organic growth. More than this, Blake offers a perspective on the re-enchantment of the world. If we can go beyond our five senses and cleanse the doors of perception, then we will see that 'everything that lives is Holy'. (Blake, Complete Writings, pp.777, 379,149,160). This encapsulates Blake's total vision of reality. Everything that lives is holy not because we choose to think it so, but because it is intrinsically holy. The holy cannot be defined, only experienced as the ultimate knowledge of consciousness. ‘Within the scope of human experience there are degrees of knowledge and value, self-authenticating, of which those who have reached the farthest regions tell us, the vision of the holy, and the beatitude of that vision is the highest term.’ (Raine 2011). And it is because of this that Blake's stars and grains of sand can say no other than ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Here, we are beyond a narrowly intellectual appreciation of the world. As Raine concludes, this is not poetic fancy: it is the profoundest knowledge. The vision contained in the mind’s eye is realised by freeing the sensuous imagination to play upon reality as a field of potentialities:

. . . the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 187).

How deeply we are mired in duality becomes clear in our concerns to restore the connection between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. Through our disconnection from nature, we have become bifurcated personalities. The externalization of nature is a consequence of what Blake called the ‘wrenching apart’ of the appar­ently external world from the unity of the wholeness of being.

And Los, round the dark globe of Urizen,

Kept watch for Eternals to confine

The obscure separation alone ;

For Eternity stood wide apart,

As the stars are apart from the earth.

Los wept, howling around the dark Demon,

And cursing his lot ; for in anguish

Urizen was rent from his side,

And a fathomless void for his feet,

And intense fires for his dwelling.

But Urizen laid in a stony sleep,

Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity.

The Eternals said : "What is this? Death.

"Urizen is a clod of clay."

Los howl'd in a dismal stupor,

Groaning, gnashing, groaning,

Till the wrenching apart was healed.

But the wrenching of Urizen heal'd not.

Cold, featureless, flesh or clay,

Rifted with direful changes,

He lay in a dreamless night,

Till Los rouz'd his fires, affrighted

At the formless, unmeasurable death.

Blake, The First Book of Urizen 223

‘This has created an unhealed wound in the soul of modern Western man, leaving nature soulless and lifeless, and the inner world abstracted from the natural universe, its proper home.’ (Raine 2011).

That wound can be healed. We are now coming to appreciate the fact that we are active members in a ceaselessly creative universe. We can overcome our abstraction from the natural universe and see our true place within it. This is more than the intellectual appreciation of some impersonal necessity. We are active co-creators of this creative universe; the world is always in some way humanly objective, infused with will, purpose, consciousness and choice.

'Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership'.

- E. M. Forster

Soil, Soul and Society

We have the capacity to live life to the full, to find like-minded people, to hear the music quicken and to make community. If humankind is to have any hope of changing the world, we must constantly work to strengthen community. We need, first, to make community with the soil, to learn how to revere the Earth. That means walking lightly in the demands we make of life, sufficiency rather than surplus, quality rather than quantity. Second, we need to make community of human society. We need to learn empathy and respect for one another simply so that people get the love they need. That means developing an inclusive sense of belonging, identity and values. And third, we need community of the soul. We need spaces where we can rest, compose and compost our inner stuff and become more deeply present to the aliveness of life. We need to keep one eye to the ground and the other to the stars. We need to remember that when we let loose our wildness in creativity, it is [spirit] that pours forth. It does so from within, as a never-ending river. This tripartite understanding of community is the root, trunk and branch of right relationship. It is how love becomes incarnate.

Alastair McIntosh

POETRY AND ECOLOGY

Notes for A Poetics of Earth

Come away o human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy hand-in-hand For the world's more full of weeping Than you can understand

W. B. YEATS

Symbols and Images: Water, Wind, Moon

Drawing on the history, philosophy and ethics of ecofeminism, it examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic landscapes in young adult fiction reflect contemporary attitudes towards eco-crisis and human responsibility. Identifying the neoliberal discourses of individualism and self-advancement that 'feminise' categories lying outside the parameters of the adult white male, it explores the ways in which contemporary young adult authors attempt to develop a sustainable ethic of care that can encompass 'feminised' peoples and spatialities, including nonhumans and the environment. With particular reference to the ways in which global processes are mapped onto the local landscape, it advocates a poetics of earth to replace the disengaged planetary consciousness often engendered through crisis. This study lays forth various transformative responses to eco-crisis at a time of escalating global concern over the environment.

A 'Poetics of Planet': Apocalypse and Our Post-Natural Future

A Poetics of Earth: Ecofeminist Spiritualities

Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism: The Embodied, Embedded Hybrid

The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century.

Planetary Poetics

The Possibility of Cyberplacelessness

Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality:

Ecocriticism in Rabindranath Tagore’s Red Oleanders and Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil

Ecocriticism is believed to be the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. It is considered as an intentionally broad approach which is known by other names also like: green (cultural) studies, ecopoetics and environmental literary criticism.

So it means that ecocritics try to investigate such thing which has the underlying ecological values and concern. They are interested in finding the meaning of the word nature in a precise way and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race. They want the depiction of environmental issues of the current scenario in popular culture and modern literature. So for this they were very much concern and they consider other discipline such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology, to be possible contributors to ecocriticism.

So, Rabindranath Tagore and Knut Hamsun in their works have shown a fine example of it. Tagore in Red Oleander and Hamsun in Growth of the Soil condemns those who would make an end out of the means of wealth accumulation.

While Tagore being a philosopher poet has expressed a poetic romanticism in Red Oleander and Hamsun being a leader of neo-romantic revolt had embraced a georgic rootedness in Growth of the Soil. Both the writers are similar in their opinion in regard to the mis-use of the mines by the industrialist. They have used mining to demonstrate the ill-effects of resource exploitation by the human beings. Both are strong critiques of capitalist exploitation. They are more concern for moral consequences than material gains. Being a scholar of literature, they have tried to fulfil their moral & social responsibility towards the society by showing their concerns for the environment in their works.

Though the development of science and technology has benefited us a lot but it has led man astray from nature. Modern world is devoid of peace, harmony and people lead a self-centred existence by conducting nuclear wars unaware of their identity. Moreover, global terrorism and mental stress especially in European nations are common phenomena. This paper discusses on how Tagore draws values from western romantic poets and eastern ideals to develop his concept of romanticism that calls for human solidarity, spiritual unity, individual freedom and urges to offer vent for passion, imagination and perception. Attempt has also been made to elucidate Tagore‟s Romanticism by citing his poems, essays, lectures and a collection of other Bengali writing‟s that focuses on returning men back to their original residence i.e. nature, evoking the spirit of love among individuals, glorification of beauty ,restoring peace and harmony and recognition of truth that an Universal soul exists in each one of us thereby aiming to create equality among mankind, curb violence and hatred and construct unity amidst diversity by breaking demarcations and thwarting discrimination.

The Persistence of Romanticism in Contemporary World Literature

The immense space of the supersensible

. . . is filled for us with dark night.

— Immanuel Kant

The Romantics’ love for nature is deeply rooted in their ideology of pantheism; in their firm belief in the ‘spirit that impels/ All thinking things’ situated at the heart of nature. It is the conviction in the existence of this ‘spirit’ especially in the moments of elevated consciousness that makes Derozio claim “...we not only saw/But felt the moonlight around us.” Arthur Lovejoy in “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” links the “typical manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism” with “losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature”. It is this very “ecstatic contemplation” that makes Wordsworth write “My heart leaps up/When I behold a rainbow” in the sky; the very rainbow that underlines a “world rich with colour and sound, redolent with fragrance” as opposed to “a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.” This is precisely why imagination becomes so intrinsically important to romanticism to overcome and go beyond the repressive chains of reason.

And then he and Keats agreed that he had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colours”. This idea is clearly manifested through Blake’s protest against his oppressive Urizenic chains. He paints his ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ with exotic spiral patterns and the urizenic. Coleridge perceives nature as the extension or externalization of the symbols of his own mind. Many of Coleridge’s poems follow the circular structure where the mundane and the everyday is overcome by means of a romantic transcendence in the state of an elevated consciousness which is followed by a return to the starting point; the cyclical structure does not mark the erasure of the escapist journey and the return is marked by a changed, rejuvenated self by means of this transcendence.

But written during the early years of Cold War, the short-story records the ever-growing use of machines in human civilization and predicts the possibility when machines instead of being governed by man will enslave us instead. The Matrix trilogy upholds this reverted situation. Matrix shows a world ruled by machines where the humans are marginalized. The machines have not annihilated the human race because they serve as good batteries for the machines. In the world of Matrix ‘nature’ is an unheard of concept, the world has become nothing but a huge mechanical being.

The mechanical has completed the divorce between man and nature. The strong attachment to the mechanical has largely eliminated the love for nature from the human mind.

The Romantic obsession with nature got diluted as the rise of industrialisation underlined the importance of machines and shifted the focus from nature to the urbane. Violence towards nature is only a shocking by-product of this shifted focus; it is a distressing phenomenon that lies at the polar extremity of this transition and lets loose the forces of environmental degradation.

This paper attempts to look at Margret Atwood‟s Surfacing (1972) which happens to be one of her widely read works via one of the concept of sense of place.

Sense of place is said to be defined as the identity, significance, meaning, and intention of felt value that are given to places by individuals (Pred 1983) as a result of experiencing it over time (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). Sense of place is said to have two distinctive meanings within the purview of geography. It is sometimes seen from the standpoint of a place "that is memorable or distinctive, having a high image ability" (Lynch 1960, 1972), or it could, therefore, be seen as more commonly, that is viewed as “the consciousness that people themselves have of places, that possess a particular significance for them, either personal or shared” (Gregory 1991: 425).

Dwelling in a place can be said to be a Dwelling in a place can be said to be a prerequisite to really have a good sense of place, though we can admire a place from a distance, but the connection will be well achieved when International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 16(1) (2014) 31-38

we dwell in the place where we are connected with. According to Heidegger, “to dwell is to preserve things in their peace, to spare them actively from anything that might disturb them that might make them different from what they are” (qtd. in Hay 2002: 160). It becomes therefore imperative at this junction to state here, in other to keep a place, you as an individual has a great sense towards, certain criteria that should be fulfilled. One of the responsibilities is sparing, which is “tolerance for places in their own essence a willingness to leave places and not try to exploit them” (Relph, 1976: 39).

It has, therefore, become very glary that the interconnection between place, the individual and society, and goes beyond the interaction with the physical landscape and those who share the physical space as it was. This has, therefore, made geographers to assert that sense of place operation is intertwined within three dimensions:

firstly, The perceptual realm of awareness, attitudes and memories;

secondly, The emotional realm of feelings preferences, and values; and thirdly, The experiential realm of bodily and sensory contacts, insider/ outsider, and journeys It is an individually based, but group informed, localized, personal means of relating to the world, transforming mere space into personal space (Hay 1988: 160).

Home, within this light could be seen as a good example of a conscious place-full -ness, which is having a strong sense of being in place. It exemplifies the “internal knowledge – knowledge of emotion, knowledge of the heart – that comprises sense of place” (Raffan 1993: 4). Home place also establishes a source of reference from which judgments may be made. Tuan describes this as: “Security we are attached to [it]” (3). Thus, there is no place like home. What is home? It is the old homestead, the old neighbourhood, and hometown. He further assert that Love of place, or topophilia “can develop at a grand scale as national identity and even as imperial patriotism, but it can also become manifest at a much more local scale as attachment to neighbourhood or home town” (Simpson-Housley and Norcliffe 1992: 5). Our task is to care for places, “through building or cultivation.” It is only through the act of sparing and caretaking, that the notion of home can be properly realised. Relph states, “This is what it means to dwell, which is for Heidegger, “the essence of human existence” (1976: 39). Thus, Heidegger‟s most significant contribution to the (environmental) concept of home can be seen through his insistence upon the need to live authentically, to be at home, and to take responsibility for the defence of that home in all aspects - human, natural, and the intangible particulars that constitute a place‟s essence. Accordingly, a place about which one feels so deeply must become a field of care - to love and care for a place entails more than mere affectionate regards (or words); it must also come with a sense of responsibility to that place. However, to passively witness the destruction of one‟s home is to fail in one‟s duty to take care for one‟s dwelling place.

Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“The wild has no words”

The modern short lyric as a way of approaching the wordless through images.

This book, entitled The Nature of Poetry: The Environment of Icelandic Poets, is the first ecocritical study of Icelandic nature poetry from the 19th century to the present. It claims that Romantic poets, Each of them develops the nature imagery and environmental concerns voiced by their 19th century predecessors, taking them into new and often inward directions, showing how nature and the environment can be material and subjective at the same time.

The chapter follows the development of nature and environmental poetry up to the present, showing how it addresses contemporary issues, such as the theme of technology, the attachment to places and localities in the country and the city, and environmentalist concerns, which often reflect the Romantic tradition of nature poetry.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) wrote inspiring papers late in life, while living in Schwarzwald (Black Forest), addressing issues which are central to ecocritical thinking. They involve the question of technology, existential ideas on dwelling in the world, and the role of poets and poetry. Heidegger’s ideas are discussed in this chapter and an attempt is made to develop an ecocritical vocabulary in Icelandic corresponding to the German philosopher’s creative way of thinking about and using language. The chapter concludes that even if Heidegger’s legacy is controversial, his ideas should be taken into consideration when discussing the place of poetry in the world and its importance for our dwelling on the earth.

Conservatism and the Intergenerational Imagination

An astute reader of Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt recognized that within Burke’s conservatism lurked an anti- capitalist social ecology: he writes, “To think of reducing all mankind to the same insipid level, seemed to him [Burke] the same absurdity as to destroy the inequalities of surface in a country, for the benefit of agriculture and commerce.” As much as he was opposed to the hierarchical and nationalist aspects of Burke’s work, Hazlitt admires his critique of competitive individualism, particularly the ways in which it reveals how the scramble for privatization, improvement, and profit will irrevocably erode diverse, communal, social ecologies. Like Hazlitt, in my reading of Burkean conservatism, “I do not say that his arguments are conclusive; but they are profound and true, as far as they go” (SW 56). This book argues that Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the beginning of a strand of Romantic political conservatism that is committed to environmental conservation.

Romantic conservative critiques of modernity – found in texts as diverse as poetry, novels, political philosophy, natural history, and agricultural periodicals – all manifest conservative- conservationist reactions against the progressive ideology of capitalist modernity. Like the Reflections, they locate communal futurity in the past by championing localized, customary communities and practices that have been, in Burke’s words, “formed by habit” (R 315). In other words, in a time period when heated political arguments about land use tacked between an ethos of conservation and the desire for conquest,1 the conservative texts taken up in this book all insist that the telos of land should be more complex than just the production of wealth. The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837

Jonathan Bate argues, for example, that the Romantic view explores “the relationship between the Love of Nature and the Love of Mankind and, conversely, between the Rights of Man and the Rights of Nature.”

Although Bate claims that this environmental awareness finally “ transcends the politics of both Paine and Burke,” his insistence that the liberal, individualistic “Rights of Man” are the basis for Romantic environmental thought affirms a largely unchallenged assumption in both Romanticism and in environmental studies: environmental awareness and advocacy is tethered to liberal progressivism and its expanding concept of individual rights.

In order to revise the problematic conflation of liberalism and environmentalism in Romantic studies, I return to the famous political debate that Bate evokes – the one between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the legitimacy of individual rights – in order to explore the environmental ethics implicit in Burke’s conservative position, which is guided by the imagination of intergenerational responsibility when making decisions about culture or land.

However, I take my cue from Fredric Jameson, who has pointed out that “the initial critiques of the nascent world of capitalism emerge on the Right: in this sense, Edmund Burke’s seminal assault on Jacobinism can be read, less as a denunciation of social revolution, than as an anticipatory critique of emergent bourgeois social life.”4

Rather than understanding Romantic conservatives as either unthinkingly defending the status quo or as staunch proponents of industrial capitalism, my claim is that Romantic conservatives view modernity as a threatening break with the past and instead advocate for an imaginative attachment to both past and future generations. The conservative intergenerational imagination impels a substantial environmental ethic that is overlooked by both Romantic and environmental studies. Instead of resorting to our contemporary left/right, democratic/republican political paradigms, or to the often utilized radical/loyalist binary in Romantic scholarship, I analyze political positions as falling into liberal individualist and conservative traditionalist stances.

Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry

Katey Castellano

Romantic literature manifests a nascent ecological consciousness, according to Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, “through its questioning of economic and technological progress and through its utopian aspiration to restore the lost harmony between humans and nature”. Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions humanistic, technological progressivism while emphasizing the interdependence between humans and the non-human world.

In this essay, I return to the famous political debate that Bate evokes—the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the legitimacy of liberal, individual rights—in order to explore the nascent environmental ethics implicit in the debate. After analyzing the ecological and social implications of Burke’s call for an organic society guided by a sense of intergenerational responsibility, I evaluate the intergenerational imagination of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Lyrical Ballads (1798).