Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language [1 ed.] 1558499555, 9781558499553

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ECOPOETICS

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The Language of

Nature, the

Nature of Language

SCOTT KNICKERBOCKER

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ECOPOETICS

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ECOPOETICS

The Language of Nature, the

Nature of Language

sS

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS

Amherst and Boston

Copyright © 2012 by University of Massachusetts Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

LC 2012024396

ISBN 978-1-55849-955-3 (paper); 954-6 (library cloth)

Designed by Sally Nichols

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Garamond Premier

Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Knickerbocker, Scott.

Ecopoetics : the language of nature, the nature of language / Scott Knickerbocker.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55849-955-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-55849-954-6 (library cloth : alk. paper)

1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Nature conservation in literature.

3. Ecocriticism. 4. Philosophy of nature in literature. 5. Ecology in literature.

6. Poetics—History—20th century. I. Title.

PS310.N3K65 2012

811'.50936—dc23 2012024396

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.

To Megan and Rowan Ss

Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense.

—Wallace Stevens, “Variations on a Summer Day”

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language 1

1. Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

19

2. Elizabeth Bishop’s Strange Reality

56

3. Richard Wilbur’s Natural Artifice

84

4. Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

125

Conclusion Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry 159

Notes 187

Works Cited 193

Index 201

vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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y immediate gratitude goes to Karen Ford of the English Depart­ ment at the University of Oregon. She has given my writing more careful, rigorous attention than it has ever received before. Discussing poetry with her—in person and on the page—made this project an invigo­ rating experience. For reading my work and offering their wise and bracing thoughts, I also thank, again at Oregon, Louise Westling, John Gage, Mark Johnson, and William Rossi, and Mark Long of Keene State College. Before I knew John Witte very well, I once looked after his cat, goats, chickens, and rabbits when he was out of town. This led to my interviewing him about his poetry, which led to friendship and “organic formalism,” a crucial part of my conclusion. My parents, Carol and Brad Knickerbocker, sustained me with their unwavering support and enthusiasm for my work; they were often my imagined audience as I wrote. Finally, I give special thanks and dedi­ cate this book to my wife, Megan Dixon, for so often reminding me why I hunger for poetry in the first place, and to my son Rowan Knickerbocker for enlarging my sense of love and providing me with the first words of my introduction. Portions of the introduction appeared previously as “Emily Dickin­ son’s Ethical Artifice,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15.2 (2008): 185–97, reprinted with permission. An earlier version of chapter 4 ix

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Acknowledgments

was published as “‘Bodied Forth in Words’: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics,” College Literature 36.3 (2009): 1–27, reprinted with permission. Portions of the con­ clusion previously appeared as “Organic Formalism and John Witte’s The Hurtling,” KROnline (Summer 2008), reprinted by permission of The Kenyon Review.

ECOPOETICS

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INTRODUCTION The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

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“Zheee?” “Cheee! Chee!” “Shdeee . . . shdeeeeeee.”

M

y thirteen-month-old-son Rowan reaches out from my back to a towering hemlock and attempts to echo my latest denotation, “tree.” I am huffing up the basalt-riddled trail along Multnomah Creek to the top of Larch Mountain, pointing to the flora that I recognize and reciting the common names of wildflowers, ferns, and trees to the boy on my shoul­ ders. His sudden, small utterances into this ancient grove above Oregon’s Columbia Gorge startle me. He can walk but not yet talk, at least not in recognizable English. These sounds, however, are clearly meant to refer, like my “tree” with which they rhyme, to the hemlock whose moss-blanketed bark Rowan pats with his little hand. I am startled to realize that he is sud­ denly engaged in the old human habit of weaving word to world. I am also struck by his actual sounds, aural relatives of “tree” but simultaneously for­ eign—repetition with a difference. The effect of Rowan’s utterances on my perception is curious; as a result of his small strange noises, I experience lan­ guage as raw sound instead of hearing his vocalizations as merely underde­ veloped, inaccurate versions of the “correct” word he will eventually master. His sounds, that is, take on aural heft and are, in my ears, as palpable as the hemlocks around us and basalt beneath us. Rowan nudges language back to its wild origins in my ears. This rematerializing of language, one variety of defamiliarization, is of 1

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course what many poets deliberately attempt: “Poetry creates something of the conditions of hearing (not just listening to) a foreign language—we hear it as language, not music or noise; yet we cannot immediately process its meaning. Another way of saying this is that the poetic function—what Tsur calls ‘the poetic mode of speech perception’—rematerializes language, returns it from ‘speech’ back to ‘sound’; or rather, the poetic mode synthe­ sizes the speech mode of perception and the nonspeech mode of percep­ tion” (Bernstein 18). This description of poetry runs counter to the mimetic assumptions behind most nature writing, in which the text is meant to func­ tion as a mirror held up to nature. Mimesis demands that the author be as faithful as possible to the real world “out there,” beyond the page, which accounts for the dominance of realism as the literary mode of choice for most nature writers. The poets discussed in this book also relate to nature as a powerful source of meaning, although none of them uses language mimeti­ cally. Each of them, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what I term “sensuous poesis,” the process of rematerializing language specifically as a response to nonhuman nature. Their poems undo simple oppositions between humans and nature; sensuous poesis operates from the assump­ tion that humans (and their tools, including language) are both distinct and inseparable from the rest of nature. Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems (to make them seem more natural and supposedly, then, closer to nature), the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice— not for its own sake, but as a way to relate meaningfully to the natural world. Indeed for them, artifice is natural. If the mission of environmentalism is to help us gain a meaningful rela­ tionship with the nonhuman world and to encourage more ecologically ori­ ented behavior, then how does language fit in? Is nature on the other side of language, or can language, despite its mediating function between the human and nonhuman, weave us to nature? Though it is the aim of literary theory to address just such questions about language, much first-wave eco­ criticism (ecological literary criticism), roughly the first ten to fifteen years of its existence as a recognized scholarly field, responded contentiously to other literary theories, especially poststructuralism. This is hardly surprising, since any new school of criticism typically defines itself in opposition to estab­ lished practices. Nonetheless, there are substantive reasons why ecocritics, concerned by the human destruction of the nonhuman world, have resisted an anthropocentric focus on textuality, part of what David Ehrenfeld calls the “arrogance of humanism” in his book by that title. They see their work

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

as curbing the excesses of poststructuralist language theory, in which literary criticism becomes a “hermetically sealed textuality that avoids recognizing the fact that all writing is situated in the socioeconomic and environmental present of its moment of composition, influencing it and being influenced by it” (Scigaj 27). Put simply, in the battle of representation, if poststruc­ turalists are on the side of language, then ecocritics have largely been on the side of physical reality. The eco-phenomenologist David Abram goes so far as to claim that the development of written language accompanied and partly caused our increasingly occluded experience of nonhuman nature and that oral cultures were thus more ecocentric than we are. According to this logic, the alphabet was different only in degree from other technologies that have dangerously removed us from a vital connection with nature. Although in some ways Abram helpfully troubles the standard dichotomy between lan­ guage and nature—“It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse” (179)—he merely reinforces that dichotomy in his indictment of written language. We need to revise our understanding of language in the direction in which Charles Bernstein points: “Alphabetic aurality is not cut off from the earth but is a material embodiment of it” (19). Like feminist, Marxist, and other political criticism, much ecocriticism resists Auden’s assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen” (82).1 Ecocritics frequently echo Lawrence Buell’s claim that ecocriticism must be “con­ ducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (Environmental Imagination 430). While the political impact poetry has on the world is eas­ ily overblown (“no lyric has ever stopped a tank,” Seamus Heaney reminds us [107]),2 the general motive of ecocriticism to direct our attention toward the phenomenal world is compelling. Yet taken to its logical extreme, the oppositional stance of first-wave ecocriticism against textuality too easily undermines its own political aims as a form of literary criticism. The power of language to make nature matter to us depends precisely on the defamiliarizing figurative language and rhetorical devices too often associated with “artifici­ ality.” Ecological poetry posits a relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Poems best succeed at awakening one to the natural world through the emo­ tive and rhetorical power they have over readers, and this power derives from the particular form that content takes. In overreacting against textuality, eco­ criticism emphasizes political (environmental) action while losing touch with the aesthetic experience that inspires such action, or as Neil Evernden puts it, “Environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning” (103). The unnecessary tension between ethics and aesthetics is not limited

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to ecocriticism; largely as a result of the New Historicism and what Terry Eagleton admiringly calls “political criticism” (169), aestheticism is too often dismissed as a reactionary wolf in the sheep’s skin of apoliticism. Ecocriticism, especially ecopoetics, is a “natural” place to strive for a rapprochement between ethics and aesthetics. Such a combination of ethics and aesthetics is hardly new, of course. In his “Defense of Poesy” Sidney argued that true poets are those who “imitate to teach and delight” (218), and Horace before him claimed that art must be dulce et utile, sweet and useful. We learn what a poem “teaches” and how it is “useful” most effectively through our aesthetic experience of it. (Such an experience can of course be one of shock or fear, not just “sweetness” or “delight.”) Behind the ecocritical discomfort with language and aesthetics lies the fundamental question that drives almost every philosophical inquiry of envi­ ronmentalism: Are humans (and their constructions, including language) a part of nature, or are humans and nature distinct categories? The answer must be both: humans are distinct yet inseparable from the rest of nature. On the one hand, humans are distinct from (though not superior to) the rest of nature in our use of language; we are the “symbol making (symbol using/ misusing) animal,” according to Kenneth Burke (211). But on the other hand, because we are part of nature, our language is part of nature too, as Gary Snyder recognizes: “Language and culture emerge from our biologicalsocial natural existence, animals that we were/are. Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. It is of a complexity that eludes our rational intellectual capacities” (17). John Berger places figurative thinking at the ori­ gin of humans’ relationship with nonhuman animals, a chiastic relationship of simultaneous difference and inseparability. Not only did “language itself [begin] with metaphor,” as Berger paraphrases Rousseau, but also the “first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that . . . the first metaphor was animal” (261). Thus, even though what “distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought[,] . . . the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them” (262). At the origin of our relationship with nature lies metaphor; at the origin of our use of metaphor lies nature. Figurative language has traditionally been viewed by admirers and detrac­ tors alike as artificial and stylistic decoration, sprigs of parsley with which we garnish the entrée of our language. But George Lakoff and Mark Johnson show

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

us that metaphor structures the very way we think. Instead of being merely a “device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language,” metaphor shapes our “ordinary conceptual system,” and thus “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (3). Poetry, the most deliberately figurative of activities, does not then corner the metaphorical mar­ ket, but it does foreground how we think and speak all the time. Figuration is thus not only a part of “nature” but also inevitably political in the broadest sense of the term, in that it motivates and shapes the way we behave in the world. As Eileen Crist reveals in her study of the rhetoric of animal behavioral science, language is never neutral. “Ordinary” language regards animals as acting subjects, whereas “technical” language regards ani­ mals as natural objects lacking “experiential perspective” (2). Crist argues that the use of anthropomorphic language by nineteenth-century natural­ ists (including Darwin, whom we might normally consider a “technical” thinker) granted animals subjectivity and thereby enabled the naturalists’ observation of “animal mind.” The literal and figurative do not therefore merely oppose each other in a simple dualism (and neither do ethics and aesthetics or the human and nonhuman). Of course, the ethical or political relationship between word and world is complex and circuitous, as Jonathan Bate observes: “The business of literature is to work on consciousness. The practical consequences of that work—social, environmental, political in the broadest sense—cannot be controlled or predicted. They will be surprising, haphazard, indirect, long-term” (23). We should not, therefore, underesti­ mate the power of literature to affect behavior, even if that process is impos­ sible to measure with precision. Because metaphor structures the very way we think and perceive, such figurative devices as personification and apostrophe should not be dismissed as anthropocentric pathetic fallacies with which we merely project the human onto the nonhuman. When David Gilcrest claims that the “attempt to recog­ nize the nonhuman subject as linguistically competent” is “an essentially colo­ nizing move,” he builds the “trope of speaking nature” out of straw (53). First, to represent a nonhuman subject as “linguistically competent” is not actually to believe that it can talk. Moreover, personification can be employed ironi­ cally precisely to foreground the epistemological gap between the human and nonhuman. (Shelley’s personified Mont Blanc remains a mute blank which does not respond, but whose very muteness acts as a “voice” to “repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe” [546].) I admire Gilcrest’s impulse toward recognizing

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nature’s alterity, but personification need not be opposed to the recognition of nonhuman nature as wondrously other. And as Gilcrest himself admits, the “trope of speaking nature” is important not so much for its ontological impli­ cations but rather for its pragmatic and strategic rhetorical effects. According to Buell, environmentalism itself depends on a certain degree of personifi­ cation: “The rhetoric of nature’s personhood speaks merely to the nominal level; what counts is the underlying ethical orientation implied by the trop­ ing . . . [T]o ban the pathetic fallacy—were such a thing possible—would be worse than to permit its unavoidable excesses. For without it, environmental care might not find its voice. For some, it might not even come into being” (Environmental Imagination 217–18). In a different context, Jonathan Culler makes a similar claim about apostrophe. Many critics, according to Culler, have either ignored or dismissed apostrophe because it is too “embarrassing,” too blatantly artificial a poetic convention. To these critics, the direct address to inanimate objects or nonhuman nature indicates an inappropriate lack of verisimilitude. Culler himself refuses to be embarrassed by apostrophe, seeing in the figure powerful effects unique to it. Instead of merely heightening pure description of an object, apostrophe expresses intense feeling for the act of address itself: “Apostrophe . . . makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself . . . In these terms the function of apostrophe would be to make the objects of the universe potentially responsive forces which can be asked to act or refrain from acting, or even to continue behaving as they usually behave. The apostrophizing poet identifies his universe as a world of sentient forces” (139). Rather than blocking us from reality, figurative language such as apostrophe can help us experience the world as more than inert, unresponsive matter. Apostrophe and personi­ fication overtly claim that we take note of the nonhuman world; yet they also imply the possibility that the nonhuman world takes note of us, as they rhetor­ ically place the nonhuman in the position of interlocutor, even if silent. Rather than confining us in a linguistic straitjacket, figurative language and thinking in general constitute our species’ way of experiencing what Merleau-Ponty calls the “flesh of the world,” the invisible layer of reality linking the perceiver and the perceived, the sentient and the sensible (127). Even some poststructurally inclined ecocritics reinforce a false opposi­ tion between language and nature. Kate Rigby, for instance, reiterates the now well-worn deconstructionist claim about the “failure” of language— in this case the failure of language to capture or reproduce our immedi­ ate involvement in nature: “Only by insisting on the limits of the text, its

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

inevitable falling-short as a mode of response no less than as an attempted mediation, can we affirm that there is, in the end, no substitute for our own embodied involvement with the more-than-human natural world” (440). We presumably fall out of embodied experience of nature when we fall into language. Of course, reading and writing are not the same as submerging oneself in a river or encountering a herd of caribou on the northern tundra. But as imperfectly as we link language to land, we are the animals who natu­ rally use the tool of language to make just such attempts: “Symbolic expres­ sion is one of the peculiar systems that our species has evolved for coping with the world; it is one of our survival-mechanisms” (Bate 251). Furthermore, we needn’t position embodiment counter to poetry. After all, poetry itself (and all language) has a body, which we call its form. Bernstein focuses on the aural embodiment of poetic form: “Sound is language’s flesh, its opacity as meaning marks its material embeddedness in the world of things . . . In sounding language we ground ourselves as sentient, material beings, obtruding into the world with the same obdurate thingness as rocks or soil or flesh. We sing the body of language, relishing the vowels and con­ sonants in every possible sequence. We stutter tunes with no melodies, only words” (21). When a poet skillfully experiments with various sound effects in a poem, when a reader revels in the sensuous pleasure a poem provides, and when a literary critic deepens our understanding or appreciation of the way a poem’s form—its body—shapes meaning, these writers and readers experience both their own and the poem’s embodiment, even when silently sounding the poem to one’s inner ear. As Garrett Stewart explains, reading is not a rarefied, merely intellectual activity; rather, it occurs in “the reading body. This somatic locus of soundless reception includes of course the brain but must be said to encompass as well the organs of vocal production, from diaphragm up through throat to tongue and palate . . . [T]he body is the site of silent reading, subtending all conception. It is a place not separable from the space of ‘understanding,’ though standing under it. Reading builds up the semantic possibility syllable by syllable, even when these syllables are still only phonemic pulsations on the far side of word formation” (17). To return to the ancient forest above the gorge, my son Rowan’s experience of the giant hemlock occurs not only tactilely and visually, when he gazes up at it and pats its mossy bark, but orally and aurally as well, when he sounds out fetal versions of the word “tree”—“phonemic pulsations” that he feels in his throat and mouth and that enter his ears. One assumption underlying this book is that all aesthetic experience

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occurs within nature, in the broadest sense of the term. Indeed there could be no poem (or any other human creation, from microchips to civilizations) without the physical, nonhuman world that precedes, exceeds, and environs it: “The human process actualizes semiotic processes that it did not make and that it did not shape. Our cultural codes, no matter how sophisticated and multi-valued, are what they are by riding on the back of this self-recording nature” (Corrington ix). It is only natural for us to engage in artifice, as a small population of ecocritics agree. Robert Kern, for instance, resists the tendency among ecocritics to revere ecocentrism and demonize its supposed opposite, anthropocentrism; instead he sees the two as coexisting within human consciousness and artistic production: “Ecocentrism has become a necessary supplement to our anthropocentrism . . . [A]s humans we exist as both a part of nature and apart from it. Accordingly, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism are both part of what we are. As conceptual possibilities, they are our invention, and, if we think in terms of both, they offer us the oppor­ tunity to redefine ourselves as beings on the earth, which supports us, along with countless (but dwindling) other species and life-forms, and to which we must do all that we can to return the favor” (443). Because ecocriticism ostensibly has one eye on the page and one eye on the physical world, it needs to deepen thinking about the relationship between language and nature. Can language transparently offer us “reality”? Should it? What is “realistic”? This question has been central to the work of poets themselves, of course. To what extent should they be allowed to “lie,” in Plato’s terminology, and can their “lies,” or apparent infidelity to empirical reality, become a kind of “truth,” in Sidney’s terminology, that encourages ethical behavior toward the nonhuman world? The poets in this book implicitly and explicitly respond to these sorts of questions, and their work powerfully demonstrates the ecocentric promise of poetry’s natural artifice. As james breslin notes, various movements in mid-century American poetry reacted against the authorial detachment and art-as-artifice stance in high modernism and the New Criticism. Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the Confessionals, the New York poets, and others desired to return to a poetics of presence and immediacy partly reminiscent of Romanticism (xv). If, as Albert Gelpi argues, both Romanticism and modernism, despite their differences, contained a similar tension between the “conceptual” and “per­ ceptual” (in Romanticism), or Symbolism and Imagism (in modernism) (4–5), then beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, poetry has

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

witnessed the dominance of the perceptual and Imagistic. This is especially true of conventional ecopoetry, which relies on the experiential, authorial presence of the poet-prophet figure who, like Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, or Robert Bly, wants to affect his audience ethically. (Bernard Quetchenbach has shown the difficult position of these poets, who, while working within a late-twentieth-century poetics of interiority and idiosyncrasy inaugurated by Theodore Roethke’s Lost Son poems, also feel it politically necessary to speak to and for America [1–28].) American nature writing in general (from which much first-wave ecocriticism takes inspiration) favors a blend of the subjective with a healthy dose of realism, which purportedly serves as a cure for solipsism. There is no reason, however, why the expression of ecocen­ trism should be limited to realism. Indeed, the poets in this book, while demonstrating intense interest in the natural world, resist strict realism and foreground the figurative nature of ecocentrism. To put it another way, for these poets, nature and language (or Stevens’s “reality” and “imagination”) do not exist in a simple opposition to each other, whereby nature is the good original and language is the poor, fallen copy. Although these poets don’t advocate a total collapse of the old divide between nature and culture, Bruno Latour’s hybrid notion of “nature-culture,” in which nature is simultaneously real and constructed, better describes their conception of reality than a rigid dichotomy does (3, 7, 87).3 The poets I study in this volume, though each is distinctive, all acknowl­ edge an important gap between word and world. Yet rather than treating this gap as a sign of linguistic failure, they explore the fundamentally figurative nature of language. In other words, for ethical reasons ecocriticism has so far generally wanted to close the gap between word and world, yet for precisely ethical (not to mention aesthetic) reasons, a certain distinction must remain between nature and language. One can avoid Sidney’s hierarchical distinc­ tion between the “golden” world of poesy and the “brazen” world of nature, or, more to the point, ecocriticism’s simple reversal of this hierarchy, while still observing that language and (the rest of ) nature operate under differ­ ent laws. Only with such a distinction can we see the interaction between language and nature. Emily Dickinson, an influential precursor to the modern poets, exploits this distinction between the natural and the figurative in many of her poems, using figuration to make subtle yet powerful ethical claims about our rela­ tionship to nature. Despite the layers of mediation and metaphor in her poetry, Dickinson takes nature as a real locale seriously, which the biography

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of her childhood clearly evidences. As numerous critics have pointed out, Dickinson’s acute knowledge of and attraction to the scientific theories of her day reflect her earnest consideration of empiricism and her stance toward a real natural world. At the same time, Dickinson also resists strict empiricism and what she would claim is the hubris of unchecked scientific ambition. While she uses scientific parlance and theories to explore both nature and spirituality, she also mocks strict scientific classification. Dickinson’s ambiva­ lent stance toward science and empiricism suggests that she doubted the ability of science to enclose nature completely within taxonomy. She likewise both engaged in and resisted the metaphysical taxonomy (Emersonian “cor­ respondence”) involved in natural theology: reading the “book of nature” for one-to-one equivalencies between material emblems and their spiritual counterparts. Ultimately, Dickinson’s relationship to nature suggests epis­ temological doubt even as it grants nature autonomy and otherness. For instead of pushing her into solipsism, Dickinson’s various ways of describing the limitations of knowledge actually emphasize the rich autonomous reality of nonhuman creatures and natural places. At times such epistemological doubt incites fear, but at other times it fosters joy. Either way, her stance toward nature encourages perhaps the most important quality of ecocen­ trism, that of wonder. In her poem “A Bird, came down the Walk –” (F359, C) Dickinson depicts the relationship between natural observation, figuration, and ethical response: A Bird, came down the Walk –

He did not know I saw –

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass –

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

To let a Beetle pass –

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad –

They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,

He stirred his Velvet Head. –

Like one in danger, Cautious,

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language I offered him a Crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers,

And rowed him softer Home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

Leap, plashless as they swim. (384)

In the first three stanzas the speaker seems to assume the position of an objective, invisible observer: “He did not know I saw.” But even in the first stanza, when the bird eats a worm, its wildness is qualified by the description that it “came down the Walk,” a civilized frame that likens the bird to a domestic afternoon stroller. The next two stanzas offer more osten­ sibly detached observations, yet these observations also express human deco­ rum—the bird hops “sidewise to the Wall /To let a Beetle pass”—and draw from a decorative lexicon: the bird’s rapidly glancing eyes look like “fright­ ened Beads,” and his head looks “Velvet.” Such terms express the speaker’s desire to domesticate the “raw” natural scene and make the bird accessible to human understanding. These descriptions also undermine the posture of detached objectivity, as they clearly accentuate the speaker’s perspective, even if it is invisible to the bird. She thus includes the qualifier “I thought” after her simile: “They looked like frightened Beads, I thought.” After these domesticating figures, which help the speaker feel comfort­ able enough to step out of her concealed position and approach the bird, the poem employs a moment of grammatical confusion: “Like one in dan­ ger, Cautious, / I offered him a Crumb.” Occurring immediately after sev­ eral stanzas describing the bird with “frightened” eyes, the phrase “Like one in danger, Cautious” points backward to the bird even as it grammatically modifies the speaker, “I.” This vital ambiguity obscures whether the speaker or the bird feels such “Caution”—which is to say it suggests they both do— and expresses the confusion that results when the speaker attempts to make contact with the bird. After her communal gesture (indeed her “Crumb” suggests the communion bread), the bird refuses to capitulate; rather, he “unrolled his feathers, / And rowed him softer Home –.” The poem could easily have ended here, in Dickinson’s typically elliptical fashion. But the last stanza makes an elaborate comparison for the purpose of amplifying the bird’s beautiful otherness. The bird “rowed him softer Home –”

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introduction Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

Leap, plashless as they swim.

The bird literally creates distance between himself and the speaker by flying away, but so do the speaker’s metaphors. First, rowboat imagery describes his homeward flight, and then the last stanza takes us into an ocean and its swimming butterflies in a metamorphosis of metaphor. This move­ ment at the level of figure suggests both the actual motion of the receding bird as well as the shift in the speaker’s epistemological relationship to the bird from near-communion to unknowing. Furthermore, the incongruous pairing of figures—“ocean” with “seam,” “Banks” (place) with “Noon” (time), and “butterflies” with “swim”—helps confound her earlier efforts to domesticate the bird. While the speaker proposes a relationship between herself and the bird in the form of a crumb offering, he refuses, leaving the speaker in her most intense moment of abstraction in the last stanza as she watches him depart. The farther the bird flies, the more extravagant the speaker’s meta­ phors become as she both accepts and admires the bird’s radical autonomy. Both the bird and the speaker abandon their shared “Caution” at the center of the poem as the bird ecstatically takes to the air, and the speaker, in her own flight of poetic fancy, abandons her domesticating figures for the extravagant, defamiliarizing language which expresses her heightened perception. The pre­ viously used decorative lexicon is invoked only in negative terms: the “Ocean” is “Too silver for a seam.” While she depicts the bird as clearly moving beyond both her empiri­ cal and domestic figurative scope, the speaker does not present such move­ ment in defeatist terms. The caution both speaker and bird feel results in a radical distinction between them, but the speaker fills this space with awe­ struck language that demonstrates both the ethical and aesthetic necessity of maintaining difference (yet inseparability) between the human and nonhu­ man. That is, it is in the space between the human and nonhuman where poetry occurs. The more the speaker experiences this distinction between herself and the bird, the more the poem leans toward artifice and away from language that merely tells. Even the repeated “oh” and “oo” sounds of the final stanza—“Oars,” “Ocean,” “Too,” “for,” “Or,” “off,” “Noon”—evoke an open-mouthed wonder at the vanishing bird. Dickinson demonstrates the ethical potential of poetic language in

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

perceiving and considering a world always just beyond our domestic and empirical control. Dickinson’s aesthetics are simultaneously an ethics, as her metaphorical language encourages wonder and the ensuing respect toward nature. Furthermore, the wildness she experiences is not represented in a sim­ ple referential way; rather, resisting straightforward objectivity and empiri­ cism, the language itself in this poem becomes wilder as it moves from the domestic, discursive, and semantic to the associative and sensuous in the last stanza. In other words, the language undergoes defamiliarization, enacting at the level of figure and sound (rather than straightforward description) the speaker’s experience of wildness. Both Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, another important protomodernist, “charge,” in Hopkins’s diction, their poetic language with figura­ tive, syntactical, and rhythmical intensity as a result of, not in spite of, their unique relationships with the natural world. Neither poet strives for imagistic transparency. Though Dickinson is as elliptical and terse as Hopkins is ebul­ lient and syntactically fecund, both avoid simple representation of the natural world in favor of what I call “sensuous poesis,” in which, rather than mirror the world, their poems enact through formal devices such as sound effects the speaker’s experience of the complexity, mystery, and beauty of nature. That is, however influenced by experience “in the field,” their language takes on its own wildness and materiality distinct from but still a response to nature. Hopkins practices sensuous poesis to an extreme degree in his sonnet “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord,” in which he begins where Dickinson leaves off in her last stanza. Whereas Dickinson begins with domestic meta­ phors to depict her bird’s close proximity and ends by defamiliarizing and distancing (both literally and epistemologically) the bird, Hopkins expresses distance and defamiliarization immediately: I caught this morning morning’s minion, king­ dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

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introduction Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. (69)

Although an abbreviation of “caught sight of,” the opening verb “caught” is still ironic in its connotation of control, entrapment, and “mas­ tery” (which he later attributes to the falcon). This bird is clearly beyond entrapment as it wheels in the sky. Furthermore, the intense sounds of the poem play against visual entrapment implied by “caught”; Hopkins puts our eyes in competition with our ears. The first line, for example, draws atten­ tion to its own sounds by employing a combination of alliteration, repeti­ tion, and internal rhyme (“morning morning’s minion, king-”), as well as metaphor, a line break in the middle of a word, and abbreviation, which all distract from semantic understanding and visual representation of the bird. The first line is not only enjambed but also broken in the middle of a word, speeding the poem forward into more alliteration and internal rhyme in the second line and in the rest of the poem. The stacked epithet “dapple-dawn­ drawn Falcon” and the enjambed, embedded “in his riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air” are just as, if not more, important for their sound as for the visual images they convey. Phrases such as these, as well as the mostly enjambed, irregularly metered lines throughout, aurally suggest the erratic swooping and hovering of the falcon. They also, moreover, enact the ecstasy of the speaker, who praises the bird (or rather God through the bird) in language that seems to gush spontaneously. The speaker’s original ecstasy, however, is of course recollected (as Wordsworth would say) and represented through careful craft. Indeed, the “mastery” he attributes to the falcon is equally attributable to the poet: Can’t the “thing” of line eight be the speaker’s “heart” even as it is more obviously the “bird”? This recalls the grammatical ambiguity critical to Dickinson’s poem. Indeed, in the opening lines of Hopkins’s sestet he foregrounds this ambiguity: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here/Buckle!” Critics have pos­ ited different meanings to “Buckle,” but the poem’s power relies partly on buck­ ling these conflicting meanings together instead of choosing one. On the one hand, “buckle” means collapsing or folding in on itself, but it also means nearly the opposite: gathering together, consolidating one’s strength in preparation for battle, which the lexicon of knighthood and royalty—“kingdom,” “dauphin,”

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

“chevalier”—supports. The speaker simultaneously feels awe toward the falcon’s expression of the heroism of Christ (Christ as hero was a conventional figure in Hopkins’s Jesuit context), his own resultant humility, and his awareness of the beauty of his own poem. He expresses the strain of all these simultaneous responses in a line whose first half includes a mixture of stressed and unstressed syllables but whose second half—“act, oh, air, pride, plume, here”—contains nothing but stressed syllables. Syntactically and rhythmically his most ecstatic line, line nine piles nouns together as specific examples of the achievement and “mastery” of both the falcon and the poem, for the ambiguous (yet emphasized as an end rhyme) “here” at the end of the line points to both bird and poem at once. Even the line’s descriptive nouns point in both directions. Not only is the poem an example of “Brute beauty and valour and act” (“act” suggesting aesthetic creation as well as the bird’s acrobatics), but also “air” points to the medium of lyric poetry that demands to be heard, and “plume” hints at a quill (pen) even as it serves as a synecdoche for the falcon. Is the speaker directing us “here” to the scene of the bird’s flight, “here” to the page of the poem, or “here” to the speaker’s “heart in hiding”? The possibility of straightforward, transpar­ ent meaning collapses, or “buckles,” as does the line itself at a formal level. For despite how many words are crammed into line nine, the sentence still breaks, or buckles, before its last word, “Buckle.” Contrary to traditionally conceived aesthetic experience, in which a per­ ceiver coolly enframes an object from a detached point of view, Hopkins’s speaker expresses an intensely involved perception wherein the line between subject and object becomes blurred. In the penultimate tercet, however, the speaker stresses the inability of even his ecstatic, acrobatic language to cap­ ture the divine “fire,” or what Hopkins elsewhere termed “inscape,” of the falcon, which is “a billion /Times told lovelier” than words. Thus a space opens up again between speaker and falcon, a space that makes possible the autonomy of both nature and language. The poem concludes by reflecting more generally on earthly beauty, as the speaker’s gaze turns from the falcon to presumably more prosaic observations. The last tercet begins ironically: “No wonder” that the falcon expresses such beauty; of course, the poem as a whole has been steeped in wonder, and the concluding language only highlights more earthy examples worthy of wonder. The Bible may denigrate tilling the soil, yet the speaker sees a heavenly sheen in a ploughed row, or “sillion.” And even actual, material embers, as opposed to the spiritual “fire” that “breaks” from the falcon, show extraordinary beauty: “and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, / Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

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On one hand, the sonnet is, as the subtitle confirms, a piece of natural theology. The falcon’s ecstatic flight is an opportunity for the speaker, ecstatic himself, to praise the force responsible for this scene: God. The beauty of nature points to God’s existence. And yet the speaker’s experience is more com­ plex than a simple utilitarian natural theology in which the bird is a means to an end. He does not treat the falcon, that is, as a mere emblem, interchange­ able with all other falcons; rather, the intense language and striking figures present the falcon as startlingly individual. In another sonnet, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” Hopkins more explicitly treats the radical individuality of each being despite the presence of God behind all things. Even though “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” the speaker claims, Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. (90)

More significantly, “The Windhover” shows the linguistic effect—the buckling of language—of an intense aesthetic experience of nature. Para­ doxically, the poem relies on formal devices such as enjambment, alliteration, internal rhyme, and irregular meter to give the impression of presence and spontaneity. It uses a Petrarchan rhyme scheme (ABBAABBACDCDCD), though the end rhymes are somewhat hidden by the enjambment and fre­ quent change of pace. Simply put, as in a garden, the poem’s “naturalness” and spontaneity are constructed. Does this undermine the ecocentric impact of the poem, as if Hopkins were merely an Oz behind a curtain of artifice? Not if we view language and figuration as natural to our species’ perception and experi­ ence of the world. Then the question for poets like Hopkins and Dickinson is not how to get around figuration and language to contact the real world (as if that were possible), but how to figure forth the world and what kind of figures and formal devices best dramatize the complex relationships between the human and nonhuman. Though Hopkins and Dickinson demonstrate a modern ecopoetics before modernity, the sensuous poesis I locate in them has been practiced largely by twentieth- and twenty-first-century (historically modern and contempo­ rary) poets. Major shifts in philosophy (Nietzsche, Marx), science (Darwin, Einstein), and psychology (Freud), as well as two world wars, all rocked Western faith in one coherent center of meaning (traditionally thought of

The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

as God). Humans began to see themselves as less the paragons of creation (“Lord Man”) and more as animals controlled by non-divine forces bigger than themselves, whether those forces originated in biological evolution, the sub­ conscious, or class conflict. Linguistic skepticism accompanied philosophical skepticism toward conventional religious understanding. Modernists did not take it for granted that language gives a transparent view of reality, and they interrogated mimetic assumptions about language. French Symbolism, one of the major fountainheads of literary modernism in the late nineteenth century, treated language as self-referential, and the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure later argued in the 1920s and 1930s that language operates arbitrarily, within its own systems disconnected from reality “out there.” Linguistic skep­ ticism was taken to its extreme in the poetry of Gertrude Stein and her heirs among what have come to be termed postmodern Language poets, as well as in the poststructuralist method of deconstruction. The poets I consider, however, do not go so far. In various ways, they combine a certain degree of modern­ ist linguistic skepticism with latent ecological consciousness, or devotion to physical reality. For them, sensuous poesis manifests their belief that nature is both real and constituted through language. Poets who practice sensuous poesis in the manner of Dickinson and Hopkins use formal poetic devices to enact, rather than merely represent, the immediate, embodied experience of nonhuman nature. The experience of the sounds of language, for instance, lies beyond conventional semantic interpre­ tation involving signifiers and signifieds, words and nature. Sensuous poesis relies on the immediate impact on the senses of aural effects, such as allitera­ tion, cacophony, and onomatopoeia, and visual effects, such as enjambment and stanza shape, even as the words simultaneously invite the reflective con­ sideration of the intellect. Such an experience is not so much pre-lingual as it is “extra-lingual,” beyond semantic language. Of course, both the reflective, intellectual aspect as well as the sensuousness of the poem occur simultane­ ously. But the sensuous aspects act as a physically palpable analogue for direct experience of nature. We experience the immediate sensuousness of words at the same moment that we experience their mediating meanings. Why care about the sensuousness of words? In our age of polluted air and water, habitat loss, deforestation, species extinction, global climate desta­ bilization, and a host of other humanly caused environmental crises, why on this damaged earth should we spend any quiet, contemplative time writing and reading poems, let alone reading a literary critic’s analytical prose about them? The answer lies in the power of these activities to nudge consciousness

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to a more ecologically ethical state, which in turn shapes behavior. A poet crafts language that, if successful, inspires, startles, or coaxes us into knowing the world with revivified senses. Wallace Stevens both states and fulfills this purpose in this book’s epigraph: Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense. (Collected Poems 234).

Heightened perception promotes deep thinking. A literary critic’s close reading, if it succeeds, is a form of deep thinking on paper about literary language. This deep thinking should welcome readers in and, like the poem itself, inspire, startle, or coax them into perceiving and considering anew the world as brought forth through poetry. In his novella A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean’s description of thinking as similar to fly-fishing could also apply to the process of closely reading a poem: “All there is to thinking . . . is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible” (92). Like a fly-fishing guide, the literary critic helps readers to behold significance below the surface, even when the mere surface of a poem, like a river, shim­ mers distractingly in beauty. Sometimes, beauty itself is the main point, swimming up from the deep undercurrents of connotation to the poem’s surface ripples. The biologist E. O. Wilson claims that all humans feel an innate (if often submerged) attraction to the nonhuman world, a feeling he terms “biophilia,” arguably part of what Buell describes as our “environmental unconscious.”4 If we want to improve our relationship to the earth, we need to realize—with the help of the arts—our own biophilic urges and act upon them. One cause of biophilia is the beauty and complexity in nature that we feel drawn to, a response similar to the one we have in relation to art. If ecopoetics is to endure, it will do so on the assumption that the same imaginative and intel­ lectual muscles we exercise in our deep consideration of poetry are needed in meaningfully relating to nature and responding to environmental dilem­ mas—and vice versa. One is good training for the other. That is, poetry and our close reading of it demand that we focus our thinking, pay attention with all of our senses, and grow in imagination. Healing our relationship to the earth demands exactly the same.

Chapter 1

WALLACE STEVENS, ECO-AESTHETE

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ccording to most of Wallace Stevens’s prominent critics, the poet is anything but ecologically oriented. Helen Vendler, for example, describes Stevens as expressing three “large manners” in his poetry: his “ecstatic idiom” of secular and earthy joys, a “despairing” mood that “anato­ mizes a stale and withered life,” and a “tentative, diffident, and reluctant search for a middle route between ecstasy and apathy” (On Extended Wings 13). For Vendler, the “true” Stevens most often expresses the “middle route,” and it is this same Stevens who is unmoved by the material particularities of the natural world: “The lively things of this world—human, animal, vegeta­ ble—do not touch him as they did Keats or Wordsworth; he cannot become a sparrow or a stoat; he is not transfixed by a girl, a gibbet, and a beacon; the minutiae of the scene pass by unobserved; the natural cast of his eyes is upward, and the only phenomenon to which he is passionately attached is the weather. Natural forms, even when they are drawn from particular Pennsylvania or Connecticut landscapes, are generalized, abstracted, made almost anonymous in his poetry” (47). Vendler goes even further to claim that, in spite of poems such as “The Man on the Dump” and “The Comedian as the Letter C,” poems of rich specific detail that express his “ecstatic idiom,” Stevens is actually repulsed by the material fecundity of nature: “When he is faced with the gross heterogeneity of the world he recoils” (50). To abbrevi­ ate an old argument: for Vendler and others, Stevens’s “imagination” takes precedence over “reality.” 19

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Albert Gelpi makes a similar claim in his comparison of William Carlos Williams and Stevens. In Gelpi’s account, Williams sounds like a much more likely practitioner of ecopoetics, even though both poets work to “reclaim the imagination from the ruins of Romanticism” (10). The primary disagree­ ment between the two poets lies in the stark difference, according to Gelpi, between the “polar aspects” of modernism: Imagism and Symbolism. “In terms of the subject-object split,” Gelpi claims, “Imagism represents the attempt to render the objects of experience, Symbolism the attempt to render subjective psychological and affective states” (12). Williams, working in the Imagist mode, was “bent not on transforming but on revealing the object,” whereas Stevens, an heir of the French Symbolist tradition, placed art in a “violent opposition” to nature (13). If an ecological stance involves recogni­ tion of and respect toward the objects of nature, then Williams certainly sounds more ecocentric in Gelpi’s formulation: “Williams’ language eschews metaphoric indirection to focus consciousness on the object; Stevens’ lan­ guage indulges in metaphor to establish its fictive and self-referential inde­ pendence of the object” (16). Gelpi draws a stark contrast between Williams’s Imagism, supposedly on the side of nature, and Stevens’s Symbolism, sup­ posedly anti-nature. The received biographical account of Stevens does not help counter­ act the image of him as anti-nature, for he is most often characterized as an effete, urbane, hedonistic, well-dressed dandy who delighted in exotic treasures and sweet treats. A dandy aesthete believes (or behaves as if he believes) that art is more real than nature; as Oscar Wilde famously echoed Baudelaire, “Life imitates Art” (311). The characterization of Stevens as dandy is partly accurate, but it is also incomplete and tends to obscure other aspects of his character. Like Whitman, Stevens contained “multitudes” and fol­ lowed Emerson’s dictum that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (125). Gyorgyi Voros draws out aspects of Stevens often ignored in the familiar portrait of him, such as his marathon walks (sometimes twenty miles) in the country every weekend and the many journal entries in which he makes close, detailed observations of nature: “Larkspur is various and is to be known by the rabbithead-like corolloa . . . the calix—generally pur­ ple, or mixed purple and pink” (Souvenirs 44). Still, despite his dismissal of idealism as an “intolerant form of sentimentalism” (Souvenirs 209), Stevens was hesitant in going completely in the opposite direction toward absolute naturalism and materialism. Like Dickinson and Wordsworth before him, Stevens uses the microscope as a synecdoche for the positivistic tendency of

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

science which he dislikes; he warns against merely looking at “Nature with microscopes,” writing, “I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with Nature” (Letters 133). In the same vein, Stevens wrote to Elsie Moll that he found facts irritating: “Facts are like flies in a room. They buzz and buzz and bother” (Letters 94). Statements such as these lend fuel to the arguments of those who caricature Stevens as a hedonist aesthete unconcerned with physical reality. On the contrary, however, it is not reality itself Stevens “recoils” from but a way of perceiving and thereby experiencing that reality which he rejects, as his own provocative statement in “Adagia” makes clear: “Realism is a corruption of reality” (Opus Posthumous 166). The emphasis on indeterminacy, constant movement, and energy of the new physics thus appealed more to Stevens than the empirical methodology of biology. Milton Bates also avoids caricaturing Stevens by showing how the man was just as complex as the poetry. According to Bates, Stevens looked ironically upon his own roles as “fop,” “clown,” and middle-class “burgher.” While clearly quite influenced by Continental aesthetic dandyism, Stevens also mocked and revised it. Though the typical aesthete avoided barbarism, “sought pleasures that were as refined and civilized as he himself aspired to be,” and “shrank from anything not subject to calculation and control,” Stevens is “aesthete and dandy in a natural rather than artificial universe” (103). Thus, as “eco-aesthete,” Stevens does not stop with floral decorations; he piles bananas on planks and indulges in the thick materiality of the pro­ saic world in poems such as “The Man on the Dump” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In fact, as a young man Stevens positioned himself against Walter Pater and the l’art pour l’art mentality in favor of an art integrated into the world: “Art for art’s sake is both indiscreet and worthless . . . Beauty is strength. But art—art all alone, detached, sensuous for the sake of sensuousness, not to perpetuate inspiration or thought, art that is mere art—seems to me to be the most arrant as it is the most inexcusable rubbish. Art must fit with other things; it must be part of the system of the world. And if it finds a place in that system it will likewise find a ministry and relation that are its proper adjuncts” (Souvenirs 38). Stevens’s insistence that art be a part of “the system of the world” appears to contradict his aversion to Imagism as a strategy to making it so, but this apparent paradox creates a subtle form of ecocentrism. That is, much of Stevens’s poetry explores the relationship between language (the product of

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“imagination”) and earthy reality and in doing so expands our understanding of what that reality consists of, emphasizing the rich, earthy texture of lan­ guage itself. For Stevens, language does not passively reflect nature; it shapes the way we dwell on the earth and is intimately bound up with our sensuous experience of nature, as he claims in “Variations on a Summer Day”: Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense (234).1

Thus, there is more to say about the familiar debate, which only appears to have been exhausted, over Stevens’s conception of reality and the imagina­ tion: “The route to the poetry via imagination/reality is well-worn, to say the least. But as current critical theory (and Stevens’ poetics) insists, the more clichéd an idea becomes, the more it needs to be reconsidered” (Leonard and Wharton ix). The dominant view of late is that Stevens privileges the imagination and everything that accompanies it—art, artifice, language— over reality, traditionally conceived as physical nature, or that, even more strongly, imagination creates reality. In this view, Stevens is dedicated to “using his language to conjure rather than to reflect reality” and to “putting the fictional before the real” (Rosu xi). This view clearly serves contempo­ rary social constructionism and the poststructuralist account of the rupture between language and the world to which it refers.2 While no one would claim the opposite of this view of Stevens—that he is a realist—a closer look at his statements on poetry as well as his poetry itself reveals that for Stevens, reality is not swallowed up by the imagina­ tion. To him these terms are not simply opposed to each other; nor do they collapse completely into each other. Instead, the imagination and reality require each other: “In nature, the change [in mental response] is as follows: The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have . . . [The imagination] has the strength of reality or none at all” (Necessary Angel 6, 7). The imagination, to be most vital and to proliferate the most meaning, must partake of reality. Indeed, when the poet faces reality and the imagi­ nation, “he will find that it is not a choice of one over the other and not a decision that divides them, but something subtler, a recognition that here,

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

too, as between these poles, the universal interdependence exists, and hence his choice and his decision must be that they are equal and inseparable . . . [The nature of poetry] is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals” (Necessary Angel 24, 27). Stevens’s poems demonstrate that, even when the speaker’s theme is the total absorption of reality into the imagina­ tion, earthly reality persists, often in poetic form itself. A brief example of this is Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The speaker asserts repeatedly that reality, in the form of the sea, and the imagination, represented by the woman’s song, are clearly distinct from each other: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea,” “The song and water were not medleyed sound,” “The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.” The speaker protests too much, however, as the poem’s aural effects undermine the semantic arguments con­ cerning strict categories. For instance, in the lines “It may be that in all her phrases stirred / The grinding water and the gasping wind; / But it was she and not the sea we heard,” the final line aurally reproduces the sound of the hiss­ ing tide in the “z,” “sh,” and “s” sounds as well as the assonance of “she,” “sea,” and “we.” Furthermore, that the speaker rhymes the tongue twisters “she” and “sea” suggests that these two entities are not as thoroughly distinguish­ able as the speaker claims. Thus, the sounds of this line work partly to erode (like seawater) the line’s semantic assertion. Indeed, nowhere in the poem does the speaker describe the sound of the woman’s song; although the poem meditates on the song, which it says is not the sea, it aurally evokes the sea again and again (128–29). That is, while the poem seems to privilege the imagination at a semantic level, it simultaneously betrays what Stevens calls the “pressure of reality” pushing through the poem at the level of sound (Necessary Angel 20). The rhyme between “she” and “sea” may seem like a small coincidence, but it points to Stevens’s larger concept of the relationship between nature and poetry, reality and the imagination. For Stevens, “if we desire to formulate an accurate theory of poetry, we find it necessary to examine the structure of real­ ity, because reality is the central reference for poetry” (Necessary Angel 71). Both the sounds of poetry and the things of nature, Stevens claims, operate under a principle of rhyme: “resemblance” rather than “identity.” He writes: “We are not dealing with identity. Both in nature and in metaphor identity is the van­ ishing-point of resemblance . . . Nature is not mechanical to that extent for all its mornings and evenings, for all its inhabitants of China or India or Russia, for all its waves, its leaves, or its hands. Its prodigy is not identity but

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resemblance and its universe of reproduction is not an assembly line but an incessant creation. Because this is so in nature, it is so in metaphor” (72–73). In other words, like true rhyme, two or more nonidentical words marked by internal assonance and “consonance of the terminal sounds” (OED), metaphor necessarily involves simultaneous similarity and difference (what Stevens means by “resemblance” rather than “identity”) between the metaphorical word and the subject to which it applies—between what I. A. Richards terms the “vehi­ cle” and “tenor,” what Max Black calls the “subsidiary subject” and “principal subject,” or what George Lakoff and Mark Turner call the “source domain” and “target domain.” Despite twenty-five centuries of theorizing and debate over the particular function of metaphor (Abrams 163), most critics and philoso­ phers agree that it must involve the interweaving of similarity and difference, and Stevens is no exception. What makes his thoughts about metaphor unique is his effort to naturalize metaphor; nonidentical “resemblance,” he claims, existed first in the “incessant creation” of nature’s patterns, an idea that antici­ pates contemporary chaos theorists and the fractals—the patterns of repeti­ tion—they observe in nature. Stevens not only points to “rhyming” relation­ ships within nature and poetry, therefore, but also suggests that nature and poetry rhyme, in a figurative sense, with each other. Poetry and the imagination are not identical with nature and reality, but they do resemble each other in the way they function. Metaphor and rhyme and other poetic devices are not then merely “mechanical” but as lively and fluid as the processes of nature. Stevens’s conception of the imagination and reality as both distinct (“equal”) and inseparable provides a theoretical starting point for mod­ ernist ecopoetics, in which nature is simultaneously real and constructed. (Stevens even uses what will become the ecological term “interdependence” to describe the paradoxical relationship of reality and the imagination.) In Shifting Ground, her study of modernist landscape poetry, Bonnie Costello argues that for Stevens and others, landscape is not a static, controlled place but the “relationship we build with nature” (10). Landscape is “a figure for our real and symbolic entanglement with the earth as we take the view of it. Landscape is something we build as well as see, inhabit as well as escape to, put meaning into and take meaning from” (10). Therefore a landscape for Stevens implies both reference and trope; it evidences the entanglement of reality and the imagination. Stevens obviously influences Costello in her belief that the “vitality of poetry is of the imagination and necessarily abstract” (14), but that such imaginative abstraction requires an engage­ ment with nature, the source of its abstraction, because “abstraction cannot

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renew itself; it needs a stimulus, a fluent resource” (14). Costello thus reiter­ ates Stevens’s claim that imagination which does not adhere to reality soon exhausts itself. Still, Stevens was notoriously changeable in his opinions and slippery in his prose, and it would be reductive to create a fixed formula regarding the reality-imagination relationship. As he himself admitted, “my opinions gen­ erally change even while I am in the act of expressing them. So it seems to me and so, perhaps, everyone thinks of himself. The words for an idea too often dissolve it and leave a strange one” (Souvenirs 165). Despite his insistence on the imagination and reality as “equals” in this instance, Stevens often privi­ leges one over the other, depending on his mood: “Sometimes I believe most in the imagination for a long time and then, without reasoning about it, turn to reality and believe in that and that alone. But both of these things project themselves endlessly and I want them to do just that” (Letters 710). While some might accuse Stevens of “intellectual coquetry,” William Bevis rightly notes in him “a genuine skepticism on the part of a genuine thinker. Stevens was more than most poets committed to thinking, and less than most poets committed to any thought” (218). For this reason, we should not be surprised to find inconsistencies both in Stevens’s prose and between his prose and his poetry; consistency is not the point, and not every poem by Stevens neatly demonstrates what he opines in prose. Even in this journal entry, where he wants to draw a stark distinction between brute nature and civilized humankind, his use of figurative language and literary conventions implicates humans in nature: I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless. And it is a proper question, whether or not the Lilliputians have tied him down. There are his huge legs, Africa & South America, still, apparently, free; and the rest of him is pretty tough and unhandy. But, as I say, we do not think of this. There was a girl on the train with a face like the under-side of a moonfish. Her talk was of dances and men. For her, Sahara had no sand; Brazil, no mud. (Souvenirs 134)

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At a surface level, this passage repudiates caricatures of Stevens as hedo­ nistically unconcerned with the actual earth. Stevens here chooses to open his windows to the “giant” of earthly reality. His language belies, however, any purely direct experience of raw nature. For Stevens, human perception always involves a relationship between nature (“reality”) and artifice (a prod­ uct of “imagination”). Stevens imagines the “rough enormity” of the earth from the comfort of a train; indeed, the passage suggests that his humanly constructed environment partly causes him to consider what his train win­ dow frames: the “giant” underneath the “scrapings” of railroad. Technology, in the form of the train rushing across the landscape and offering continually shifting vistas and landscapes, helps Stevens to see what technology partly obscures at the same time: the “hugeness” and “enormity” of the earth. In spite of encroaching technology, Stevens claims that his earth is still sublime. Nature here is humankind’s “monstrous” other, imagined as violent and “full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes,” whereas “man is an affair of cities” and lives in a diminutive world of “gardens & orchards & fields.” Although much of nature certainly is huge and vital, Stevens selectively imagines nature as such without also considering it as quiet, calm, and subtle. In other words, his picture of nature here is clearly imagined, and even more so when he personifies the earth as a “giant” still largely free from the domesticating constraints of Lilliputian-like humans. The wild earth is not merely huge and monstrous; it is also exoticized in Stevens’s account. Wilderness is most vital in Africa and South America, and by implication, nonwhite Africans and South Americans are more vital and more expressive of this wildness than white northerners. It was, of course, a common tendency among white modernist writers to equate wildness and vitality with racial others, as Aldon Lynn Nielsen makes clear: “The ascrip­ tion of colorful exoticism is emblematic of the apartness of the African races in Stevens’s world view” (62). Stevens’s Africa is “a region of radical wil­ derness, far more other than any imaginable Tennessee” (63).3 In Stevens’s poems, nature at its wildest is exotic, tropical, and Floridian, whereas north­ ern settings typically express a cool asceticism. Stevens’s apprehension of sublime nature is not just racialized but gen­ dered, as his figure for anthropocentric shortsightedness is the girl who merely talks of “dances and men” instead of sensing the earth in all its bar­ ren wildness. Ironically, his description of her face as “like the under-side of a moonfish,” meant to express her purported vacuity and insensitivity, also simultaneously naturalizes her (“fish”) and alienates her from the earth

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

(“moon”). In either case, the figure serves to dehumanize the girl. Stevens’s perception of the girl as representing civilization’s superficiality is no mere coincidence. It reflects both the particularly American tendency to equate wilderness with manliness and freedom and to equate city life with stifling femininity (Cooper, Twain, Hemingway) and the tendency of the European dandy (such as Baudelaire) to “[praise] artifice and perfection of surface partly . . . to distinguish himself from such specimens of homo naturalis as woman and the bourgeois” (Bates 104). If language itself blurs the distinc­ tion that Stevens poses sometimes between humans and nature, the conse­ quences of such blurring are varied. In the case of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the sea looms through the form of the poem (what the poem does) even though the words seem to alienate the sea in what they say, and from an environmentalist standpoint this formal subversion is positive. In the case of the journal entry, however, the figures and literary conventions uncover alienating impulses in terms of race and gender despite Stevens’s primary purpose of lamenting human alienation of the earth. Still, the wild earth Stevens praises in his journal entry is not the pri­ mary concern of his oeuvre; the stark reality of nature emerges even in the suburban figure of “The Snow Man.” Stevens’s value as an eco-dandy lies in his process-oriented skepticism, which enabled him to put nature and the imagination (and thus the objective and subjective) into dynamic play without fixing their relationship into a stable theory. Such a stance also serves as a corrective to both first-wave ecocriticism, which often sides with physi­ cal reality, and poststructuralist language theory, which assumes the priority of language over nature. While Stevens “found positivism rather distasteful . . . such an aversion does not automatically place him in the camp of decon­ struction” (Rosu 4). Anca Rosu concisely summarizes the “main conflict” in linguistic theory “between the positivist or realist view of language, which emphasizes the relation between language and reality, and the Saussurian theory, later modified by deconstruction, which places the main stress on the internal relations present in the system of language” (4). Despite this con­ flict, however, both realist ecocriticism and antirealist deconstruction share an eye-centered approach to language; both approach meaning (or a lack thereof ) in visual terms. Realism frames meaning in terms of what is visually observed, as most nature writing demonstrates. (Even biologically speaking, humans tend to favor their sight over their other senses.) Deconstruction, for its part, focuses on the printed and not the spoken word: “It has become, since Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, an accepted idiom in theories of

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literature to value writing and to devalue speech. Writing is thought of as the play of difference and of the material sign. However, it is clear that the materiality, diversity and uncertainty of language can also be thought of in terms of its sound” (Barry 183). Indeed, Stevens’s poems require his readers to experience meaning in an aurally inflected and even constitutive way, as Stevens himself makes clear: And what about the sound of words? . . . Those of us who may have been thinking of the path of poetry, those who understand that words are thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking, must be conscious of this: that, above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds . . . A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words . . . It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential. (Necessary Angel 31–33)

This interdependence causes stevens’s poems to navigate the some­ times disruptive fault line between sound and sense. Largely because of the demands they place on (and the pleasures they induce in) the ear, Stevens’s poems also enact the difficulty of clearly segregating nature and the imagina­ tion, even if they simultaneously toy with clear categories. Likewise, Stevens’s poems place the real and the figurative in a symbiotic rather than an oppo­ sitional relationship. In “The Snow Man,” Stevens dramatizes a paradox produced by the dynamic relationship of nature and imagination: the necessity of figurative thinking in communicating one’s direct experience of nature. Stevens pre­ sciently troubles the contemporary dichotomy between aesthetic experience (typically assumed to be anthropocentric) and ecological awareness, or more simply, between the literal and the figurative. One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (9–10)

The poem offers us a lesson in perception and representation. The first line asserts in a seeming paradox what the poem in its entirety demonstrates. To conventional thought, the literal (the real) is opposed to the figurative (the imaginary); thus it would seem paradoxical to evoke the stark dimensions of the real through a personified figure, “winter.” As Voros notes, winter is “that season which in Stevens represents the most stoic and most real relationship a human being may have with Nature” (139). One must clear one’s mind of figures inappropriate to the real, the speaker claims, but the real is still to be figured forth through the imagination. Winter may lack the fecund growth of figurative excess, but it is still a figure that occurs in the “mind.” Instead of calling for the eradication of figurative thought, in other words, the poem asks what kind of figurative thought would best suit one’s open-minded expe­ rience of the surrounding landscape. Winter, after all, precedes the mind’s choice of it as a figure. The opening line can be read in two ways: one must have winter’s mind, in which case winter is personified, or one must “dehu­ manize” oneself and let one’s mind take shape according to the nonhuman world: a mind of winter rather than a mind of the human. Whether the line describes nature in human terms or describes the human in terms of nature, or both simultaneously, the implication remains that nature is humanity’s autonomous other. “Winter” and “nothing,” like Shelley’s Mont Blanc, suggest vacancy and blankness even as they paradoxically point to the sheer materiality of the real. The syntax of the first line emphasizes this paradox by claiming this vacant nothingness in the form of a positive acquisition: the mental blank­ ness of winter is something to “have.” Still, to “have a mind of winter” is merely preparatory and not enough to make contact with nature. One could presumably acquire a “mind of winter” indoors and coolly “regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow” from safely behind a window. “Regard” etymologically connotes a guarded, objective stance,

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whereas to “behold” (suggesting palpable touch, “hold”) nature, one must experience it in an embodied way: to “have been cold a long time.” The sec­ ond stanza expresses this embodiment through its use of sounds to depict a visual scene and feeling of coldness. The thick and varied consonant sounds of “junipers shagged with ice” emphasize the “rough” texture of the frozen trees, and “shagged with ice” also evokes the word “shiver.” “In the distant glitter” simultaneously conjures the sparkling scene while onomatopoetically offering us the tinkling sound of wind through the icy trees and perhaps the cold chattering of teeth. Despite the detached, meditative tone of the poem, Stevens’s attention to sounds enacts the immediate, embodied experience of nonhuman nature. The poem culminates with the “listener,” either the “snow man” or the human who becomes like a snow man. In any case, the poem implies a pro­ gression at a thematic level from relatively detached “regarding” to more in­ volved “beholding” and “listening” of experience. Since the “listener” “be­ holds,” the speaker insinuates that not only the visual but the aural as well is beheld. In the middle line of the middle stanza, the speaker shifts themati­ cally from sight to sound. This shift suggests a more direct relationship with nature while it also reiterates the paradox of the opening line by embodying such an experience of nature in a personified listener. Contacting pure real­ ity, the poem suggests, requires our figurative faculty. The incantatory repetitions of the last three stanzas, both of words (“sound,” “same,” “wind,” “listen” and “listener,” “nothing”) and syntax (“sound of the wind,” “sound of a few leaves,” “sound of the land”) move the poem away from mere reference and toward sound, the wintry origin of language. That is, the repetition depletes the referential potential of the language and foregrounds the “sound” of the words, as if to approximate the materiality of “reality.” The speaker’s description of the wind attempts to become more concrete as the “sound of the wind” becomes “the sound of a few leaves, // Which is the sound of the land,” but the land is only “Full of the same wind / That is blowing” in a “bare place.” That is, the speaker fills then empties the wind of content, and the circular imagery makes it clear that these lines are less important for what they say than for how they enact the eddying, insistent pressure of the real on the human subject. In other words, repetition and sound itself, rather than a visual image, become the content. Though we are not to commit a pathetic fallacy by attributing “misery” or other human traits to it, the wind does act as an animating force, enlivening everything from “leaves” to the entire “land.” The wind does not merely blow across the land;

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

rather, the land seems to breathe the wind: “the land / Full of the same wind.” If not outright personification, this figuration at least suggests that the land is like something alive and that the wind is like breath, inhaling and exhaling the content the speaker attributes to it. The last line offers what to human sense seems paradoxical: the nonhu­ man as “nothing” is both absence and presence, emptiness and fullness. It is not something and it is something. When one acquires a “mind of winter,” or accords one’s imagination to reality partly through figurative restraint, then one experiences nature first as emptiness and absence. Yet neither nature nor language permits nature to remain absolutely empty or silent. The repetition of “nothing” in the last two lines foregrounds the word’s materiality, giving it aural “substance.” “Nothing” also wields figurative substance, for it is of course a metaphor for nonhuman reality, just as “winter” is. That is, figura­ tive restraint is itself imagined, as Stevens expresses in “The Plain Sense of Things”: “Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined” (503). But “nothing” is a metaphor that points outside of itself. The defamil­ iarizing syntactical effect of experiencing the somethingness of “nothing”— the “nothing that is”—mimics one’s experience of the nonhuman world as simultaneously empty and full. The concluding phrase thus recalls the first line of the poem, in which the nothingness of winter is something to “have.” The poem (and many other Stevens poems) therefore sidesteps the dilemma of which came first, imagination or reality. Instead of trying to solve this problem, Stevens avoids such a temporal fallacy by positing a dynamic relationship between the two. That is, imagination and reality simultaneously bring each other into being; each is distinct yet dynamically intertwined with the other. Stevens’s title, “The Snow Man,” expresses this relationship. On the one hand, wintry reality, in the form of snow, precedes the imaginative construct of snow man; one can’t build a snow man or a poem titled “The Snow Man” until, at some point, nonhuman nature has produced snow. As Bonnie Costello argues in her reading of “The Plain Sense of Things,” “We need nature to figure our own habits toward nature; the pond of the mind begins in Elizabeth Park” (“Wallace Stevens” 216). On the other hand, as the anthropomorphic title and ambiguous “listener” of the final stanza imply, one cannot imagine or share one’s immediate experience of reality without embodying it anthropomorphically; the best way to “behold” nature is not to abandon completely the human (which is, after all, part of nature), but rather to imagine what it would be like to behold as a snow man beholds. The techne of snow man and poem alike are thus inextricably bound to human

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production even as they must both be made of “reality’s” ingredients: snow and the aural effects of language. Of course, we should not overlook the possibility that Stevens is wink­ ing at us, despite the meditative, serious tone of the poem. As I’ve been sug­ gesting, Stevens’s poem looks back at Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” as an aesthetic and epistemological precursor, yet the sheer blankness and muteness of Shelley’s massive hulk of snow and ice have been reduced to the blank stare and silent grin of a snow man. Still, Stevens offers us more than mere domes­ ticated sublimity. Similar to William Cronon’s argument that a tree in one’s backyard expresses as much “wildness” as a tree in an old-growth forest, Stevens’s poem defamiliarizes (to recall Shelley once again) an image as con­ ventionally suburban as a snow man in order to show us the stark dimen­ sions of nonhuman “reality” just outside the door. One need not go as far as Chamonix (9–10). Although “The Snow Man” is perhaps Stevens’s most famous and most frequently anthologized poem, he does not treat it as a final statement or definitive theory of the imagination-reality knot. A poet of process and spec­ ulation rather than finality and didacticism, Stevens explored the possibili­ ties and tested the limits of sensuous poesis repeatedly throughout his poetic career, sometimes seeming to grant the imagination omnipotence, and other times expressing the unavoidable, formidable fact of reality. Stevens’s poems therefore should be read as qualifying one another in an ongoing dialogue rather than as discrete arguments. The relationship between nature and the sounds of poetry appears as a theme in many poems by Stevens, but he both extends and qualifies “The Snow Man” when he again takes up this theme in “Autumn Refrain”: The skreak and skritter of evening gone And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun, The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon, The yellow moon of words about the nightingale In measureless measures, not a bird for me But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath The stillness of everything gone, and being still, Being and sitting still, something resides, Some skreaking and skrittering residuum, And grates these evasions of the nightingale

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.

And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,

The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound. (160)

Both poems concern themselves with the simultaneous somethingness and nothingness, or “stillness,” of nature as experienced in a direct, sensuous way. Both poems also respond to Romantic forebears: Shelley in the case of “The Snow Man” and Keats in the case of “Autumn Refrain.” In this latter poem, however, Stevens dramatizes more forcefully than in “The Snow Man” the poet’s world stripped not only of figurative excess but of references to reality as well. George Lensing calls this “the most somber of Stevens’ autumn poems,” telling of what “remains after decreation” (74), which Stevens also considers in “The Plain Sense of Things”: “as if / We had come to the end of the imagination” (502). Stevens alludes to the nightingale of Keats’s famous ode, and both poets use the bird as a figure for the imagination, against which the cacophony of Stevens’s grackles conjures reality. Indeed, Eleanor Cook describes the first line as “one of the noisiest lines he ever wrote” (126). While the speaker uses the words “skreak and skritter” to describe the eve­ ning, they onomatopoeically suggest the grackles of the second line, who may be “gone,” but whose harsh song the poem reproduces despite their absence. This sense of compensation is echoed throughout the poem. Unlike “The Snow Man,” which uses gentle repetition and a detached tone to express a meditative state of mind, “Autumn Refrain” beats out its repetitions in an awkward, almost desperate way. The speaker, repeating “gone” four times and using the personal “I” and “me” (unusual for Stevens), elegizes his losses in a way that echoes Hopkins’s silvan elegy “Binsey Poplars” (“All felled, felled, are all felled” [78]). But where Hopkins bemoans the loss of a specific species, Stevens expresses a general sense of loss, grasping at what can possibly “reside” in the autumn landscape (and soundscape). Whereas the speaker of “The Snow Man” suggests that figurative restraint is necessary in order to experience reality, the speaker of “Autumn Refrain” appears to experience figurative loss as an inevitable and uncontrollable process accom­ panying the loss of natural referents. As in “The Snow Man,” both imagina­ tion (the nightingale) and reality (the grackles) in “Autumn Refrain” emerge through figures. But whereas the former poem makes a case for figurative restraint, asking what kind of figures most approximate reality, in “Autumn Refrain” not only are the famously figurative nightingale and its imaginative

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“evasions” of reality inaccessible to the speaker, but also the grackles, figures for reality, have flown too. The speaker wonders what would remain without either kind of figure, and he discovers that sound itself constitutes the “residuum.” The “nothing” of “The Snow Man” becomes the “something” and “still­ ness” of “Autumn Refrain,” which the latter poem nevertheless discusses in an agitated fashion. The speaker says that everything is profoundly still after the clichés not just of the poetic imagination but of nature itself are seem­ ingly gone. The third line refers to two moons, the moon of reality, which, like the sun, is gone, and the figurative moon traditionally associated with the imagination and thus with poetry: “The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon, / The yellow moon of words about the nightingale.” Yet in spite of the exodus the speaker senses in both reality and the imagina­ tion, the poem’s irregular meter, percussive repetition, and noisy alliteration run counter to the “stillness” thematized at the heart and conclusion of the poem. Indeed, the “something” that resides “beneath / The stillness of every­ thing gone” is described in a decidedly cacophonous line, “Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,” even noisier than the first line of the poem because it is less metrically regular. What resides, the speaker claims, is the poem’s sound itself, “desolate” after being stripped of imaginative and natu­ ral referents. Yet this residual sound of poetry after the emptying of reality and the imagination does not prove the ascendancy or priority of language over nature since such a conclusion still would rely on an oppositional dual­ ism between language and nature. Rather, “Autumn Refrain” explores the speaker’s “phenomenological reduction,” his experience of the raw sound of language as the natural remainder of reality. Reality and the imagina­ tion’s figurative experience of it have been ground down (or “grated”) to a nub, and that nub is sound itself. That is, the pure sound of the poem does not represent either imagination or reality in isolation from the other, but expresses instead “something subtler . . . a recognition that here, too, as between these poles, the universal interdependence exists, and hence they are equal and inseparable . . . [The nature of poetry] is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals” (Necessary Angel 24, 27). The title, “Autumn Refrain,” reinforces the messy entanglement of imagination and reality. First, the seasonal reference evokes nature’s detritus, when the falling leaves suggest both the process of stripping down to deso­ late reality, with which the poem deals, and the messy, colorful evocation

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

of imagination and creativity. Second, the word “refrain” contains multiple meanings that point to both imagination and reality. “Refrain” can refer to a piece of music, which the poem supports in its references to “measureless measures,” “a nameless air,” and “the key of that desolate sound” as well as in its general preoccupation with sound. “Refrain” also refers to birdsong, the “skreaking and skrittering” of reality’s grackles. In both cases, “refrain” spe­ cifically denotes repetition of aural phrases, whether in music or birdsong, and the poem is heavily repetitive. Finally, as a verb, “refrain” also means to withhold or restrain oneself, and the poem, like “The Snow Man,” practices figurative restraint. It rejects the nightingale’s imaginatively overindulgent “evasions” of reality in favor of something at once stranger and more real. “Autumn Refrain,” however, like all of Stevens’s poems, does not suggest a simple flight from fancy, a rejection of the imaginative and literary for the physical earth and its grackles. In Stevens’s poetry, grackles are, of course, lit­ erary and symbolic themselves. But through sensuous poesis, we experience these grackles as simultaneously real and constructed, natural and artificial. Grackles also make an appearance in Stevens’s ars poetica, “The Man on the Dump,” which negotiates the difference between poetic figures that have become ineffectual clichés, such as bouquets of flowers and morning dew, and those that are fresh and lively. “One feels the purifying change,” the speaker says hopefully. “One rejects / The trash.” A “pure” language is tied to a clarity of perception, so that one sees the exotic in the ordinary—“the elephant-colorings of old tires”—and the ordinary with more directness: “you see / As a man (not like the image of a man), / You see the moon rise in the empty sky.” As in “Autumn Refrain,” the seemingly more real “blatter of grackles” replaces the traditional nightingale (201–3). In spite of the speak­ er’s success at formulating unusual clusters of images and sounds, however, he never transcends the dump. The poem ends with the implication that once one has uttered something truly fresh or authentic, it inevitably lands on the dump. That the grackles will themselves become figurative clichés is therefore always a risk. The poem’s concluding series of unanswered ques­ tions concerning what combination of images or sounds grants us access to “the truth” suggests that the line between nature and artifice is not so easily drawn. Indeed, these terms become problematic in their misleading opposition, for the effect Stevens finally has as a proto-ecological modernist is to put into question what composes the real as well as to help us see the wild unpredict­ ability of language. Stevens never proposes a specific way we should treat

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nature, but his poetics shows us the intertwined relationship of language and the imagination with physical reality in its most fundamental form. No matter how much we pare down or restrict language to get at brute nature, “something resides,” yet that residuum of language and sound is itself wild and beyond our ability completely to control it, like nature. Stevens plays with this simultaneous distinctness of and inseparability between imagination and nature in “Anecdote of the Jar,” which alludes to another ode by Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” As a post-Romantic, Stevens was, like his forebears (and like Plath after him), fascinated with the relation­ ship between mind and nature, between subjective experience and objective reality. But as an American modernist, Stevens also distinguished himself from the Romantics not only in his skepticism toward their Neoplatonic ideas of transcendence and immortality but also in his self-consciously mod­ ern idiom, particularly in poems such as “Anecdote,” in which he employs a decidedly post-Romantic diction. Perhaps more than for the Romantics, for Stevens the messy relationship between imagination and nature has formal reverberations that he takes seriously. Indeed, such a relationship may be the result of, not just the cause of, particular poetic form. In his famously cryptic semi-ballad, Stevens treads the fault lines between sound and sense, nature and artifice, narrative and lyric: I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee. (76)

Many critics have considered the poem pure allegory, as illustrating the proper way to understand the relationship between reality (the wilder­ ness) and the imagination (the jar). These critics do not always agree on

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

the meaning of the supposed allegory, however. Joseph Carroll and Fredric Jameson, for instance, contend that the poem celebrates a moment of aes­ thetic triumph in which the speaker transfers his own imaginative activity to an inhuman medium. They perceive the speaker as speaking in earnest when he asserts that the jar “took dominion everywhere.” William Bevis, by contrast, believes that the poem “exposes the inherent sterility of ideal solutions to the problem of chaos” (269). Confronted with the seemingly ugly wilderness, Bevis claims, the speaker desires a human idea of order and places it there. Once that pure, ideal order is firmly established, however, it becomes sterile, and the speaker longs again for the variety and specificity of nature. In spite of their disagreements, these critics all share a focus on the thematics of the poem and do not give enough attention to the poem’s form, which complicates any allegorical reading (and these rather serious readings also overlook the sheer comedy of the poem). Yet critics who do concentrate on the poem’s formal devices tend to resist reading in it any commentary on actual wild nature. For Helen Vendler, the poem is primarily intertextual, evoking Keats’s ode. While she is persuasive that Stevens is once again responding to his Romantic forebears, Vendler sees the central question of the poem as what kind of language to use—an inher­ ited language of Europe or “plain American”—and overlooks the wilderness in both its real and figurative senses. Anca Rosu sidesteps the reality and imagination debate even more explicitly when claiming that the poem acts as a “charm” that generates rather than reflects reality. “The whole poem,” Rosu claims, “is like a circle described around the jar, and it may literally be so, since the action is one of ‘surrounding,’ and the repetition of ‘round’ and several of its variants creates a sound dominance . . . [T]he ‘Anecdote’ threatens a loss of its sense, which is kept in a precarious balance only by its curious ‘surrounding’ movement, a movement that is largely the effect of sound” (47–48). More than anyone else, Rosu discusses the poem in terms of its sounds. But his belief that all of reality is socially constructed and his desire to avoid what he sees as a tired discussion about reality and the imagination prevent him from discussing how, like many of Stevens’s poems, “Anecdote of the Jar” explores the relationship between nature and artifice. As in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” this poem’s formal elements challenge the notion of clear categories between imagination and reality without collapsing the two. Even at a thematic level, the supposed “slovenliness” of the wilderness does not necessarily mean that the jar truly “dominates” the landscape, for

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by the end of the poem the jar is merely “gray and bare,” and it lacks the creative power of the wilderness, which produces “bird” and “bush.” At a formal level, however, the poem from the start undermines the jar’s seem­ ing supremacy. True, the jar symbolizes aesthetic creation in the tradition of Keats’s great urn, as Vendler argues, but more specifically, the humbler jar correlates to the ballad stanza itself. And as a ballad, “Anecdote of the Jar” comically undermines Keats’s formally solemn ode, just as Stevens’s snow man both points to and winks at Shelley’s hulking Mont Blanc. Stevens’s choice of the ballad form also emphasizes his playful attitude toward what could otherwise become a ponderous philosophical lesson on the nature of reality and the imagination. Several key aspects of “Anecdote of the Jar” cause me to describe it a ballad. First, the narrative movement tells of actions in the past occurring sequentially, as a ballad tells a story. Even the title of this “anecdote” empha­ sizes its narrative element. Second, the poem’s meter is very close to the most common ballad form, a stanza composed of four lines of alternating iam­ bic tetrameter and trimeter. All but two of this poem’s lines are tetrameter. Third, the poem’s rhyme scheme approximates that of a ballad although only the first stanza employs the common ballad rhyme scheme (ABCB). Fourth, the poem parcels discrete syntactical units into each end-stopped line (with the exception of the lightly enjambed third line, “It made the slovenly wil­ derness / Surround that hill”). Finally, like a traditional folk ballad, the poem uses colloquial language, replacing Keats’s “ode” and “urn” with the more common “anecdote” and homely “jar.” By identifying the poem as a ballad, we can see disruption in its significant exceptions to the received form. Instead of the poem aurally “surrounding” the jar, as Rosu would have it, the poem itself metonymically stands for the aesthetic object the jar sym­ bolizes. If we consider the poem a ballad, its ballad features are continually disrupted through its own form. The poem asserts that the jar has the power to set the wilderness in order, yet it is in these very lines (3–4) that the poem questions its own formal order; after the first three tightly tetrameter lines, the stanza thuds to a close in an awkward dimeter, “Surround that hill.” The light enjambment of line three also hints at the “sprawling” and “slovenly” wilderness, which, at the level of form, is actually not completely contained in end-stopped lines. Also, instead of a true rhyme, which Stevens would call “resemblance” rather than “identity,” the identical rhyme “hill/hill” ex­ presses only identity: “Both in nature and in metaphor identity is the van­ ishing-point of resemblance” (Necessary Angel 72). Already in the first stanza,

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

therefore, the poem formally questions the dominance of the jar-poem, even as it asserts that dominance semantically. The second stanza seems to recover at a formal level the expectations the poem initially leads us to have; the lines are regularly iambic and tetram­ eter, and each one is syntactically contained and end-stopped. Yet the line endings do not rhyme at all, not even in a slant way. Instead, the rhyming has drifted to the inside of the stanza; the internal rhymes “around,” “round,” and “ground” look back at the internal “round” of the first stanza. The repetition of the “round” image works against the preceding linearity and verticality of the ballad and jar, just as the horizontal internal rhymes replace the vertical end rhymes. Likewise, the suggestion of the round and squat jar’s “portliness” by the word “port” undermines the elevated yet odd diction “tall and of a port in air” (what Vendler calls the poem’s posture of Englishness in the context of an American idiom). The final stanza returns to end rhymes, but it offers a different rhyme scheme from the first stanza. The last stanza’s first two lines now rhyme with the second stanza’s last word (“air,” “everywhere,” “bare”), and such idling on the same sound further destabilizes the poem’s formal development. This inter-stanza rhyming also undercuts the conventional ballad’s tendency to contain syntax and sounds within lines and stanzas. The last word, “Ten­ nessee,” again offers an identical rhyme with the first line, further accentu­ ating the poem’s lack of development and by implication the jar’s lack of dominion. Whereas a traditional ballad relies on the repetition of metrical pattern and rhyme for its aural power, each stanza of the “Anecdote” shifts slightly in both meter and rhyme. The only trimeter line of the poem, “The jar was gray and bare,” emphasizes the truncating of expectations concerning the jar’s purported “dominion” and creative power. The poem’s formal restless­ ness in general also betrays the aesthetic dominance of form over the land­ scape. Indeed, in spite of what the poem claims, the wilderness, in the form of sensuous poesis, creeps into the jar and upsets its orderliness. That is, the “wilding” of language enacts the subversive wildness of the landscape, whose sprawling slovenliness the ballad is ultimately unable to contain and control completely. The poem asserts that it, as the jar, orders the wilder­ ness, but formally the wilderness “disorders” the jar and the ballad. As a poet of the middle ground between formalism and free verse, Stevens demonstrates that what I call the “wildness” of language depends partly on the background orderliness of form. That is, without the received

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form of the ballad that Stevens uses in “Anecdote of the Jar,” we wouldn’t experience its significant formal exceptions as revisionary. Poetry, for Stevens, exists in that fluid borderland between form, or the poet’s intention, and the wild spontaneity of language. Whereas Robert Frost described poetic form as a “momentary stay against confusion,” forms such as the ballad serve for Stevens not so much as a way to control or eliminate the “pressure of real­ ity,” but as part of his technique to foreground the “confusion,” or wildness, of language and nature in their very resistance to formal rigidity. Thus, not in spite of but partly because of the formal regularity of “The Auroras of Autumn,” in its ten sections, each section comprising eight tercets in roughly iambic pentameter, language displays its wildness in fresh and startling ways. Unlike “Anecdote of the Jar,” brief and lighthearted like many of the early poems of Harmonium, “The Auroras of Autumn” sprawls over many pages, typical of the philosophically exploratory later work. Stevens was increasingly drawn to the long poem, which he says “comes to possess the reader and . . . naturalizes him in its own imagination and liberates him there” (Necessary Angel 50). As Vendler astutely surmises, “when Stevens speaks of the effect of reading a long poem, he is probably drawing on the experience of writing one” (On Extended Wings 2). That is, despite the particular challenges and artistic risks inherent in composing a long poem, Stevens also felt freer with it than with the short lyric to explore his “sense of the world” and develop his “temperament” or “manner of thinking and feeling” (Necessary Angel 120). The poet, in other words, and not just the reader, becomes “naturalized” in the habitat of the long poem. This does not mean, however, that “Auroras” says anything conclusive or final about the relationship of nature and the imagina­ tion. Indeed, the poem’s length renders the relationship even more complex. Three quatrains may fit the anecdotal jar, but the figure of the northern lights, the grand aurora borealis—Stevens’s wildest figure for the interaction between nature and the imagination—requires a much vaster formal field. The central image of the auroras immediately blurs the borderline between imagination and reality. Throughout the poem, that is, the image of the auroras simultaneously refers to the ephemeral northern lights through visual description and formal enactment and signifies the equally unstable movements of the speaker’s mind. The poem attempts what the speaker claims the auroral phenomenon itself—“form gulping after formlessness”— does: it tries to represent, through language, the dynamic flux of nature. This would indeed be a paradoxical and ultimately impossible task (merely a beautiful failure), if we considered Stevens’s language as conventionally

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

representational from the start. But as most of his poems demonstrate, language itself can be as wild and slippery as the nature it represents, and the “The Auroras” in particular does not presume simply to reflect a natu­ ral scene or “capture” nature in language. Indeed, that the speaker would include the preposition “after” in “gulping after formlessness” suggests only empty “gulping.” The speaker admits that the poem does not “gulp” form­ lessness, the auroras, itself (411). In many of Stevens’s poems a particular image, such as the grackles, the snow man, or the sea, serves as a synecdoche for nonhuman nature in general, for “reality.” In “Auroras,” however, Stevens picks an image that accentuates more strikingly than these figures nature’s difference from humankind. The auroras are a physical phenomenon of nature, not only nonliving (like the snow man and sea) but also infrequently observed, physically ambiguous, and, most of all, otherworldly. Without scientific explanation, they elude understanding, and even with it, they still induce awe in human observers. Indeed, the auroras are so strange that in the context of Stevens’s poem they resist being treated as a natural phenomenon at all; critics typically leap to the figurative level immediately. As Justin Quinn points out, the poem “is so far from our conventional idea of nature poetry that it has never been recognised as such. And yet what are the auroras if not one of nature’s grandest perfor­ mances?” (15). As the poem expresses repeatedly, the auroras embody extreme flux and nebulousness. The image of the auroras weaves itself throughout the poem’s ten sections, sometimes taking center stage (thus the theatrical meta­ phors) and sometimes receding into the background of the speaker’s imagina­ tive fantasies. This oscillation between prominence and disappearance further enacts the flux associated with the auroras. Stevens chooses this extravagant metaphor for nature not merely to suggest a chasm of difference between humans and the rest of nature or to accentuate the flux and impermanence of autumn and what autumn conventionally symbolizes: impending human mortality. He does suggest these themes, but more significantly, he chooses the auroras to illustrate the entangled relationship (the distinctness yet insepa­ rability) of imagination and reality, of the human and nonhuman. At times the auroras are figuratively tied to reality, and at other times they embody the imagination. Most important, they seem to point to both, confounding any sense of strict distinction between Stevens’s categories. Through sensuous poesis, Stevens immediately puts intense pressure on the relationship between nature and language in section one of the poem, which deals primarily with the auroral phenomenon itself. The language of

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this section denies easy access to the natural referent while also conjuring it in an immediate fashion through sound effects, syntax, and shifting diction. Instead of denoting the auroras directly, that is, the poem begins at once with metaphor: “This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.” The speaker presents the auroras not only visually but also aurally in terms of a serpent, whose hiss­ ing is evoked through the repetition of “s” and “z” sounds in the first stanza: “This,” “is,” “serpent,” “lives,” “bodiless,” “His,” “is,” “his,” “Eyes” “fix,” “us,” “sky” (411). Because the serpent stands for the auroras, the auroras are associ­ ated with the real rather than the figurative, even though they later become figurative themselves. But everything about section one prevents us from having a firm grasp on this natural referent. The elusive snake continually changes its shape and is most often observed merely by its trace, the “moving grass,” which then becomes “the Indian in his glade,” another example of Stevens’s tendency to equate wild nature with racial others (412). The speak­ er’s insistent use of the demonstrative case—thirteen instances in only eight short stanzas—is very much at odds with the indeterminate auroras. The demonstrative markers, “this,” “these,” “there,” “that,” point toward reality without simply representing it. But the reality they suggest is insistently elu­ sive, culminating in the ambiguous “this” and “that” of the penultimate stanza: “This is his poison: that we should disbelieve / Even that” (411). The poem does not make clear what it is we disbelieve, and this very uncertainty points to the tenuous grasp the speaker has on what he observes despite the confidently certain tone expressed through the demonstrative case, which ironically only foregrounds the uncertain referent. In the second section, however, Stevens constructs a landscape of stark reality. Indeed, the first two lines suggest that he is employing the mode of stage directions: “A cabin stands, / Deserted, on a beach” (412). This mode anticipates the extreme theatricality of the poem’s later sections; the artifici­ ality of stagecraft also complicates any notion that the poem (a “made thing”) offers up reality directly. Nonetheless, Stevens employs motifs—solitude, whiteness, barrenness, coldness—which he used in “The Snow Man,” among other poems, to evoke reality. Juxtaposed with the starkness and stillness of stripped-down reality, however, the lines of this section busily revise and qualify themselves after the first clearly stated description of the cabin. His repetition of “or” when offering different reasons for the cabin’s whiteness, for example, gives the lines an unsettled feeling, as do the qualifications and abrupt phrases of the sprawling sentence:

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete The flowers against the wall

Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white That was different, something else, last year Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon, Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon. (412)

The frequent caesuras and other pauses, as well as the hesitant, startstop rhythm, act as counterpoints to the sprawling length of the sentence and predominance of enjambed lines. This tension within the form, as well as the more immediate tension between the uncertain, restless tone of the lines and the barren scene of “reality” they describe, suggest that the speaker is not satisfied with the usual motifs (the old scenery) associated with reality (in contrast to “The Snow Man,” in which the theme of stark reality is, for the most part, matched with a calm, meditative tone). The speaker is not sat­ isfied with these indicators of reality because they have become too familiar and lack the startling effect of an accurate expression of nature’s immediacy. But instead of abandoning these old figures straightaway, Stevens spends most of this section rehearsing them, clustering them in various configura­ tions, like Yeats in his final look at his own collection of musty metaphors in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” (Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump” is an even more direct heir of Yeats’s poem.) One powerful effect of the clearly contrived figures of section two is the way they amplify by contrast the final stanza’s fresh and convincing figure for vital nature, the auroras. Near the middle of this section, after the ellipsis (which functions like a dimming of stage lights between scenes), “The season changes.” The rest of the section expresses a markedly different tone from the first five stanzas. Unlike the preceding lines, which are mostly enjambed and full of internal pauses, the lines of the last three stanzas settle down into mostly end-stops with few internal pauses. The meditative tone and formal smoothness of these lines mark a shift in the section’s attention; in the first half, the obsessive qualifications self-consciously draw attention to the words themselves, words with which the speaker is never fully satisfied: “Here, being visible is being white, / Is being of the solid of white.” The speaker’s association of whiteness with visibility and solidity declares the reality of whiteness only at the semantic level (even though “visible” and “solid” are themselves abstract

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words), but his self-correction and use of awkward syntax—“being of the solid of white”—throws whiteness into abstraction. The result of such for­ mulations and reformulations of these motifs for reality is not reality itself but merely the “accomplishment / Of an extremist in an exercise” (412). After the change in season and scene, however, the speaker’s tone shifts as a “cold wind chills the beach. / The long lines of it grow longer, emptier” (412). The ambiguous “it,” as well as the double meaning of “lines,” suggest that not only the tidal lines of the beach but also the poem’s lines themselves become “longer, emptier” in the sense that they are less choked with rhythmic inter­ ruptions, qualifying clauses, and excess verbiage than the stanzas prior to the “change.” “Whiteness” and the other ineffective motifs of reality grow “less vivid” as the solitary “man who is walking turns blankly on the sand,” away from these old markers and toward a more apt sign of reality in the north: the wild auroras (412). Stevens calls forth reality by juxtaposing different sets of figures. Through syntax, diction, and tone, the former motifs for reality come across as artificial and unconvincing compared to the new “sweeps,” “gusts,” and “enkindlings” of the auroras (413). These words again underscore the flux and process of the auroras, in contrast to the nearly ossified former things of reality: the cabin, the white flowers, nominalized whiteness itself (412–13). In the figurative algebra of the second section, the auroras are, at an immediate level, in the position of representing the imagination since they are juxtaposed to the whiteness and barren scenery of reality (in contrast to the first section, in which the snake as metaphor aligned the auroras with reality). Compared to the barren scenery, the auroras also behave like an imaginative artist, brushing the canvas of the sky with colorful “sweeps.” And yet the shift in language that emphasizes the sterility and artificiality of reality’s former props makes the auroras seem to be the most “real” element of the section. Part of what gives the auroral metaphor freshness and “real­ ness” is the tension produced by the number of opposites in the last stanza: “frigid brilliances,” “blue-red,” “polar green,” “ice and fire.” These opposites also suggest that Stevens has once again sidestepped the question of which has priority, imagination/language or reality/nature; he has discovered a fig­ ure that expresses the paradox and complexity of the entangled relationship itself. The auroras, after all, contain both the frigidity and “solitude” of real­ ity and the colorful exuberance of imagination (413). And yet, despite the auroras’ apparent vital creativity, the speaker also associates them with impending death and dissolution, as the third section makes clear. In her effort to read ecological phenomenology into this poem,

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

Voros considers the mysterious mother of the poem as an “earth mother” (109), and she associates the poem’s persistent imagery of homes—eggs, nests, cabins, houses, rooms—with Heideggerian “dwelling,” the oikos at the etymo­ logical root of ecological. Voros reads the poem, therefore, in a rather anach­ ronistic light; according to her, the poem “depicts a full-fledged dwelling on Earth within earthly limits” (106). Voros’s reading not only valorizes nature over humanity (she even capitalizes “Nature”) but also neglects the extent to which the poem concerns itself with how nature is simultaneously real and constructed. In one context, the auroras appear imagined and full of creative power in contrast to worn-out metaphors, and in another context, such as the third section of the poem, they appear ominously real things, in whose light death and dissolution creep. And behind this oscillation of the aurora’s prom­ ising creativity and impending doom lies the elusiveness of language itself, which, like the auroras, is capable of both impressive pyrotechnics and seman­ tic unraveling. It is unclear who gathers in the house of section three, but these unnamed figures experience dissolution, in the form of the “evening, half dissolved,” and later in their house itself, which “will crumble and the books will burn” (413). Even the grammar and sense of the next three lines begin to dissolve as the speaker’s attempt to paint a peaceful domestic picture feels the tremors of the approaching auroras: “They are at ease in a shelter of the mind // And the house is of the mind and they and time, /Together, all together” (413). In the final stanza, descending night, the setting for the auro­ ras, takes on a menacing, violent feeling. Yet the speaker anticipates his own moment of crisis in section six when his proxy, the “scholar of one candle,” must face the auroras himself, so he attempts to ameliorate the ominous feel­ ing with the regular iambic pentameter of the first line and the only clean rhyme of section three: “A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round / And knock like a rifle-butt against the door. / The wind will command them with invincible sound” (414). But the regularity of these lines cannot forestall mor­ tality. The section anticipates the association between sleep and death in the second stanza, which describes the evening as lacking “the prescience of oncoming dreams” (413). Even the mother, who “gives transparence to their present peace,” is “dissolved, she is destroyed” (413). By the end of the section, what the mother has provided, “gentleness” and insight, or “transparency,” is replaced by opacity and the “commanding” auroral night. Instead of provid­ ing transparency, the house windows only reflect the approaching auroras and mask inner darkness: “The windows will be lighted, not the rooms” (413). Why would Stevens present the auroras in this section as a threatening

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force, at odds with what the house and mother seem to provide—comfort, shelter, and stability? The speaker’s ambivalent attitude expresses yet another oscillation associated with the flux of the auroras itself. Nature is not inher­ ently good or evil; rather, it is perceived and constructed as such depending on human subjectivity, which is itself in flux. Furthermore, it is possible that the inhabited house of section three is a past incarnation, a flashback, of the deserted white cabin of section two, in which case the house is again aligned with reality, a structure in which the human subjects seek refuge. Taken together, sections two and three dramatize the human impulse to seek habitual, comfortable modes of perceiving reality simultaneously with nature’s refusal to be taken for granted. Stevens uses, that is, the aesthetic of the sublime; compared to conventional, picturesque, homey modes of per­ ception, the fresh metaphor for nature appears both beautiful and terrifying. To make room for this grand new “auroral” way of perceiving reality, human perception must be cleansed of the conventional, the poem seems to argue. But such a process of stripping away goes only so far in Stevens’s poetry. Just as “something resides,” some “skreaking and skrittering resid­ uum” in “Autumn Refrain,” in the fourth section of “Auroras” “The cancellings, / The negations are never final” (414). Led by a cloud-hopping father, the imagination’s troupe of characters perform in sections four and five. The auroras, which in every other section make an appearance, at least in the final stanza or two, are hardly mentioned in these two sections. It is as if the imagination, in rebellion, attempts to crowd out the “pressure of reality,” culminating in a performance that seems (ironically, just like the auroras) to come out of thin air, self-perpetuating and not inspired by anything real. Because reality, in the form of the intimidating, dazzling auroras of the first three sections, refuses to be matched with the imagination’s old motifs for reality, the speaker explores the possibility of divorcing imagination from reality entirely, asking, “What company, / In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?” What combination of self-sufficient artifice, that is, can face up to raw nature and perhaps “out-dazzle” it (415)? Section five, the middle of the poem, presents pure artifice and the­ atricality, with no mention of the awesome auroras that instigated such a flight into fancy. The magician-like celestial father (who “leaps from heaven to heaven” in section four) gathers a festive and predictably exotic congre­ gation—storytellers, musicians, dancing negresses, laughing children—and deals in stage materials pulled “out of air”: “Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods / And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep” (415).

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

Extravagant artifice here has a pulse: the incessant repetition of alliterative pairs, beaten out like a circus drum: “father fetches” (four times), “tellers of tales,” “mute much,” “muse much,” “sing-song,” “tinny time,” “unherded herds,” “trumpet’s touch,” “this then,” “A-dub, a-dub.” Just as this aural festi­ val reaches its zenith, its “tumult,” the speaker spurts in exasperation: What festival? This loud, disordered mooch? These hospitalities? These brute-like guests? These musicians dubbing at a tragedy, A-dub, a-dub?” (415–16).

This section, which more than any other departs from sense and flirts with pure sound, shows the consequence of overindulging in artifice. The repetition of alliterative pairs culminates in the speaker’s disgusted parody of himself, “A-dub, a-dub,” which calls to mind the old nursery rhyme: Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub,

And who do you think they be?

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,

They all jumped out of a rotten potato,

Turn them out, knaves all three.

In an older version of this rhyme, the three men are mocked for gawk­ ing at a common sideshow attraction at an old fair, three girls in a tub: Hey rub-a-dub, Ho rub-a-dub,

Three maids in a tub,

And who do you think was there?

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker;

And all of them gone to the fair.

Both the nursery rhyme and Stevens’s section of “Auroras” involve the carnivalesque, and it may not be coincidental that one of the men in the nursery rhyme—the belittled candlestick maker—bears a resemblance to Stevens’s poet figure, the “scholar of one candle,” who is literally belittled by the auroras in section six (417). Without a basis in reality, the speaker asserts, “there are no lines to speak,” and “there is no play.” Pure artifice can only build upon itself—“the

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persons act one [a play] merely by being here” (416)—and ultimately does not satisfy the speaker, who expresses Stevens’s thought that “art for art’s sake is both indiscreet and worthless” (Souvenirs 38), and that “the imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real” (Necessary Angel 6). In section five the imagination “adheres to the unreal” in its attempt to stand autonomous from auroral reality, and the speaker presents this adhesion as a failure, or at least as uninteresting (416). Thus he moves quickly back to the auroras themselves, devoting a full section (section six) to a description of them. After the rhetorical and figu­ rative excess of the previous section, which doesn’t mention the auroras at all, one might expect section six to offer the auroras in literal, denotative language, instead of the following: It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change. (416)

Stevens once again avoids taking sides between imagination and reality, preferring to explore the way each calls the other into being and what figures most appropriately and effectively conjure such a process. The speaker begins this section with unusual directness: “It is . . . ,” similar to the first section’s “This is . . . ,” and the grammatical directness and simplicity of metaphor (as opposed to simile: it is like . . . ) seem to be at odds with metaphor’s indirect relationship to reality. The power of these metaphors, however, to “adhere to the real” in a convincing way lies in their juxtaposition with the previous section’s figurative abandon. The speaker retains section five’s lexicon of performance by calling the auroras a “theatre,” but the way the metaphors gracefully and quickly shift from one to another—in only four lines the light of the auroras is a theatre, which is a cloud, which is misted rock, which is mountains, which is running water, which is waves of light—enacts the beautiful “change” and “transformation” of the physical auroras. Such figurative “drifting,” contrasted with the self-perpetuating “tumult” of the previous section’s imaginative fes­ tival, comes across as devoted to nature’s actual drift. Furthermore, the use

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

of theatrical metaphors to describe the auroras, in contrast to the theatrical excesses of human imagination in section five, suggests that the auroras “per­ form” just as a human artist does; indeed, human performance, even at its most gaudy, is upstaged by nature. The main opposition of the poem, there­ fore, is not between reality and imagination but between imagination that adheres to the real (and in doing so acknowledges nature’s own performance) and imagination that adheres to the unreal. For Stevens, reality and imagi­ nation are always bound together, so adhesion to the unreal, as section five demonstrates, is unsustainable because it relies on a false dichotomy between reality and imagination; it assumes it can sustain itself independent of reality. The opening lines of section six also effectively dramatize the way the auroras, as both a physical phenomenon of nature and a figure for nature itself, render porous the boundary between the real and the figurative. The auroral light is metaphorical—“a theatre floating through the clouds”— but it is also literal: “Itself a cloud.” This second cloud of reality, however, quickly becomes figurative again, as it is “of misted rock / And mountains running like water.” When the speaker claims, therefore, that the auroras are “of cloud transformed / To cloud transformed again,” he describes not only the physical metamorphosis of dancing light but his own use of meta­ phorical metamorphosis as well, as he alternately metaphorizes the literal and literalizes the metaphorical (416). Section six returns to the solitary man of section two, who has become the “scholar of one candle,” a figure for the poet who must face and reckon with the auroras. The speaker reiterates the claim of “The Snow Man” that in order to behold nature, one must first go through a mental purging of imagi­ native excess and perceptive familiarity before internalizing the beheld scene in all its strangeness: “This is nothing until in a single man contained, / Nothing until this named thing nameless is / And is destroyed” (416). Indeed, the auro­ ras are never named as such in any part of the poem, and even (or especially) those sections that treat the phenomenon most directly lean on metaphor most heavily. Stevens suggests that metaphor, rather than being merely orna­ mental, is fundamentally involved in one’s perception of reality; in a seeming paradox, the closer we get to reality itself, the more metaphorical our experi­ ence of it becomes. The sixth section concludes by encapsulating the central drama of the poem, the imaginative poet’s encounter with a wild nature that seems to have its own majestic imagination:

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chapter i He opens the door of his house On flames. The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is. And he feels afraid. (416–17)

The poet’s imagination, in the form of the single flickering candle, is held up to nature’s imagination, the “Arctic effulgence,” which doesn’t just dwarf the tiny candle but totally subsumes it. The alliteration of “f,” “l,” and “r” sounds intensifies the potency of this encounter; indeed, one can picture the poet’s little flame being blown about by these thick sounds. The poet “feels afraid” because he has reached the inevitable, intimidating paradox produced by the logic of the auroral metaphor. For poetry to have a power­ ful or meaningful effect, it must “adhere to the real,” yet to render nature in all its sublime and creative power threatens the obliteration of poetry. The more poetry adheres to nature, without which it cannot be, the more pro­ visional it seems by comparison. Particularly in light of the auroras, which are themselves awesome yet fleeting, a poetry that strives to be auroral itself must reckon with the risk of being semantically snuffed out at any moment. After this climactic encounter between the artist and the auroral knot of reality/imagination, the poem indeed seems to weaken in intensity. The imag­ ery becomes less vivid and the lines more prosy as the speaker muses on the philosophical implications of the complex auroral metaphor. Granted, many of Stevens’s late poems suffer from a philosophical (albeit playfully ambigu­ ous) didacticism and are perhaps more usefully thought of as “pre-poetry, a tentative approach to the poem,” to use Frank Lentricchia’s description of Stevens’s late poetry as nascent, exploratory, and not fully realized (160).4 But Stevens’s “Auroras” lessens in poetic vigor also because the “pressure of real­ ity” proves to be too great, and the poem is ultimately unable to perform the impossible task it sets out for itself in section one; it cannot render “form­ lessness” into “form,” at least not in any permanent way. Thus the language retreats from the crisis of section six into a safer, more detached prosiness. In section seven the speaker speculates on what nature at its wildest—the aurora’s “Arctic effulgence” of the previous section—suggests at a figurative level: personified imagination, which, godlike, “sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent.” Just when the auroral light show becomes most antihuman, most starkly pitted against human experience, the speaker suddenly imag­ ines auroral imagination in his own image, that of a man, albeit a superhu­ man one, who “leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,” like the

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

acrobatic father of section four. Though Stevens did not subscribe to tradi­ tional Christian notions of deity, this personified, powerful imagination takes on deific proportions in contrast to the typical conception of imagination as merely subjective and personal, limited to “one candle.” It has the power to [Extinguish] our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought, A shivering residue, chilled and foregone.

The auroras literally obscure the planets in the night sky, but figu­ ratively they also wield power as destructive as it is creative: “grim as it is benevolent.” But the speaker runs into an inevitable paradox: this grand imagination “dare not leap by chance in its own dark.” If the imagination at its grandest, in other words, has the power to imagine us—it “leaps through us” just as in summer it “stops //To imagine winter”—then who or what imagines it? The speaker claims that it is not self-generative, and as the open­ ing of this section has already shown, imagination at its most inhuman and sublime must itself be personified, in other words, it must be imagined (417). The poem ultimately is unable to resolve this problem, though it only seems like a problem to be solved because of the rhetoric of philosophical inquiry and abstraction in these last four sections that, to a certain extent, has replaced the vivid imagery and aural effects of the first half of the poem. Section eight attempts to convince us that the auroras, despite being a fig­ ure for universal imagination (nature at its grandest), nonetheless express sheer reality, a “time of innocence / As pure principle,” underneath or prior to human concepts. The speaker places this “innocence of the earth” in contrast to the “falsely” figurative, recalling the “loud, disordered mooch” of section five: “So, then these lights are not a spell of light, / A saying out of a cloud, but innocence. / An innocence of the earth and no false sign.” But these lines merely say without showing enough; they are therefore less persuasive than the sensuous argument previously expressed in the “theater floating in the clouds” or the “Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame.” Indeed, the more earnestly the speaker insists on the “innocent earth” and “time of innocence,” the less convincing are his lines: “It is like a thing of ether that exists / Almost as predictable. But it exists, / It exists, it is visible, it is, it is” (418). The speaker protests too much, and the repetition of words and phrases in this particular case, especially the empty “it is,” only compromises their rhetorical power.

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The ninth section recovers some poetic power, particularly in its indi­ rect yet vivid description of the auroras: “The stars are putting on their glit­ tering belts. / They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash / Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.” Perhaps because the auroras proved over­ whelming for the solitary “scholar of one candle,” section nine replaces him with a group of men, the “Danes of Denmark.” Bonnie Costello links the Danes to Hamlet, which serves her argument that “Auroras” is tragic, like Shakespeare’s play. But despite the poem’s periodic gestures toward impend­ ing “disaster”—“Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring? / Of what disaster is this the imminence: / Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?”—the Danes are more likely related to Stevens’s idea of direct contact with the “innocent earth.” Not only do they fit with the northern orientation of the poem as a whole, but also, more important, they recall the pagan men of “Sunday Morning” and their orgiastic rituals. These Danes “knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen, / For whom the outlandish was another day // Of the week, queerer than Sunday.” Whitmanian figures, these men are “earthy” in more than one sense; they are vigorously linked to the earth and erotically linked to one another: We thought alike

And that made brothers of us in a home

In which we fed on being brothers, fed

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep. (419)

Still, the “drama” of the Danes is muted; they do not “chant in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun,” like the “ring of men” in “Sunday Morning” (69–70). Indeed, the “glittering” celestial drama of the sky in “Auroras” eclipses any temporary attention the Danes may draw. Stevens’s Danes bring to mind Fitzgerald’s Dutch sailors (at the conclusion of The Great Gatsby), whose sight of the “fresh, green breast of the new world” only emphasizes for Nick Carraway the fact that we can no longer feel the sense of discovery they felt when “face to face for the last time in history with something commensu­ rate to [humankind’s] capacity for wonder” (182). Similarly, Stevens’s Danes express an earthy vigor and Romantic connection to nature no longer possi­ ble, cut short by the auroras’ “last embellishment.” Unlike Fitzgerald’s Dutch

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

sailors, however, Stevens’s Danes realize that their days—their Edenic ways of relating to nature—are numbered. Consequently, they see themselves “hang­ ing in the trees.” The auroras demand a language and way of being far more complex than the Danes’ “idiom of an innocent earth,” which we imagine was spoken in a past, paradisiacal time when humans seemed to be at one with nature in a simple way (419). Section nine suggests that such a relationship is illusory, or at least irretrievable, a thing of the mythic past that we might yearn for, like Nick Carraway. But the auroras present a way of relating to nature that is at once more real and more difficult. The poem therefore concludes with perhaps its most obscure section. The “scholar” of the poem’s middle has now become, or become replaced by, the “rabbi,” to whom the speaker directs his orders. After the rest of the poem has repeatedly refuted any clear divisions between artifice and environment, the speaker now tries out various “phases of this difference” between culture and nature. His final choice seems to be based more on aes­ thetics—on what sounds right—than on any working of logic. “An unhappy people in an unhappy world” is too symmetrical—“Here are too many mir­ rors for misery”—whereas “A happy people in an unhappy world” simply does not sit comfortably in the speaker’s mouth: “There’s nothing there to roll // On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.” The penultimate choice, “A happy people in a happy world,” sounds too frivolous and silly: “Buffo!” the speaker blurts in reaction. He finally settles on “An unhappy people in a happy world,” not because of any profound meaning in this phrase (though it does get at our separation from a nature we are nevertheless a part of) but primarily because it is the most rhythmically pleasing: “Now, solemnize the secretive syllables,” the speaker directs the rabbi. The speaker is aware that this formulation is an “extremity” and a “contrivance,” “Contriving balance to contrive a whole.” He is aware, that is, that our sense of categorization and separation from nature is an arbitrary matter of language, and that no such stark division exists “out there” (420). And yet, as the concluding tercet illustrates, our entanglement with nature can also be a matter of language. The rabbi does not land on the “inno­ cent earth,” a “pure principle” divorced from concept and language: “not hushful paradise,” but “a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights / Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick” (421). The “–ing” verb “haggling” recalls the verbs of the poem’s opening section—“wriggling,” “gulping,” “moving”—which emphasize auroral flux and process, but it also suggests that any effort to think through and articulate the distinctions between nature

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and culture is a messy, even frustrating process. “Haggling” refers to terms in dispute, and Stevens chooses to leave his terms that way. The concluding image of the auroras—“these lights / Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick”—domesticates what was in previous sections sublime and intimidating. Indeed, whereas in section six the “scholar of one candle” was juxtaposed with the “Arctic effulgence,” now the auroras, reduced to the flame of a straw rushlight, resemble the flame of the scholar’s candle. The pastoral image of a rushlight stuck in a “nick,” or notch, puts the auroras in a diminutive light, offset­ ting the “haggling of wind and weather” but adding to this section’s lexicon of calm religiosity: “rabbi,” “solemnize,” “congregation,” “meditations,” “medi­ tates.” In a final instance of figurative flux and metamorphosis, the auroras have shifted from something dreadful to something hallowed. The coexis­ tence of “summer straw” and “winter’s nick” also gestures toward the unan­ swerable question underlying the poem: Is wintry reality a product of sum­ mery imagination, or is the imagination embedded in a nonhuman world that exceeds and precedes it? The image suggests both summer and winter simultaneously. The complicated metaphor of the northern lights—wild and imaginative at once—demands that the question remain open. In “The Auroras of Autumn,” this nearly “last embellishment” of his opus, Stevens attempts to create language that overlaps with and derives from the texture of complex nature itself. Indeed, as many critics note, Stevens is more interested in the process itself—the “gulping” of “form” after “formless­ ness”—than any sense of finality or closure. Stevens’s ecopoetics lies more in this aesthetic process—foregrounding the wildness of language and suggest­ ing by extension that human imagination is both part of and distinct from the rest of natural reality—than what many ecocritics are perhaps habituated to see as ecocentric in literary texts: specific ecological truths rendered into metaphor, implicit critiques of industrialism, or valorizations of the natural world “out there.” Stevens, however, is not a pure aesthete in the pejorative sense of the word; he does not deride or deny the power of that outside world. On the contrary, nature is always central to Stevens’s poetics, though not in a conventionally Romantic way, as Costello argues in guiding our attention to “the physical conditions of consciousness and the perceptual base of its activ­ ity, which Stevens so often invokes as both limit and need. Stevens’ romantic resistance to materialist views of reality has blocked this line of relatedness. We have tended to follow his lead in addressing the Cartesian split as a prob­ lem to be solved by the pre-eminence of mind. But the body in mind remains a part of his poetics even at the most abstract” (“Wallace Stevens” 203). Thus,

Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete

the old opposing categories of “subjectivity” and “objectivity” only obscure the work Stevens’s poems actually do, which is continually to trouble the “Cartesian split,” seeking what he calls “something subtler” in the relation­ ship between reality and the imagination. Even as he questions the solidity of the material world (in concert with the new physics of his day),5 Stevens materializes ideas, reminding us of their origination in the matrix of the natu­ ral world: “All of our ideas come from the natural world: Trees = umbrellas” (Opus Posthumous 189). He also treats language as a physical phenomenon, another wonder of nature that never ceases to surprise us. “Above everything else,” Stevens emphasizes, “words . . . are, in poetry, sounds,” and these sounds are as strange and surprising as the rest of nature’s sounds (Necessary Angel 33). Sound in Stevens’s poems is not just a matter of prosody but also a matter of experiencing language as “a physical phenomenon—the noises of sea and inanimate nature, of birds, insects, and animals, as well as the sounds people make, both verbal and non-verbal, such as cries . . . Many, perhaps most, of his poems present sounds in this sense—sound not as signifier of meaning but as sheer physical act” (Nicholson 63). While this emphasis on the physical aspect of language suggests, says Mervyn Nicholson, “another kind of mean­ ing altogether, not the conceptual one usually identified with words” (63), reading Stevens’s poetry encourages a compelling way to conceive the rela­ tionship between language and nature. Words, that is, are not something to overcome, retreat from, or otherwise avoid in our efforts to think and behave “ecologically”; they are, as Stevens puts it, the ear and “eye grown larger, more intense,” so that not just words themselves but the world they inhabit become more wondrous (Collected Poems 234). One must have a “larger, more intense” perception of nature to be able to turn such experience into poetry, but one’s ability to compose startling and fresh language also enables one to turn back to the rest of nature with freshened senses. “The greatest poverty,” the speaker of “Esthetique du Mal” cautions, “is not to live / in a physical world” (325). Stevens encourages us to be simultaneously attuned to nature and skeptical toward conventional ways of perceiving it, “to live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it” (Opus Posthumous 190). That is, he models what it is to be an eco-aesthete, to see the natural in the artificial and, alternately, the inevitable role of artifice—its necessity and limit—in shaping the way we perceive and experience nature.

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Chapter 2 ELIZABETH BISHOP’S STRANGE REALITY

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nsofar as environmentally inclined poetry is based in fidelity to a real nat­ ural world, any ecocritical account of Elizabeth Bishop must surely start with her “famous eye”—her extremely close attention to the visual details of the natural world. This familiar characterization of Bishop alone makes her an obvious choice for a study in ecopoetics. Unlike Wallace Stevens, for whom reality is most often figured abstractly and obliquely, Bishop depicts nature as palpably particular and “real”; she mistrusted extreme aestheticism that would raise art above nature: “I remember in the 5th or 6th grade, in précis writing, the teacher confounded me by saying that there actually were people to whom a description ‘of a forest’ meant more than the ‘forest’ itself ” (qtd. in Keller 412). For Bishop, the power of poetry’s artifice takes as read a world that pre­ cedes and exceeds language, even if our experience of that world is inevitably mediated, and one way she respects nature’s reality is through close obser­ vation. Indeed, a few early reviewers complained that her poems were too often “mere description.” Others have recognized more in Bishop’s poems than outer landscapes. They note the influence on her of surrealism and the way so many of her poems, even those that appear to look outward at the world, reveal the psychological concerns of her “inner landscapes.” Her work also draws attention to the surface of the poem and thematizes artifice itself. Furthermore, most critics see in Bishop’s poems her devotion to form and careful craft, even in the freest of her free verse. Despite the relatively more 56

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personal themes and tone of her later work (most famously “In the Waiting Room,” in which the speaker comes to realize that she is “Elizabeth”) com­ pared to her earlier work, Bishop never presumed to “break through” form to achieve immediacy and authenticity the way so many of her contemporaries did. Bishop’s (albeit idiosyncratic) formalism, as well as her most frequently noted personal qualities—modesty and restraint—may partly explain why, like Richard Wilbur, Bishop does not frequently come up in discussions of nature writing or “ecocentric” texts (except perhaps fleetingly in reference to the speaker who “let go” of her famous fish, a textbook ecocentric moment). Indeed, like Wilbur, who uses the image of a rain dancer to describe the paradoxical “necessity of artifice” in evoking reality (as I discuss in chapter 3), Bishop looks to deliberately nonrealistic indigenous artwork as a useful alternative to referential, merely “descriptive” art that attempts to hide its own artifice: “I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous . . . Long, fine, thorough passages of descriptive prose fail to produce it, but sometimes animal or bird masks at the Museum of Natural History give one (as the dances that once went with them might have been able to do) . . . [an] immediacy of identifi­ cation” (“As We Like It” 130–31). Any “immediacy of identification” with the natural world, according to Bishop, does not attempt to discard the various “masks” and “dances” of artifice; rather, immediacy relies on artifice. Because American nature writing is traditionally (since Emerson’s “meter-making” argument) associated with the purported immediacy and “naturalness” of organic form, and because organic form in its usual sense so often necessitates the Romantic egoism of its speaker, Bishop’s imperson­ alism and formalism remove her from the conventional category of environ­ mental literature despite her acute powers of description.1 But if we view artifice as paradoxically the most natural way through which humans relate to the rest of nature (and notice the fallacies in the usual arguments concerning the supposedly special proximity of free verse to nature), then the ecocritical importance of Bishop’s poetry becomes clear. Furthermore, as some critics have rightly concluded, Bishop’s poetry is nei­ ther mere description nor pure rhetoric in disguise. Like Stevens, Plath, and Wilbur, she inhabits the complex middle ground between concept and per­ cept. She expresses what Stevens calls “something subtler” than the domi­ nance of either reality or the imagination, instead striking, in Wilbur’s terms,

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a “difficult balance” between the two. Large-scale philosophical positions made Bishop squeamish (“I’m not too good at ‘ideas,’ ” she wrote. “It’s like being tone deaf ” [qtd. in Millier 334]), and in a letter to Robert Lowell she characterized her own epistemological stance with typical reticence: “I believe now that complete agnosticism and straddling the fence on everything is my natural posture—although I wish it weren’t” (qtd. in Costello, Elizabeth Bishop 8). Bishop’s skepticism is not, however, merely a matter of intellectual indecisiveness. While she shied away from expressing grand opinions with the excuse that “the poet’s concern is not consistency,” Bishop was more savvy than a merely confused fence straddler (“It All Depends” 267). The power of her poetry, in fact, relies heavily on her middle way between empiricism and skepticism, nature and artifice, as Bonnie Costello recognizes: “To read Bishop’s poetry is to be caught up in its descriptive vitality and its psycho­ logical and philosophical wisdom. But it is also to find the balance between them shifting and unstable . . . A decade of criticism has established that Bishop is far from being the mere describer that early critics took her to be. But it is wrong, too, to present Bishop’s attention to detail as mere coyness meant to distract us from her ‘higher’ rhetorical purposes” (Elizabeth Bishop 3). Instead of either of these false characterizations, Bishop’s work demon­ strates that close, careful description reveals the world’s strangeness. The “truth” of nature is often bizarre or quirky, as Bishop’s frequent experimenta­ tion with perspective uncovered. One of her main concerns, after all, was to explore the implications of different ways of seeing. Defamiliarization, for Bishop, is the result not of aesthetic manipulation so much as close observa­ tion, as illustrated in the following account. In 1965 Bishop acquired a pair of powerful binoculars and remarked on their effect in a letter: “I adjusted them immediately and it is just too bad there aren’t any interesting ships on the sea at the moment. However, I have examined an ancient Brazilian Navy cruiser from bow to stern, and a couple of [Portuguese] fishing boats and a group of fat ladies playing bridge or something on the beach—all look wonderful,— the boats have links in every chain, meshes in every fish-net, and the ladies have hairs on their arms. The world has wonderful details if you can get it just a little closer than usual” (qtd. in Millier 335). Many of Bishop’s poems function like this pair of binoculars: they get “a little closer than usual” to the world and reveal its “wonderful” and minute details. She also knew that any observation, no matter how accurate, necessarily distorts and omits as much as it reveals (by focusing in, both binoculars and poems narrow their scope). Relativism doesn’t cause her to resort to radical subjectivism, however; in

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

fact, the world’s unknowability, at least on a grand scale, necessitates for her close observation of its details: “My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish—but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?” (qtd. in Kalstone, Becoming a Poet 213). This may explain why Bishop’s poems not only strive to be “accurate” but also usually conform to a formal pattern; like Robert Frost, she treated accu­ racy and poetic form as “momentary stay[s] against confusion,” against the world’s general wildness and indeterminacy. Of course, this doesn’t mean her poems are static or predictable; rather, they enact the world’s strangeness and mystery through accurate description and form, not in spite of them. Another way to put this is that unlike her Puritan and transcendentalist forebears, she doesn’t take the “book of nature” for granted. That is, even as she frequently (if indirectly) invokes this trope of the natural world’s textual­ ity, its apparent signification, she also undermines the figurative fundamen­ talism that too rigidly applies certain spiritual meaning to certain material objects. Instead she highlights the act of “reading” this “book” and suggests that the provisional meaning we find there is written by us, not by an intel­ ligent designer: Bishop reflects the Puritan and transcendentalist habit of describing nature as a kind of Bible or supplemental text, but she does so without subscribing to—and often while subverting—the theological, epistemological, and esthetic implications that Puritans and transcendentalists upheld. Bishop’s work often describes nature as thick with signs of print . . . Nature can be a teacher for Bishop, but its teaching is “never a priori.” Nature’s text is not the holograph or hieroglyph of God, a book of truths just waiting to be read. Texts are imposed by us or others of our kind. In reading them we do not discover “truth,” although we might learn something of ourselves. (Rotella, Reading 195)

for ethical reasons, many works of environmental literature and eco­ criticism, while not necessarily operating from the traditional “book of nature” idea, have nevertheless urged us to close the gap between word and world. From this standpoint, mimetic and referential texts have been consid­ ered more “ecocentric” than the autotelic, self-referential texts of high mod­ ernist and postmodernist authors such as Gertrude Stein or John Ashberry. Yet there are also ethical implications to Bishop’s descriptive yet skeptical treatment of that “book.” First, by emphasizing the simultaneous reality of the natural world and the artifice of our perceptions and interpretations of

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it, Bishop treats nature as autonomous and able to resist our inevitably figu­ rative perceptions of it. Second, by working with a looser, more provisional relationship between nature and our interpretations of it than the traditional “correspondences” Emerson urged us to see, Bishop presents figure as not only inevitable but also laden with ethical consequences and subject to revi­ sion from dogmatic to respectful ways of experiencing and expressing our relationship with the natural world. Bishop’s poems are thereby not only about nature per se as much as they are about how we perceive nature, the ramifications of these perceptions, and the relationship between art and nature. These concerns combined with her strongly descriptive poetics make her difficult to categorize. For despite closely attending to the objects of reality, her poetry is too figurative and skeptical toward our ability completely to know those objects to be consid­ ered objectivist or Imagist: “The objectivists aimed at a camera-like mastery of objects. In Bishop’s poetry, by contrast, the observable world recedes from our gaze. She experiences knowledge as glimpses on the periphery of vision” (Costello, Elizabeth Bishop 9). At the same time, while she expressed an early interest in surrealism, and some of her poems (such as “The Man-Moth”) playfully distort reality, she later distanced herself from it, forcefully stating to a publisher that she was “not a surrealist” (One Art 135). In responding to Anne Stevenson, who was working on a chapter linking Bishop to surrealists and Symbolists, Bishop agreed that there is no “split” between conscious and subconscious ways of experiencing the world but also adeptly changed the subject from surrealism to natural history: There is no “split” [between the role of consciousness and subconsciousness in art]. Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful sur­ realism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational—and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious or auto­ matic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (“ ‘Darwin’ Letter” 66)

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

bishop’s discussion of darwin shows her belief in the “strangeness” that results from close attention to the real world. “Sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown” is a matter not (as it is for surrealists) of shutting out reality or projecting onto it one’s quirky vision but rather of restraining one’s aesthetic and theoretical projections and letting the world unsettle one’s dis­ tinctions between conscious and subconscious ways of perceiving it. Both Darwin’s methodology and Bishop’s description of it anticipate Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the scientific “paradigm shift,” which does not result simply from logical reasoning but rather involves qualities we usually associate with artistic creation, such as intuition, creativity, and even dreamlike passivity: “Scientists . . . often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘light­ ening flash’ that ‘inundates’ a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its compo­ nents to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution. On other occasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep. No ordinary sense of the term ‘interpretation’ fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born” (Kuhn 122–23). Likewise, Bishop sidesteps the tired oppo­ sitions between objectivity and subjectivity, rationalism and intuition, seeing in Darwin a more subtle alternative: their mutually enabling entanglements. Whereas the surrealists often relied on dream experiments or some­ times intoxication or hallucination in order to experience the extraordinary, Bishop took a sober look at reality despite her long struggle with alcohol­ ism. Unlike some of her contemporaries, who relied on alcohol to activate their creativity, Bishop “could never write productively and drink heavily at the same time, and her long fallow periods often correspond to times when her drinking got out of control. This situation separates her from still other writers, who argue that because poets are inhibited by the world, they must drink to escape it, to free themselves so they can write. She could write only when she was firmly ‘in’ the world” (Millier 151). Through, not despite, “end­ less, heroic observations,” Bishop believed, we perceive a wondrous world without needing to distort our perception of it. This is the main lesson she takes from Darwin. Going to a scientist like Darwin to discuss the typically surrealist idea of welding consciousness and subconsciousness may seem like an odd move on Bishop’s part unless we distinguish between Darwin’s Victorian natural his­ tory and a modern science typically deemed objective. As Zachariah Pickard argues, it was common for certain modernist poets, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore, to invoke modern science as both a model and an analogy for poetry, which they thought should be impersonal, precise,

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and stripped of Romantic idealism and sentimentality. Bishop’s choice of the Victorian naturalist Darwin, however, reveals her different analogical use of science. First, she “departs from the narrative of [modernist] imper­ sonality, as her choice of scientist hero makes clear” (Pickard 273). More important, nineteenth-century natural history differs in several significant ways from modern science: “Victorian natural history . . . prefers observa­ tion in the field to experimentation in the laboratory; it does ‘not require any great accuracy in . . . measurements’ . . . ; and it is practiced largely by untrained or half-trained enthusiasts like Darwin himself. Most impor­ tantly, though, natural history differs from a more modern notion of sci­ ence in that it is organized around accumulation rather than reduction. This emphasis on accumulation exists on a number of levels, from the physical work of collecting specimens to the all-encompassing scope of natural his­ tory’s inquiry” (Pickard 273–74). Bishop is therefore indebted to Darwin not only for his blend of the conscious and the subconscious—the way his fixation on “fact and minute details” leads to his “sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown”—but also for his slow accumulation of observations, a tactic much of her poetry demonstrates as well. This method of slow accre­ tion often leads to an epiphany of sorts, an imaginative realization of some­ thing abstract and larger than the sum of all those carefully observed details from the physical world. Bishop’s Darwinian method of close observation leads not to absolute truth but to the “always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life.” Surrealism and symbolism as artistic movements, by contrast, attempt to estrange reality and prioritize aestheticism. Bishop prefers what Robert Pinsky calls her “formula of the normal as the ‘strangest thing there is’ ” (58). Bishop and Darwin work inductively, whereas both modern reduc­ tive science, in our normal understanding of it, and its seeming opposite, movements such as surrealism or symbolism, impose a vision or theory onto the world in a priori fashion. Bishop’s frequently cited “restraint” and “modesty” are thus not merely psychological, part of her personality (and certainly not attributable to her gender), but more significantly qualities inseparable from her ethical stance toward the natural world: “Restraint for this poet is a necessary element in the relationship she finds between language and life” (Doreski x). For Bishop, “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” is important primarily for the creation and enjoyment of art, but this receptive mentality that she rec­ ognizes in Darwin is also necessary in compiling one’s accurate and detailed observations of the natural world. In any case, this receptive frame of mind

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

presupposes the agency and autonomy of a world always potentially surpris­ ing and never entirely predictable, inevitably filtered through our figurative perception of it and yet never subservient to human artifice. Whereas objectivists and other poets committed to the conventional sense of organic form strive for the closest possible association between word and world, Bishop’s ethical consideration of the natural world requires that a certain gap remain between it and her poetry. In a more general sense, this impulse comes from her dissociation of modernist formalism from the sometimes questionable ideology that accompanied it. Bishop makes use of modernist aesthetics while discarding the reactionary politics of some high modernists: “In [the 1930s], while Eliot was championed by New Critics but scorned by leftists, Bishop stood among a precarious group of writers and intellectuals who wanted both to retain their political values and revere Eliot. Her values have not always seemed clear because readers too often assume that a formal ‘breakthrough’ must accompany any radical politics in poetry: Elizabeth Bishop’s social conscience requires a different story” (Longenbach 34). Part of this story is that, during the fashionably socialist 1930s, Bishop maintained a healthy distance between her political inclinations and her aesthetic ideals. “Politically I considered myself a socialist,” she said, “but I disliked ‘social conscience’ writing. I stood up for T. S. Eliot when everybody else was talking about James T. Farrell” (“Interview” 293). Though some of her contemporaries reacted to Eliot by throwing his aesthetic out with his ideology, “Bishop could build a poetic practice out of her reading of Eliot without adopting Eliot’s values” (Longenbach 33). Writers who are too strenuously political or earnestly ideological, Bishop believed, compromise the ability of their art to give us detailed, particular views of reality. Using art to push large political abstractions is a fault Bishop associated not just with some of her aggressively socialist friends but with a specifically male way of perceiving, despite her usual resistance to gender essentialism (she never wanted to be published in anthologies of “women writers”): “Men, she said, tended to focus on larger issues, trends, and patterns and to miss the details. This had been her complaint about her left-leaning, reform-minded friends in the 1930s, and it remained her firstline defense against her own perceived inability to prefer the pattern over the individual case” (Millier 334). Bishop self-consciously parodies and enacts this “inability,” of course also a strength, in “Sandpiper,” in which the small bird running down the beach “takes for granted” the “roaring” of the ocean and is instead

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watching his toes.

—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains

rapidly backwards and downwards. (131)2

indeed, one point of the poem seems to be that whether a focused per­ spective on details is a strength or a weakness is itself a matter of perspective, which explains the mixed tone of the speaker. On the one hand, the speaker treats the bird as silly and comical: finical, awkward,

in a state of controlled panic . . .

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

on the other hand, she affectionately describes the bird as “a student of Blake” (who urges us to “see a world in a grain of sand”), and in the final two lines the speaker shifts her attention from the sandpiper to the sand, thus becoming like the bird, who “stares at the dragging grains”: “The mil­ lions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, / mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst” (131). From a conventional perspective, a handful of sand has little worth or distinction, but close attention reveals different colors and even semiprecious stones “mixed” with the less valuable quartz. This mixture of the common with the valuable in the poem’s final line emphasizes the speaker’s ambivalent tone toward the bird, who is both endearing and silly. While Bishop explicitly likens herself to this sandpiper (and the final two lines implicate the speaker in the bird’s “focussed” perception), the irony and self-deprecating humor in her depiction of the bird caution us against iden­ tifying her too closely with it. Bishop’s ironic and slightly detached treatment of the bird is just one way she reveals traces of a modernist aesthetic, even at a time when many of her peers rebelled against such detachment. The 1950s and 1960s saw a number of poets—Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, John Berryman, Frank O’Hara, among others—move away from this ironic stance as well as the tight formalism associated with high modern­ ism and New Critical ideals toward a more formally “open” poetry associated with psychic or political health (or both). A striking example is Adrienne

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

Rich, who employed meter and rhyme in the 1950s but then rejected tra­ ditional form, which she associated with social oppression. For Bishop, however, such a formal “breakthrough” (Lowell’s term) was never necessary because “she did not begin writing with an attenuated conception of poetry as impersonal, apolitical, or closed, and she never had to make exaggerated gestures toward the personal and the open in order to express her values” (Longenbach 47). Indeed, given that her values include respect toward an autonomous natural world that resists our human concerns, Bishop’s dislike of what she perceived as overly self-centered and morbid confessional poetry (“The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves [“On ‘Confessional Poetry’ ” 35]) as well as her tendency to foreground both the necessity and limit of figure make sense. Her (organic) formalism is thus not part of an impulse to project mastery over landscapes but rather a part of her ethics of restraint. For Bishop, overly personal poetry that attempts to buck the productive restrictions of form presumes to be of the world without giving the world respectful distance. Of course, the productive tension in Bishop’s poems between art and a resistant nature does not mean that she subscribes to the New Critical idea that the artwork should be experienced as autotelic, cut off from reality around it. As is widely recognized, her early poem “The Imaginary Iceberg” offers a critique of just this kind of artwork: The iceberg cuts its facets from within. Like jewelry from a grave it saves itself perpetually and adorns only itself, perhaps the snows which so surprise us lying on the sea. (4)

the “self-made” imaginary iceberg, “fleshed, fair, erected indivis­ ible,” epitomizes one kind of artistic monument. It is insular, self-signifying, impressive, yet ultimately too esoteric for the humans in the poem: “Good­ bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off / where waves give in to one anoth­ er’s waves / and clouds run in a warmer sky” (4). The fluid waves and running clouds toward which the humans sail correspond to the energy and life of reality, “warmer” than the detached iceberg, which is, after all, only “imagi­ nary.” The poem suggests that such artwork is not even possible. In contrast, “The Monument” offers a different figure for artwork and its relationship to the world, one that suggests an aesthetic Bishop valued.

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The poem begins by addressing the reader directly, drawing him or her into the poem just as the monument lets in the elements: Now can you see the monument? It is of wood built somewhat like a box. No. Built like several boxes in descending sizes one above the other. (23)

the speaker revises and specifies her simile and assembles mostly monosyllabic words together in the second line in a disjointed rhythm— “built somewhat like a box. No. Built”—and this “rough” style of description approximates the mysteriously ramshackle object, which resists the somber and stately sense usually associated with the word “monument.” Like the strange monument of “piled-up boxes” it describes, that is, the poem dis­ plays its own artifice and deliberate coarseness. The monument is far from perfect or beautiful in the conventional sense—it is “outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off, / cracked and unpainted. It looks old”—and it is entangled with its physical environment: The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea,

all the conditions of its existence,

may have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted,

and made it homelier than it was . . .

once each day the light goes around it

like a prowling animal,

or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it. (24)

unlike bishop’s imaginary iceberg, keats’s Grecian urn, or even Stevens’s jar in Tennessee, which supposedly stand impervious to history and the nat­ ural world, Bishop’s “artifact / of wood” is clearly organic, subject to decay, the weather, and other environmental “conditions.” Like the “earth art” of Andy Goldsworthy, who makes temporary outdoor sculptures and designs out of objects he finds in nature, Bishop’s monument is not something to be contained statically in a museum; rather, its “art” incorporates its physi­ cal environment, and any aesthetic experience of it must take into account its history in terms of both construction and decay over time. Inversely, the landscape is part of the wooden artifice; the sky is “palings,” the boards of a fence, with “splintery sunlight and long-fibred clouds” (23), and as Guy

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

Rotella notices, sometimes “even the viewers of the object seem to be ‘within the view.’ All of this both inscribes and erases the conventional boundaries separating works of art from the world and observers from things observed” (Castings 35). Proper aesthetic experience of the monument, the poem sug­ gests, focuses not on a fixed object but on its process: The monument’s an object, yet those decorations,

carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all,

give it away as having life, and wishing;

wanting to be a monument, to cherish something. (24)

the monument’s figurative relationship with the world—its ability to signify clearly—is tenuous, and the speaker employs gerunds in her attempt to get at the process embodied by the monument: “having,” “wish­ ing,” “wanting.” Ironically, the poem concludes with “beginning” in describ­ ing the monument’s status as artwork ever in the process of becoming: “It is the beginning of a painting, / a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, / and all of wood. Watch it closely” (25). The poem’s emphasis on process and flux as opposed to traditional ideas of an artwork as timeless and fixed stems partly from Bishop’s early fascina­ tion with Gerard Manley Hopkins, who “helped Bishop to see that poetic structures could be bent but never broken through” (Longenbach 25). She recognized in Hopkins’s poetry a desire to capture not a fixed idea or image but motion and energy themselves through those “bent” poetic structures: “Hopkins, I believe, has chosen to stop his poems, set them to paper, at the point in their development where they are still incomplete, still close to the first kernel of truth or apprehension which gave rise to them . . . In this manner the boundaries of the poem are set free, and the whole thing is loosened up . . . [T]he poet is set on bringing down onto the paper his poem, which occurs to him not as a sudden fixed apparition of a poem, but as a moving, changing idea or series of ideas . . . [T]he target is a moving tar­ get and the marksman is also moving” (Bishop, “Gerard Manley Hopkins” 6–7). Bishop’s idea that Hopkins attempted to “portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking” applies to her own poetry as well. Her “monument” belies its own description as such in the way it both transforms and is transformed. Whereas a monument is usually fixed and static, Bishop’s monument, an emblem for the kind of poetry she wants to write, is shaped by its environ­ ment and history even as it shapes the way we see the landscape it inhabits.

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And yet the poem does not merely describe the monument’s process; like the strange monument, the poem offers a “moving, changing idea or series of ideas” about how to interpret the central figure, which itself is mutable. Bishop thus uses the word “monument” ironically to describe what is really her anti-monument. Any significance it has, the poem repeatedly suggests, is subject to the vicissitudes of time and environment, similar to what the speaker at the conclusion of “At the Fishhouses” realizes: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. (66)

both the world and our experience of it are in flux, Bishop believes, so many of her poems employ figurative revision and resist any dogmatic rela­ tionship between language and nature. Nature may be a book, but it is never easy to read for Bishop’s speakers, and sometimes the “text” of this book changes its meaning in the space of one poem. In Bishop’s short story “The Sea and Its Shore,” the protagonist, who picks up litter on the beach, including discarded newspapers and other fleeting texts, comes to see the beach environment itself as inscribed with language: Either because of the insect armies of type so constantly besieging his eyes, or because it was really so, the world, the whole world he saw, came before many years to seem printed, too. Boomer held up the lantern and watched a sandpiper rushing distractedly this way and that. It looked, to his strained eyesight, like a point of punctuation against the “rounded, rolling waves.” It left fine prints with its feet. Its feathers were speckled; and especially on the narrow hems of the wings appeared marks that looked as if they might be letters, if only he could get close enough to read them. (Collected Prose 178–79)

like the sandpiper that the “distracted” bird in this passage anticipates, Edwin Boomer is a parody of Bishop, who shares his initials (also, Boomer sounds like Bulmer, her mother’s family name, and Boomer, like Bishop, is an alcoholic). Boomer and the sandpiper of the poem both see and don’t

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

see; the bird sees the minute grains of sand but is oblivious to the crashing waves of the greater world, and Boomer sees certain details of the sandpiper’s plumage and footprints but only with “strained eyesight.” Because of his myopia, Boomer cannot clearly read the “text” of the landscape and bird, but seeing nature as inscribed is itself a misperception, even if an inevitable one, that causes his understanding of nature to be “strained.” Not only are the “words” of the landscape too obscure for Boomer to read, but also the nature-as-book figure itself is only tenuously offered: the marks on the bird’s wings “looked as if they might be letters.” Any ability on Boomer’s part to “read” the natural scene is constrained by the double qualification of simile and conditional mood. Bishop employs simile such as this one far more often than metaphor. This makes sense, given her ethic of restraint concerning the natural world and her subsequent treatment of language as only tentatively touching the reality to which it refers. Simile is the most self-conscious of figures, display­ ing its own artifice with “like” or “as” and thus maintaining an obvious and, for Bishop, respectful gap between word and world. Even poems containing metaphors operate from an underlying ethic and aesthetic of “as if,” which consequently enables a central figure or subject to take on various mean­ ings without ever being confined by one. This is one way Bishop keeps her poems “loosened up,” an attribute she perceives and admires in Hopkins. In “Roosters,” for example, the plurality of the title refers primarily to the vari­ ous ways roosters signify. Indeed, their significance evolves over the course of the poem. We might first “read” them as representing male aggression and militarism: Deep from protruding chests In green-gold medals dressed, Planned to command and terrorize the rest, The many wives Who lead hens’ lives Of being courted and despised. (35)

but later the roosters acquire classical and finally religious significance before the poem returns them to a prosaic “backyard” of actual roosters, “now almost inaudible” in the “low light” of morning. They are no longer personified as macho, after being filled then emptied of various meanings. Just as the sun of the final tercet is “faithful as enemy, or friend” (35), the

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roosters, the poem finally suggests, are good, bad, or otherwise significant only according to the various personifying lenses through which we view them. Such lenses may be inevitable and even necessary in order for our experience of the world to be meaningful, but none of them is ever final. One reason Bishop emphasizes the provisional relationship of language and reality—through figurative metamorphosis and by favoring the “as if ” quality of simile—is her respect for the autonomy of a natural world that always exceeds our ability to capture it in language. This is most obviously expressed in “The Fish,” which certainly concerns itself with an ethical rela­ tionship with nature, as most people see, but for more interesting reasons than its basic narrative of catch and release. Critics vary widely in their inter­ pretation of the ambiguous “victory” that accompanies the fish’s release at the end of the poem. Some seem to be on the side of the fish and others on the side of the fisher. For example, Richard Moore claims that the fish becomes “human . . . a living creature in its own right” and that once “it becomes really itself, it becomes inviolable” (259). Nancy McNally goes even further, concluding that “the real victory belongs to the fish . . . who now achieves a moral victory in refusing to compromise his aged dignity by fruit­ less resistance” (194). Ronald McFarland, by contrast, insists that the fish remains merely “impassive” and that the poem offers a parable about “what it is to be human. It is the role of human beings to find and identify beauty. That is man’s esthetic responsibility. It is also the role of human beings to make value judgments. That is man’s ethical responsibility . . . [I]t is the enlightened decision to let the fish go that best demonstrates the speaker’s humanity” (375–76). Despite their opposition, these fish-centered and fishercentered arguments treat the final act of the poem in an overly literal way. The poem does not simply dramatize the speaker’s decision physically to “let the fish go”; more important, it searches for appropriate language that will simultaneously “capture” the reality of the fish while still leaving it free from human assumptions and control. What does it mean to “let the fish go” at a linguistic level? In a wider sense, the poem attempts to answer affirmatively a central ethical question behind ecopoetics: Can language simultaneously give presence to nature and show nature as surpassing language? The first line, “I caught a tremendous fish” (42), echoes the opening lines of Hopkins’s “The Windhover”: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin.” Both openings are ironic, as the speakers assert “I caught” the titular animals, who ultimately prove to be beyond the speakers’ figurative grasp. In Bishop’s case, the seemingly boastful beginning

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

is further undermined by the fact that the fish “didn’t fight. / He hadn’t fought at all” (42). The “tremendous” quality of the fish turns out to be not its status as a worthy opponent to the fisher but its size, venerable age, history of elud­ ing previous attempts to catch it, and, most important, its imperviousness as a representative of wild nature to human epistemology and exegesis, the final catalyst for the speaker’s “letting go” of the fish in more ways than one. Indeed, the literal meaning of “tremendous” as that which induces trembling suggests that the fish is an ambassador of the sublime, the traditional cat­ egory for an aesthetic experience of nature’s grand otherness. Furthermore, as Ronald McFarland puts it, the way “tremendous” refers to trembling shows that “the power of Bishop’s word choice here lies in its literally physical force” (370). Similarly, Richard Moore finds “terrible” (from the same root as “tre­ mendous”) in line twenty-three a “fine word” that “emphasizes the fishiness and strangeness of the fish and makes us feel akin to him at the same time” (255). Moore touches on the double role of figurative language in foreground­ ing the status of animals as simultaneously similar to us and alien. Especially given the pun on the opening “I,” suggesting Bishop’s “famous eye” of close description, her poem also recalls Hopkins in his elliptical open­ ing, “I caught [sight of ] this morning” the falcon. Despite all of Bishop’s descriptive language, as Anne Stevenson notes, “the poem is not only about a fish but about the poet looking at the fish” (54). Both Hopkins and Bishop invoke and ultimately reject the human tendency to associate vision with mastery and control. This does not mean, however, that Bishop forgoes care­ ful imagery as one strategy to render the fish. Like Bishop’s sandpiper, her speaker focuses intently on the minute physical details of the fish, speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice. (42)

the assonance of long “i” sounds—“fine,” “lime,” “tiny,” “white,” “lice”— emphasizes the accretion of small details. Because the fish is not killed and cleaned, its interior has to be imagined, but even this speculation is expressed in strikingly corporeal, tactile terms: I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers,

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chapter 2 the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony. (42)

the visual imagery and similes are reinforced by sound effects, such as the five subsequent heavy stresses “packed” in two lines likewise packed together by enjambment: “coarse white flesh / packed in.” Despite the ability of such language to render the immediacy and palpability of the fish, how­ ever, sensory experience has its limit. Vision provides a full sense of the fish’s physicality, but its unknowability stubbornly remains: I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. (43)

bishop emphasizes the inadequacy of sight by figuring the moment of attempted relation with the fish as looking “into his eyes.” The eye is traditionally symbolic of an entryway to the soul; this moment thus signals the speaker’s epistemological shift from getting to know the fish’s intricate physicality to wanting to understand it and even relate to it at a deeper level. Knowing the fish completely, however, is denied. As in Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird, came down the Walk–,” when the bird rejects the speaker’s attempt to connect with it, the middle of “The Fish” shows the speaker’s attempted communion with an animal as quickly leading to their extreme difference. Not at all like windows, the fish’s eyes reflect back rather than admit entry, and they are layered rather than transparent: the irises appear to be “backed and packed,” the lenses seem “scratched.” The slightly ambiguous grammar of “seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass” suggests that not only

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

the fish but also the speaker sees through distorting lenses, though isinglass is a gelatin, neither lens nor glass. While this section of the poem emphasizes the difference between fish and human—“his eyes . . . were far larger than mine”—it also implies a similarity between the two. The eye reveals and distorts simultaneously; even the most astute descriptive language, the poem suggests, unavoidably warps its object. Still, the shiny, mica-like “isinglass” refers primarily to the reflective “tinfoil” of the fish’s distinctive eye. Indeed, this poem demonstrates Bishop’s belief that reality is strange even before language has a chance to estrange it. Isinglass refers not just to mica but to the semitransparent substance derived from the air bladders of sturgeon, so the metaphor points in two directions at once: as mirror-like mica, the isinglass implicates the speaker, emphasiz­ ing that the fish reflects back only what the speaker projects upon it, but as a fish-derived substance, isinglass also points back to the fish, whose self-refer­ entiality renders it further resistant to interpretation. The latter connotation is deeply ironic, as isinglass is a fish-derived product harvested by humans. Attempting to gain access to the fish’s identity by looking “into his eyes” and assuming too much identity with it easily becomes another kind of exploita­ tion of it, the poem suggests. The speaker, however, is not yet prepared to stop interpreting and per­ sonifying the fish, which she “admires,” through metaphors and similes that express its venerability; the broken fishing lines hanging from its lip are like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw. (43)

the speaker resumes her figure-making immediately after presenting the fish as ultimately unknowable, although with qualification and revision: the fish’s inaccessibility is “more like the tipping / of an object toward the light” than what the previous figures express, and the speaker uncovers and questions even a subtle use of personification: I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike . . .” (43; emphasis added)

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the speaker interrupts herself to emphasize the otherness of the fish as well as the inadequacy of language even as her sympathy for the fish cul­ minates when she personifies it as an old military hero with a “beard of wisdom,” bedecked with medals. We experience the “reality” of the fish, the poem suggests, through a combination of both figure and the fish’s resistance to figure. Like many of Bishop’s poems, “The Fish” uses more similes than metaphors, emphasizing the artificial and provisional nature of language as it relates to reality. The conclusion of the poem—its last two sentences—employs a combi­ nation of close description, ambiguity, paradox, and symbol to “let the fish go,” not just literally but at the level of language as well. As is typical for Bishop, close observation of the “real world” is not at odds with an imaginary world of figure and symbol; indeed, they are linked. The more carefully her speaker looks at the fish, the more extra-literal resonance it takes on. Similes, personifications, and metaphors always come close on the heels of meticu­ lously accurate descriptive language in Bishop’s poems. Bishop puts in stark relief the necessary link between observation and what exceeds it: “I stared and stared / and victory filled up / the little rented boat” (43). The ambiguous “victory”—Is the speaker victorious? The fish? Both?—does not transcend the visual, “stared”-at scene. Focusing intently on the physical details of real­ ity until its full strangeness is revealed goes hand in hand with metaphysical “victory” (thus the conjunction “and” instead of “but”). This is what Bishop means, in her discussion of Darwin as a kind of pre-surrealist, when she says that there is no “split” between conscious and subconscious ways of know­ ing. A “perfectly useless concentration” on accumulative observable details eventually gives way to a “relaxed,” intuitive sense of the whole scene. In “The Fish,” this epiphany is figured in the final rainbow, which links “everything” together. The speaker’s visual attention, for instance, shifts from the fish to the “little rented boat,” which, like the fish, is old and battered yet also beautiful in its own way. Her language also shifts, however, from descriptive imagery of the “pool of bilge / where oil had spread a rainbow” to the visionary rainbow at the end: “I stared and stared” at the various rusted parts of the boat “until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go” (44). The lyricism of the ending—the repetition and mostly regular metrical feet of the penultimate line, the one instance in the poem of end rhyme, “rainbow” and “go”—along with the ambiguous, visionary language accompany the speaker’s unstated admission that even the most carefully wrought descriptive

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

language fails to “catch” the fish entirely. Indeed, letting the fish go physically is merely a belated manifestation of the speaker’s earlier realization that the fish, although “caught” in one sense, eludes her epistemological grasp when it does not “return my stare.” Still, her careful looking and notation are prereq­ uisites to any “vision” or epiphany concerning the fish’s mystery. As part of her ethical treatment of nonhuman unknowability, Bishop continually reins in her language while also pushing it to the limit of its ability to depict reality. Even as they stay as faithful as possible to the details of the physical world, her poems also repeatedly remind us of their own artifice. This in-between quality of her poetics resembles her thematic and imagistic mixing of nature and culture; like the other poets in this book, Bishop rarely if ever treats nature as “purely” wild, devoid of human touch; nature for her is most often a borderland meeting ground of human and nonhuman elements, like the environment her “Monument” is both in and of. Similar to “The Fish,” which concludes with the image of seawater mixed with motor oil at the bottom of the boat—a “pool of bilge / where oil had spread a rainbow”—the conclusion of “The Moose” offers an olfactory image of the moose, a seemingly more “immediate” sensation of it than mere sight, but smelled along with the bus fuel: For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam; then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. (173)

both poems conclude by emphasizing the otherness of wild creatures, yet in both instances the human realization of this otherness is accompanied by images of a mixture of the natural and the human-made. This not only accentuates the wildness of creatures—the moose would not seem so wild in a completely “natural” environment devoid of bus and human passengers— but also suggests that while the natural world is never entirely socially con­ structed, our experiences of it are inevitably colored by our cultural lenses, for better and for worse. As Jonathan Bate puts it, “Bishop’s imagery always respects nature as it is and for itself, while at the same time recognizing that

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we can only understand nature by way of those distinctively human catego­ ries, history . . . and language” (65). Bishop foregrounds the ethical consequences of this unavoidably accul­ turated perspective of nature in some of her Brazil poems, which frequently treat nature as humanly inhabited or at least inscribed by human history. While most of Bishop’s work involves a relatively detached perspective, the earlier poems of North and South (1946) are generally the most detached, whereas the later poems of Questions of Travel (1965) exhibit a more obvious ethical concern for her subject matter. In both “Brazil, January 1, 1502” and “The Armadillo,” for instance, Bishop “assumes the advocacy-role of witness of human destruction of nature, the world of damaged shores. Exiled by her refusal of ordinary empathy, the poet [regrets] her undeniable kinship with destroyers” (Doreski 36). In contrast to earlier poems set in Key West or Nova Scotia, in Bishop’s Brazil poems nature is evidently politicized, a place to interrogate injustices among humans. Witnessing harsh poverty and class hierarchy after moving to Brazil, Bishop became more sensitive to social injustice, although she also sometimes romanticized native cultures there. Even though she lived in Brazil for many years, Bishop experienced it as wild and exotic, as did most North Americans. Still, even if she sometimes represented native Brazilians as exotic too, she also indicted any racial essentialism that would too closely associate native people with nature. This is most clearly evident in “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” which shows the potential ethical problems with turning “landscape into art,” the title of the book by Sir Kenneth Clark from which the poem’s epigraph derives: “embroidered nature . . . tapestried landscape” (91). Both the poem and its title employ understatement, one of Bishop’s sharpest tools, to uncover the colonial oppression of native peoples, especially women, and the natural environment. Indeed, such oppression derives, the poem suggests, from too closely associating nature with natives and women, an association we are still habituated to make today, as the poem’s opening subtly reveals: Januaries, Nature greets our eyes exactly as she must have greeted theirs: every square inch filling in with foliage— big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves, blue, blue-green, and olive, with occasional lighter veins and edges, or a satin underleaf turned over. (91)

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

The poem immediately implicates the speaker and us in “their” experi­ ence, that of the newly landed Portuguese conquistadors, though the vague pronoun and seemingly innocuous, neutral landscape description that con­ tinues for the bulk of the poem downplay the troubling significance of this implication until the conclusion. Still, the capitalized, feminized “Nature,” not typical for Bishop, hints that more is going on in the poem than mere pastoral aestheticism. The multicolored flowers “up in the air” are “solid but airy; fresh as if just finished / and taken off the frame” (91). The painterly language does more than show the process of “landscape” being made “into art”; it also expresses the tendency of European invaders to experience the “New World” as “fresh” and virginal, devoid of a long, complex history of native human interaction with the environment. If humans are acknowl­ edged at all by the Europeans, they are woven into the “tapestried landscape” and subsequently treated like animals. Indeed, humans do not appear in the poem until the third and final section when the speaker offers an ostensibly seamless (and thus “natural”) transition from a scene of lizards in the previous section to a description of the “Christian” invaders: The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes are on the smaller, female one, back-to, her wicked tail straight up and over, red as a red-hot wire. (92)

this foreshadows the way the conclusion (ironically, of course) justifies as natural, from an invader’s point of view, the rape of the native women. Not only is the previous scene set in the natural world, but also the female lizard, presumably in heat, seems to invite being accosted with her “wicked” red tail, thus further naturalizing male aggression (even though the speaker describes the whole scene as “Sin”). The final section begins with a kind of volta, turning from the lizards to the conquistadors they seem to resemble: “Just so the Christians, hard as nails, / tiny as nails, and glinting, / in creaking armor, came and found it all” (92). The white space before these lines enables us to read “just so” as pointing in two directions: to the entire rest of the poem, as the invad­ ers perceive the New World’s nature “just” like the speaker who has been cataloguing its strange details, and to the preceding lines, so that the con­ quistadors are “just” like the male lizards, also armored, about to chase the

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female. The wild fecundity of the Brazilian rainforest “corresponds” to both the “wealth and luxury” the newcomers left behind and “a brand-new plea­ sure,” which includes the freedom to rape. The speaker concludes with ironic understatement: Directly after Mass, humming perhaps

L’Homme armé or some such tune,

they ripped away into the hanging fabric,

each out to catch an Indian for himself—

those maddening little women who kept calling,

calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)

and retreating, always retreating, behind it. (92)

the nonchalance with which the men leave church to rape the native women is picked up by the speaker, whose description of the scene is smoothed over with qualifications like “perhaps” and “or some such” and the parenthetical interjection “or had the birds waked up?” This question points back to the opening personification of “Nature” as “she.” Confusing the native women with nature, the poem suggests, enables white violence toward them, and the poem as a whole “naturalizes” this process through understatement and the rich detail of the aestheticized landscape it presents. The dissonance between the conclusion’s brutal connotation and the poem’s pleasant tone and imagery, however, is arresting. The repetition in “calling, / calling” and “retreating, always retreating” also hints at the trauma behind the native women’s experience. The lyricism of these lines, like the repetition of “rainbow” in the lyrical final lines of “The Fish,” signals a differ­ ent register of language and consequent emotional register than in the rest of the poem, which comes from a mostly visual and detached “aesthetic” per­ spective. David Kalstone also interprets the poem as criticizing the European urge to aestheticize and tame a new landscape, but he is much too sanguine in his belief that the poem’s Brazilian rainforest “excludes invaders from it” and that “nature’s tapestry endures, renews itself. After our initial glimpse of order, we shrink like Alice or Gulliver—toy intruders, marveling” (“Elizabeth Bishop” 20–21). Such a reading underestimates the violence only partly con­ cealed by the poem’s naturalizing strategies. The “hanging fabric” the invad­ ers “ripped away” is not just the “tapestried landscape” of thick vegetation, after all, but the clothing of the Indian women. The violence of the conquis­ tadors not only victimizes the natives but also damages the natural scene,

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

including its aesthetic integrity. The “embroidered nature” that the poem has woven is “ripped” by the violence of actual history, suggesting that the same impulse that would turn landscape into art ultimately (and quite quickly) destroys the landscape. The poem dramatizes how easy it is to overlook the ethical ramifications of treating nature merely as art and the violence associ­ ated with figurative fundamentalism, or the logical extension of too closely considering “Nature” as “she.” The conquistadors and the speaker (at least ironically) either willfully or unconsciously ignore the necessary gap between word and world that Bishop demonstrates is a necessary part of treating the natural world, including its human inhabitants, in an ethical way. Thus “just so” is a heavily ironic phrase. For Bishop, the relationship between humans and nature is never “just so,” never to be taken for granted; rather, this rela­ tionship is always ideologically significant. Indeed, as Ross Leckie notes, every subsequent white arrival in Brazil after the first Portuguese, including her own, Bishop suggests, implies a “complicity with that original Christian European imperial violence” (189). Leckie chooses the word “original” to describe the “violence” because “the poem invokes a metaphor of Brazil as paradise, a garden artfully framed as natural, that is destroyed by the original sin of the Portuguese soldiers’ rapacity, but also because original implies an ongoing repetition of that rapacity, cycled through time and rediscovered with each spring’s promise of paradise and the renewed possibility of its exploitation” (189). Bishop thus uses the plural “Januaries” to begin the poem, emphasizing what by the end of the poem she implies is an annual transgression and linking our January to that of the invaders. For Bishop, art is the meeting ground between humans and nature. So many of her poems use the borderland between nature and culture as their setting, and at the level of form her poems enact the natural world she observes. Consequently, Bishop’s work suggests that one’s experience of nature is inevitably “embroidered” and “tapestried,” or seen through cultural lenses. (Bishop also playfully inverts this idea in “12 O’Clock News,” in which she describes a writer’s desk as if it were a war-torn landscape.) As “Brazil, January 1, 1502” reveals, however, the idea that art is part of nature can be used to justify oppressive and destructive behavior. One needs to tread carefully, Bishop implies, the meeting ground of art and culture and experience them as intertwined yet distinct from each other. While it is ethically problematic to mistake cultural forces such as colonial oppression for “natural” processes, as “Brazil” expresses, it is equally problematic to treat art as severed from the earth and superior to nature, as Bishop shows in “The Armadillo.”

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In this poem Bishop describes what happens when human inventions, no matter how beautiful, fly out of our control and damage their natural environ­ ments. The poem is more, however, than simply “a symbolic rejection of mute resistance to invasive human evil” (Goldensohn 188). Indeed, “evil” is too strong a word, for the poem undoes any clear distinction between nature and artifice even as it warns against artistic indiscretion and hubris. Anne Colwell is correct to link the armored armadillo to poetic form: “Form appears to be armor, capable of excluding or controlling the wild internal forces of emotion, and yet, by focusing all its energy on evasion, on control, form necessarily calls attention to what it evades” (161). But this does not mean, consequently, that what the poem expresses foremost is a “deep-seated ambivalence” about “form’s ability to carry meaning”; rather, the poem’s ambiguity and figurative richness, especially in the urgent conclusion, cause meaning to proliferate concerning the complex relationship between nature and artifice (161). The “fire balloons” the speaker witnesses during the Brazilian Saint John’s Day festival are initially “frail” and gorgeous as they “flush and fill with light,” but later become “dangerous” when one balloon crashes to earth in a ball of flame, wreaking havoc among the creatures there (103). The balloons, sugges­ tive of any artistic creation, also specifically connote a certain kind of poetry. They fly in the realm of the ideal, the upper reaches of the sky-as-imagination (as opposed to earthly reality), so that “it’s hard / to tell them from the stars” (103). Like the imaginary iceberg, the fire balloons seem to float in their own reality, disconnected from the earth. They are literally filled with hot air, sym­ bolizing exaggerated lyrical breath, and in an instance of wordplay they are, like poems, “paper chambers” (my emphasis) that “flush and fill” with the “light” of inspiration. Also, like language, the balloons exist independently from total control or intention; in the “wind” of lyrical breath they “flare and falter, wobble and toss,” yet at another moment they “steer” themselves and drift away from us, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. (103)

human technology or art (another kind of techne) that presumes to transcend the earth may be fleetingly beautiful. But the balloons as a product of human hubris are potentially dangerous and destructive.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

When one balloon does indeed become dangerous, splattering “like an egg of fire / against the cliff behind the house,” the creatures there flee in terror. Ambiguous visual imagery suggests either reflected fire or blood in the owls’ feathers, “their whirling black-and-white / stained bright pink underneath, until / they shrieked up out of sight” (103). And the heavily enjambed lines express the owls’ rapid, terrified motion. Still, the painterly word “stained” also reinforces the relatively detached, aesthetic perspective of the speaker. Even in this moment of crisis for the animals, the speaker carefully notes their physical characteristics: and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. (104)

these last two lines of the penultimate stanza, in the assonance of “a” and “i” sounds and the exclaimed interjection, anticipate the exclamatory, lyrical language that takes over in the final stanza. Yet the speaker remains relatively detached from the scene, a requisite stance in order to express the careful observations she has been narrating. “And then” emphasizes the sequential aspect of the bulk of the poem as contrasted with the nonnarra­ tive, lyrical ending. Again, Bishop’s conclusion shifts to a different use of language, this time emphasized with italics: Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky! (104)

here the speaker departs from the narrative structure and straightfor­ ward syntax of the rest of the poem (up until the latter half of the penul­ timate stanza, the poem is composed of complete sentences). The urgent, rapturous tone and exclamation points suggest a sudden shift in the speaker’s attitude toward the victimized creatures and toward her own language evok­ ing the scene. The “weak mailed fist” connotes the hard-plated armadillo (who occupies only three lines in the eighth stanza), yet this ambiguous description could also refer to the speaker, who is “mailed” in symbolism.

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The desperate sense of powerlessness yet passion in these lines is startling after the restrained tone of the rest of the poem. The combined lyrical ele­ ments of the final quatrain—its internal rhyme (“pretty” and “mimicry”), alliteration (“falling fire” and “piercing cry / and panic”), the poetical inter­ jection, “O”—signal the sudden release, as in the conclusion of “The Fish,” of the speaker’s descriptive mode into a moment of heightened experience. The urgent, verbless cry against “mimicry” indicts the foolish human hubris behind the planet-like fire balloons, but given the status of the balloons as symbols for poetry, the cry also points to the inadequacy of poetic mimesis. The eye rhyme “mimicry” and “cry” emphasizes the discrepancy between poetry and the actual suffering poetry attempts to reproduce; poetic suffer­ ing and actual suffering may “look” the same, like these rhymes, but they “sound” decidedly different. Still, despite this clear distinction between poem and reality, the final stanza also employs ambiguity in such a way that it inextricably binds speaker, poem, and natural scene. Both the fire balloons and the figurative language they symbolize are “too pretty,” even though the speaker goes right on to apostrophize them, the suffering creatures, and the “mailed fist.” The fist refers simultaneously not just to the speaker and the armadillo but also to the bal­ loons. The shape of the raised fist visually echoes them, but the final phrase, “against the sky,” also literally echoes an earlier line about the balloons (in the third stanza), which are seen “up against the sky.” Our experience of nature is inevitably figured, the poem suggests, even an anti-figurative experience. Indeed, the gesture of the fist, seemingly set in opposition to the destructive “poetic” balloons, is the most complex figure in the poem, pointing in three directions at once. The poem dramatizes not a binary opposition between, as Bonnie Costello puts it, our “aesthetic imagination, detached from its object” and “our moral imagination, which empathizes with its object,” but rather the simultaneous inadequacy and inevitability of aestheticism (Elizabeth Bishop 77). Also, as in “The Fish” and other poems (as well as in Bishop’s account of Darwin), careful, relatively detached descriptive language leads the speaker to (rather than opposes) the overtly lyrical, visionary language of the conclusion. The complexity and subtlety of Bishop’s figures ensure against any ethi­ cal heavy-handedness in “The Armadillo”: “There is no sense of false moraliz­ ing about this poem; in fact, no sense of moralizing at all, although the moral dimension of the poem is inescapably present” (Laurans 81). Still, though the poem may not be either as figuratively presumptuous or as dangerous as the fire balloons, the speaker does imply that a merely mimetic aesthetic fails

Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality

to offer us the terror and destructiveness of the actual scene. As in many of Bishop’s poems, however, this self-conscious admission of inadequacy itself offers another form of adequacy: “the sense that limitations of knowledge (and language and other cultural forms . . . ) are not failures but the condi­ tions under which we live and work” (Rotella, Castings 16). Ironically, in foregrounding their difference from reality, her poems succeed in power­ fully suggesting a real world “always retreating,” to recall the end of “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” behind the fabric of artifice. Indeed, without that fabric, there would be no world behind it.

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Chapter 3 RICHARD WILBUR’S NATURAL ARTIFICE

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tter the phrase “contemporary ecopoet,” and most people will imme­ diately think not of Richard Wilbur but of Gary Snyder, and for good reasons. Not only have critics categorized Snyder this way, but also Snyder refers to himself as an ecologist (as well as a student of anthropology, literature, Native American mythology, and Zen Buddhism). His poems go beyond referencing objects of the natural world to engage in specific ecologi­ cal concepts such as species interconnection, and he explicitly speaks out, in his poems and essays, against the destruction of natural habitat. Snyder does not shrink from the public role of environmental spokesman; he has been a keynote speaker at the conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, the chief academic organization devoted to ecocriticism, as well as other environmental gatherings. Most significantly, Snyder has become a guru of the contemporary American environmental movement, inspiring many younger activists to engage in his “practice of the wild.” His influence as an environmental thinker clearly extends beyond his poetry and has as much if not more to do with his early renown as a key figure of the Beats; the contemporary environmental movement, after all, sprang largely from the American counterculture (with a large debt to more conventional figures such as Rachel Carson). To the extent that environmen­ talism involves a socially rebellious stance opposed to the destructiveness of industrial capitalism, an antiestablishment figure like Snyder attracts consid­ erably more attention as an ecopoet than does a politically and personally 84

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

moderate figure such as Richard Wilbur, even though Wilbur clearly and forcefully expresses environmentalist concerns: But shall we not soon be forced . . . to recover a view of nature that is not purely exploitative? . . . I sat in our kitchen eating lunch and heard Lord RitchieCalder speak on the radio of things which no one can now ignore—the crisis in population growth and food supply, the pollution of Earth’s water systems and atmosphere, the finding of DDT in antarctic fauna, our perilous storing of radioactive wastes in the state of Washington . . . Unless we elect to despair, we are now obliged to make choices that will reconcile us with a natural system of which we are only a part, and I do not doubt that the process will bring not only a fresh sense of how nature may be used, but also of what it is. Scripture asserts that we are worth many sparrows, and that may well be so; we may soon better remember what else scripture says of the sparrow—that it possesses infinite value and meaning in itself. (Responses 159)

while wilbur’s poems do not make the overtly environmentalist claims that his prose does, they do continually encourage a “fresh sense” of nature’s “infinite value and meaning” without slipping into the sentimental, naïve idealism associated with traditional “nature poetry.” What explains Wilbur’s absence, then, from contemporary discussions surrounding ecopoetics? When Wilbur is considered, it is almost always for his formal craftsman­ ship rather than his ethical positions. Though he is more politically progres­ sive than is often recognized (he was removed from his position as a mili­ tary cryptologist during World War II because he was considered too leftist, and he attended anti–Vietnam War gatherings during the 1960s and 1970s), Wilbur is no radical. He prefers change to occur within existing politi­ cal structures: “Actually, I think that many people who take that position [prophesying against a sick society less divinely sick than they] are prophesy­ ing not merely against the faults of our institutions, but against institutions themselves. Insofar as they do that, I can’t sympathize with them. Though I can share all their objections to our Viet Nam policy, I’m all for institu­ tions, for working in and through institutions, and if that means being in the establishment, why there I am” (Conversations 49). His political moderation, mild temperament, and quiet lifestyle make Wilbur an unlikely prophet for environmentalism. Indeed, one of his most famous poems, “Advice to a Prophet,” which deals specifically with nuclear destruction of natural life, positions the adviser-speaker in opposition to the prophet figure (even as it paradoxically turns the speaker into an indirect

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kind of prophet by telling his interlocutor what to prophesy). In addition, Wilbur’s opposition to confessional poetry—“A direct spillage or raw feeling is seldom of any use to us as art” (“Richard Wilbur” 6)—further dissociates him from the picture of a wild-eyed prophet hurling his anger at society. Wilbur not only shrinks from the role of prophet, a role he would deem pretentious—he shares Emily Dickinson’s understanding of the role of poet as craftsperson rather than the Emersonian and Whitmanian idea of poet as seer—but also doubts any direct ethical consequences of poetry. In an essay titled “Poetry and the Landscape,” Wilbur argues that other arts—sculpture, design, painting, and even city planning—can react directly to the forms of nature, thus making us more sensitive and responsible inhabitants on the earth: But as for poetry, the most complex, philosophic and indirect of the arts, I had rather not guess in what ways it might reflect a changing view of our natural environment, and will content myself with being vaguely optative. It is, after all, only in the most limited sense that the poet can be con­ sidered as an initiator and legislator of attitudes. In the broadest sense of the word, poetry is a self-definitive activity of the total culture, and the work of the individual poet, whenever it seems revolutionary, is very likely but the full formulation and personalization of some nascent corporate impulse. (89)

only in “the most limited” and indirect ways, according to Wilbur, can poetry make something happen, including an improved relationship to nature. Still, he does believe that “any full poetry is bound to have an implicit political dimension” (Conversations 43), and he rejects the common percep­ tion of Wallace Stevens’s poetry as ethically unconcerned: “I don’t pretend to have grasped [Stevens’s] thought as a whole, but I don’t see how there can be a supreme fiction which lacks ethical content” (52). Wilbur’s reluctance to be a spokesman for any political cause, combined with his skepticism toward the direct ethical consequences of poetry, would seem to exclude him from ecocritical attention despite the clearly environmentalist concerns of some of his prose pieces. Wilbur’s relatively conservative resistance to the radical formal innova­ tions of American poetry—the nearly perennial American impulse to “make it new”—stems from the same temperament that produces his conservation­ ist (literally “conservative”) concerns. Whereas Ezra Pound (in his Vorticism) and William Carlos Williams (in his valorization of the automobile, for example) embraced the excitement of modernization, Wilbur expresses seri­ ous trepidation and regret over its environmental as well as cultural costs:

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice [Our nation is] not an articulate organism, and what most characterizes our life is a disjunction and incoherence aggravated by an intolerable rate of change. It is easy to prophesy against us. Our center of political power, Washington, is a literary and intellectual vacuum, or nearly so . . . [O]ur cities bristle like quartz clusters with faceless new buildings of aluminum and glass, bare of symbolic ornament because they have nothing to say; our painters and sculptors despair of achieving any human significance, and descend into the world of fashion to market their Coke bottles and optical toys; in the name of the public interest, highways are rammed through old townships and wildlife sanctuaries; all other public expenditure is begrudged, while the bulk of the people withdraw from community into an affluent privacy. (Responses 107)

while he expresses an uncharacteristically negative portrait of mod­ ern life circa 1970 here, Wilbur tellingly links the commercialism of pop art to the same general force that degrades natural landscapes; for Wilbur, both Warhol’s Coke bottles and the actual bottles they represent litter the environ­ ment. By the same token, Wilbur would like to conserve both certain poetic traditions (such as meter, rhyme, and classical allusion) and natural environ­ ments from the onslaught of “progress.” Thus he takes the conventionally environmentalist position in reaction against the urbanization and mechanization of contemporary life, which have largely cut us off from the land, from agriculture, from a sense of dependence on nature, and from participation in the rhythm of the seasons. There is the extraordinary mobility of modern life, which, together with the changeability of the mod­ ern landscape, injures one’s sense of locality and belonging. And then there are the frequent ugliness and dreariness of the urban and suburban environment, which make for a retraction of the senses and a feeling of disrelation. The poet, like everyone else, is affected by these things. (“Poetry and the Landscape” 88)

Although Wilbur rarely if ever makes explicitly environmentalist claims in his poems, they do counteract the “placelessness” of postmodernity in their rootedness to specific locales, especially the New England woods and fields near his western Massachusetts home. Still, Wilbur resists being labeled a “nature poet,” let alone an “ecopoet,” and only one brief essay about Wilbur—“A Case for Richard Wilbur as Nature Poet” by Robert Sayre—takes the possibility of such a categorization seriously. Wilbur him­ self derides most contemporary “nature poetry” as “intellectually shoddy, daintily selective, and sub-literary: it is tourist poetry, garden-club poetry, in which nature has a lot to say and sounds exactly like Uncle or Mummy,” and

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thus he would not want to be associated with it (“Poetry and the Landscape” 88). Perhaps because of this negative connotation of nature poetry as trite and sentimental, critics generally avoid foregrounding Wilbur’s treatment of the natural world, even though he also emphasizes the importance of treat­ ing nature in an attentive and substantive way: “Among genuine poets today, nature-imagery is frequently used to concretize ideas or moods, but in a hitand-run fashion . . . [F]or the modern poet nature is mostly a grab-bag of images, and has no character in itself. (In consequence, as Geoffrey Grigson has pointed out, modern poetry is full of atrocious mistakes about nature.)” (“Poetry and the Landscape” 88). The first requirement of a sophisticated treatment of nature is that one pay attention to the landscape; mere cultural sophistication is not enough, as is made clear in Wilbur’s criticism of his friend from New York, an excellent abstract artist, [who] walks through our Berkshire woods smoking Gauloises and talking of Berlin. It is too bad that he cannot be where he is, enjoying the glades and closures, the climbs, the descents, the flat stretches strewn with Canada Mayflower and wintergreen; I should like to see him catch the first rumor of a stream up ahead, or notice how we leave the beech grove behind and enter a stand of hemlock and laurel . . . The elaborate arrangement of the hop hornbeam’s leaves would engage my friend’s exquisite sense of line and pattern, if only he would see it, but he will not. “Forgive me,” he says. “To me, this is all a smear of green.” And so he walks along in an envelope of smoke and talk. (Responses 152–53)

it is not enough to have an aesthetic sensibility if it is divorced from what originally gave it shape: the natural world, where all “line and pattern” originate. Such a sensibility can only lead to what Wilbur elsewhere calls a “vacuum-packed consciousness” (Responses 218–19), a mental “envelope” sealed from the world. It is tempting for poets or any artists to exaggerate the importance of their work as it relates to world, but Wilbur’s “general posi­ tion” is that “life is more important than art (though in the greater sense of art the two are inseparable), and that usable orderings of the world are more valuable than eccentric subjective intensities” (Catbird’s Song 150). In stat­ ing his position about the natural world having “character in itself,” Wilbur reiterates his ecocentric position: he wants to feel the “resistance” of reality in tension with the artifice of his poems. While Gary Snyder is considered the preeminent contemporary ecopoet for reasons beyond his actual poetry—his many environmental essays, his wilderness advocacy, his mountaineering activities, and his general persona

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

as ecological guru—there are also specific reasons why Snyder’s poems, in the Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams tradition of Imagism and immediacy, are often experienced as “closer to nature” than more formally traditional poetry such as Richard Wilbur’s. But it is not necessary to make Snyder into Wilbur’s straw man. In terms of the environmental movement and environmental philosophy, Snyder has made some of the most impor­ tant contributions among contemporary writers, and his poems admirably situate their speakers within a dynamic environment (of process, not merely place), bow toward other creatures, and aim to “relinquish,” in Lawrence Buell’s words, an anthropocentric focus on ego and subjectivity. There are, however, problems inherent in the common association of Snyder’s poetics with ecocentrism, problems Wilbur hints at in a 1977 interview: I like [Snyder’s] early book Riprap. I guess my reservation about him would have to do with its being too easy to predict what he’s going to say about anything . . . his too-reflexive primitivism . . . admiration for the life of the woods, for the Indian, for unspoiled land; and rejection of cities. Of course, such attitudes are fairly easy to share, but it seems to me that he doesn’t explore them, he doesn’t criticize them, he doesn’t sophisticate them quite enough . . . It’s more complicated than he lets it be by simply heading for the mountains or the monastery . . . Too much of it follows William Carlos Williams’ weaker poems, I think, in simply telling you some things that are there, in a tone of breathless simplicity—the cloud stands above the mountain—so what?! That’s the reservation I have about some of his work, but I do think he’s one of the most talented of that whole group [of Beats], don’t you? (Conversations 192)

what begins as an expression of admiration (“I like”) shifts to the gently introduced “reservation,” which in turn escalates to criticism and climaxes in the emphatic “so what?!” followed by a return to the mild “reservation” and compliment (though even this “most talented” is qualified by the slightly dis­ missive and condescending tone toward “that whole group”). Wilbur is usu­ ally more gracious and gentlemanly than this, even toward his biggest artistic adversaries, such as “Dr. Williams,” but his critique here is a manifestation of his deeply held convictions about art and reality, poetry and nature. His reservations toward Snyder’s poetics, that is, point to important differences between Wilbur and Snyder (and Williams), differences that render Wilbur an alternative ecopoet of our time. For behind the public persona and all the extracurricular environmental activities of the poet lie the poems them­ selves, and while Snyder may represent a more cohesively ecological person

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whose poems are easily accessible to a certain kind of thinking in the envi­ ronmental community, Wilbur’s poems and prose pieces express a sophis­ ticated understanding of reality’s complex of nature and culture. His work asks for freshened senses toward the world’s wonder (the first requirement of any improved relationship between humans and their habitat) as well as intellectual and emotional delight, necessary ingredients too often lacking in the grim news of our contemporary environmental situation. With delight comes hope, two qualities for which Wilbur has been criticized, but without hope, what finally will motivate change in our behavior? Part of Wilbur’s critique identifies Snyder as a latter-day Romantic, in his primitivism, valorization of wild nature, and efforts to operate with a poetics of immediacy. Snyder’s role as an environmental prophet figure opposed to mainstream society indeed associates him with Romanticism. Wilbur, for his part, has been categorized by both detractors and admirers as a contempo­ rary classicist, in his humanism, his devotion to meter and rhyme, and his idea of the poet as community member rather than misfit: “There are risks of corruption, then, in becoming a poet-citizen rather than an alienated art­ ist, but I myself would consider them risks well taken, because it seems to me that poetry is sterile unless it arises from a sense of community or, at least, from the hope of community” (Responses 116). While “Romantic” and “classic” too easily become rigid categories, they do begin to point to signifi­ cant differences in worldview between the two poets. When Wilbur opposes himself to the Imagistic poetics of Williams and Snyder, he is not merely claiming stylistic preferences; he is expressing firmly held beliefs concerning the way art corresponds to reality. As nearly every one of his critics has observed, Wilbur is intensely inter­ ested in material objects and physical creation, the “things of this world,” to quote his most famous poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” Reacting against a critic’s accusation that Wilbur does not truly care for “things,” he counters: “I feel intensely drawn to things, I think more drawn to things than to thoughts. Since the world has to pass through thought in order to come out as poetry, it may not be immediately obvious that I am drawn to things. But I sure am” (Conversations 190). And as he more force­ fully puts it early in his career, “No poetry can have any strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things” (Responses 217). Such a stance would seem to place him close to Snyder and Williams, who famously proclaimed “no ideas but in things.” Indeed, even Wilbur cautions against overstating his differences from Williams. He expresses admiration for the

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

focused attention Williams’s poems give to the “real existence” of “ash cans, wastepaper, and red wheelbarrows . . . [T]aking these things as isolable rep­ resentatives of the ambient reality, is a kind of minimum devoutness in these days. It is a step toward believing in people” (218). Furthermore, Wilbur typifies his own poetics as opposed to those of Edgar Allen Poe (himself at the opposite end of the spectrum from Williams in terms of his aesthetic position). Both Poe and Wilbur are concerned with spiritual reality. Whereas Poe, however, is interested in the “pure negation” (66) of the physical world as part of one’s transcendence to a “higher” spiritual realm, Wilbur is com­ mitted to exploring “the proper relation between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit. [My] poems assume that such intuitions are, or may be, true; they incline, however, to favor a spirituality that is not abstracted, not dissociated and world-renouncing. A good part of my work could, I sup­ pose, be understood as a public quarrel with the aesthetics of Edgar Allan Poe” (125). Wilbur, like Stevens before him, turns away from radical aestheti­ cism—the belief that art takes priority over reality—even as he calls for the necessity of artifice in dialogue with nature: “Because poetry can so charge and heighten the world in language . . . the poet is prone to the illusion that he can make or unmake the world, or create an alternative reality. This he cannot do, and in proportion as he is touched by that illusion he confesses a timidity about doing what he can do—interact with the given world, see and feel and order it newly” (Catbird’s Song 139). If he places such a high premium on the “given world,” then how does Wilbur differ from Williams and his followers? Why hasn’t Wilbur been considered in ecocritical terms the way Williams and contemporary envi­ ronmental poets have been? (See, for example, the collection Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction, edited by J. Scott Bryson, which includes studies of Williams and Snyder.) Despite Wilbur’s devotion to “thingness,” his aes­ thetic stance is just as different from Williams’s as it is from Poe’s. Wilbur is, in other words, a poet of the complex space between subjectivity and objectivity, imagination and reality, as is Stevens (though Wilbur is far more clear in his articulation of this space than Stevens ever is in his obfuscating prose). If Wilbur’s disagreement with Poe is a “public quarrel” in a figurative sense, his disagreement with Williams resulted in a nearly actual public quar­ rel during a Bard College poetry conference in 1948, at which “there were knock-down discussions of poetic form” (Responses 215). Wilbur was asked to write an article in reaction to addresses by Louise Bogan and Williams, an article titled “The Bottles Become New, Too.” In this early essay Wilbur

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vigorously argues in defense of his in-between poetics as they differ from Williams’s (and, by implication, Poe’s), and in so doing he articulates his sophisticated form of ecopoetics (though he wouldn’t use such a term). After commending Williams and Marianne Moore for their “devoutness” toward actual, physical reality, Wilbur cautions against going too far in this direc­ tion, as he perceives D. H. Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers to have done: “To contemn the consciousness . . . is to deprive existence of its dynamism. Likewise the other extreme—a vacuum-packed consciousness—is undy­ namic. Neither the mysterious world nor the formative mind can be denied” (Responses 218–19). Lawrence Buell admiringly describes the ecocentric “ethic of relinquishment” in which poets attempt to move beyond human ego and subjectivity into an ecological mode of being (and Snyder, in Buell’s thinking, comes closest to achieving this), yet Wilbur wants to hold on to conscious­ ness. But Wilbur also wants to avoid solipsism, or a “vacuum-packed” way of thinking. His description of Cézanne’s painting articulates his own aesthetic ideal: “In the best paintings of Cézanne you are aware of the tremendous mass, immediacy, and entity of the world, and at the same time of the mas­ tery of the mind which got that into a frame. Every Cézanne is a moment of tension between a formative mind and a reality which that mind insists on recognizing. It is a dynamic balance, a fierce calm . . . Sainte-Victoire is more than any painting of it. But the important thing is to have a relation to the mountain” (219). A “dynamic balance, a fierce calm” also describes many of Wilbur’s poems, in their expression of simultaneous energy (“dynamic”) and careful construction (“balance”) and in their frequent turn to paradox (“fierce calm”). Wilbur begins to sound ecological when he speaks of a “rela­ tion to the mountain,” but he also knows that any relation necessitates at least two distinct (yet inseparable) entities, painter and mountain, imagina­ tion and reality, or art and nature, and not the collapse of one into the other. Wilbur again emphasizes this idea of relation in his most extended met­ aphor of the essay, the rain-dancer conceit: “What is the rain-dancer doing but trying to establish a relation to the rain?” (219). Because the dance so often occurs despite its failure to achieve total power over the rain, Wilbur argues, the dance must serve more than economical purposes; it must also serve a sacred function of articulating a relation between humans and nature. This relation is more complex than mere imitation of natural processes: The rain-dancer casts down his fingers like rain shafts, or beats with his feet somewhat as the rain tramples the earth. But it isn’t really like the rain; it can’t begin to substitute for what it refers to. It is not a mere imitation, but a

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice magic borrowing of the powers it wants to approach, and a translation of what is borrowed into the language of the dancing human body. How are fingers to reproduce the concurrent precision and dishevelment of rainfall, or feet to approximate the delicate yet thundering sound of rain striking the earth? Moreover, there is so much in the dance which does not seem to refer directly to the rain at all: patterns, intervals, repetitions. Above all, the difficulty. Rain probably has no difficulty in falling; it ought to be the easiest thing in the world. The difficulty and intricacy in the rain-dance arise not from emu­ lation, and not from virtuosity in the dances, but from the difficulty—the impossibility—of achieving a direct expressive relationship with the rain, or with any other real thing. In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means. The painter who throws away the frame and rebels at composition is not a painter any more: he thinks the world is himself, and that there is no need of a devious and delimited struggle with it. He lacks that feeling of inadequacy which must precede every genuine act of creation. So that paradoxically it is respect for reality which makes a necessity of artifice. Poetry’s prime weapon is words, used for the naming, comparison, and contrast of things. Its auxiliary weapons are rhythms, formal patterns, and rhymes. It is by means of all these that poets create difficulties for themselves, which they then try to surmount. I cannot see that any of them needs or ought to be dispensed with. (219–20)

this prose statement, a keystone in his ars poetica, gathers together most of Wilbur’s strengths: careful physical description of the rain and dance, graceful orchestration of thoughts, and most of all the use of an extended earthy metaphor to illustrate an abstract but vital paradox: “It is respect for reality which makes a necessity of artifice.” Wilbur both reproves his aesthetic adversaries, who in Wilbur’s view approximate the “painter who throws away the frame and rebels at composition” and “thinks the world is himself,” and justifies his own use of “rhythms, formal patterns, and rhymes” as part of the necessary “difficulty” involved in respecting the

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otherness of reality. Most important, the passage expresses the entangle­ ment of Wilbur’s aesthetic and ethical positions, that is, the necessity of form as a consequence of facing reality head-on. Only by observing the distinction between art and nature can the poet feel, in Wilbur’s view, what Stevens calls the “pressure of reality” pushing back against the poem: “I like the world to resist my ordering of it, so that I can feel it is real and that I’m honoring its reality” (Conversations 51). Along this line of reasoning, staunch Imagism and “projective verse” tend toward mistaking themselves for reality. In other words, they lean toward anthropocentrism, failing to acknowledge a respectful distance between their inevitable artifice and the otherness of the natural world. Wilbur’s difference from Williams and those heavily influenced by him (such as the Black Mountain poets), however, ought not to be overstated. Wilbur respects and admires Williams and was to a certain extent influenced by him, and he and Williams share a passion for the particularities of reality: “Wilbur’s own work . . . also displays a radical loyalty to the physical world, even though the poems don’t sound at all like Williams” (Longenbach 67). It has been the general tendency for poetry discussions since modernism to draw stark battle lines dividing free verse poetry that is perceived as, in Robert Lowell’s words, a “breakthrough back into life” (Collected Prose 244) and “academic” poetry like Wilbur’s that is perceived as formally old-fashioned, impersonally detached from life, and even politically reactionary. Whereas Robert Bly, after reading Wilbur’s poem “Mind,” raises a “fist” against “stuff like this, crystallized flower formations from the jolly intellectual dandies” (47), Anthony Hecht is equally reactionary when he praises Wilbur for stand­ ing apart from “this poetic era of arrogant solipsism and limp narcissism— when great, shaggy herds of poets write only about themselves, or about the casual working of their rather tedious minds” (130). Despite all the colorful name-calling, Wilbur himself refuses to resort to dogma. In fact, he is “not out to attack free verse” (Responses 220); rather, what he most opposes in Williams is his absolute rejection of “traditional” forms. Wilbur wants to live in a craftsman’s world where every tool is available: “[Poetry] should include every resource which can be made to work . . . I will not accept any limita­ tions or prohibitions or exclude anything in the name of purity. So far as pos­ sible, I try to play the whole instrument” (Responses 123). Regardless of Wilbur’s openness and lack of dogma, he is often cast by his adversaries as rigidly devoted to “traditional” (metrical, stanzaic, and rhyming) verse, even though he never uses set forms such as the villanelle

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

or rondeau and uses the sonnet form only sparingly. He often flinches at the word “traditional” when used by his interviewers, partly out of defen­ siveness, but also because he believes with Louise Bogan that “when poets put new wine in old bottles, the bottles become new, too” (Responses 223). Perhaps the caricature of Wilbur as conservative comes partly from the fact that his poetic career, despite experiencing its own inevitable shifts, has not witnessed the kind of radical formal “breakthrough” (“often accompanied by a psychological ‘breakdown,’ ” as Longenbach observes [5]) that has itself become a tradition among so many poets after modernism: Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke. While it has become nearly an unstated assumption among most contemporary poets (and their readers) that in order to become closer to nature, poetry must somehow throw off or leap beyond formalism, “Wilbur never felt the need to overthrow or break through traditional poetic forms in order to bring his poetry closer to the physical world” (Longenbach 67). Indeed, for Wilbur a keen devoutness to the details of nature is coex­ tensive with formalism, as “it is respect for reality which makes a necessity of artifice.” The first and fundamental act of such artificiality, according to Wilbur, is giving names to the plants and creatures and natural features that surround one: “This act of naming is the essential poetic act” (“Poetry and the Landscape” 86). By naming something, the poet gives it a relation to himself or herself. The naming process also expresses a “primitive desire” to “lay claim to as much of the world as possible through uttering the names of things” (97). Words and designations give us a sense of control over our environment: “If we travel to the tropics for the first time, and find ourselves surrounded not with oaks and maples but with a bristling wall of nameless flora, we hasten to arm ourselves with nature books and regain our control over the landscape” (97). This presumption of “control over the landscape” would seem anything but ecological if Wilbur did not simultaneously feel the ability of the natural world to exceed control: “And I like the world to resist my ordering of it, so that I can feel it is real and that I’m honoring its reality” (Conversations 51). Naming and otherwise putting language to nature may be an inevitable part of our relationship to the nonhuman, in other words, but this process always contains the possibility of error or failure, as the speaker joyfully admits in “On Having Mis-Identified a Wild Flower”: A thrush, because I’d been wrong, Burst rightly into song

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chapter 3 In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only. (86)1

the thrush’s sudden song emphasizes the speaker’s freshened percep­ tion of reality brought on by his error of signification. The ordering power of language and poetry is not total; its “control” over nature is always tem­ porary and contingent, what Robert Frost calls a “momentary stay against confusion” (18). Although the Adamic process of naming gives one “a kind of symbolic control over what [lies] around him” (“Poetry and the Landscape” 86), Wilbur also believes that the relationship between language and reality has always been arbitrary; words do not essentialize nature: “However personally we may take the landscape, however much sympathy and meaning we may discover in it, there is always a suspicion that our words are not anchored in the objects at all—that the word tree does not harpoon and capture the tree, but merely flies feintingly towards it and, like a boomerang, returns to the hand” (87). Although Wilbur here is merely describing a mindset prevalent among moderns (“our words”) rather than setting forth linguistic doctrine, he certainly nods toward the structuralist and poststructuralist account of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. But he does not go so far as to believe that language is radically indeterminate or write poems that are merely self-referential. Again, Wilbur strikes a “difficult balance,” this time between word and world—between linguistic skepticism and a faith in the “power” of language to establish “relations” with the earth. The relative arbitrariness of language does not bother Wilbur; he does not feel trapped in a linguistic “prison house” and therefore does not feel the need to escape the artifice of language and “break through” to nature on the other side. For, in another paradox, the artificial activity of poetry is itself naturally human: “If I write of the landscape as it ribbons past the train-window, fusing it with my thoughts and feelings and interpreting it through my human senses, it does not trouble me that my words do not essentialize it. What I write, as my words energetically unravel and shape themselves, is a part of the truth of things, and a gesture toward the sources of form and energy. My poetry, to me, feels ultimately at home in the world; and I find I can entertain the idea that I am most natural when engaged in that artificial business” (90). Wilbur recognizes that the forms poetry makes and embodies, while distinct from the physical world they inhabit, nonetheless are part of that world. Even the natural world itself, after all, operates as much on formal principles

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

as it does on organic principles. The argument for the greater “naturalness” of free verse (and thus its presumed closer proximity to nature) dates from well before the age of ecology. The Romantic concept of “organicism” in poetry becomes specifically pro–free verse with modernists such as Pound, Lawrence, and Williams (although this shift is also anticipated by Whitman). An organic poem, according to these minds, is not constructed by formal guidelines external to the poem (such as a specific meter or rhyme scheme); rather, an organic poem grows according to its own autonomous requirements, its own unique “spasms,” as Lawrence would have it. Pound likens the formation of the free verse poem to the growth of a tree, whereas he compares poems of traditional or “symmetrical” forms to human artifice: “water poured into a vase” (9). The Black Mountain poet Charles Olson further weds the organic theory with natural process in his idea of “projective verse” or “composition by field,” whereby he claims that free verse, because it obeys its own internal laws, expresses “breath patterns” with no need of adherence to meter. The poet works in an “open field” and must follow the “tracks” of the poem. To emphasize his point, Olson uses vegetal metaphors: “It is my impression that all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch, when you work it, come spring” (20–21). Organicism, trees, field, vegetables: it is no wonder that free verse has come to be experienced as nature’s poetry. But these associations overlook the extent to which nature operates for­ mally, following patterns with a high degree of regularity (as contemporary chaos theorists tell us). Modern organicist theories of poetry rely on a decid­ edly unnatural idea of nature, as Timothy Steele argues in response to Olson’s “open field” doctrine: “The poet who claims to be composing organically thus misconstrues, at least in one sense, composition and nature alike . . . Nature does not produce in free-form fashion. Its products exhibit definite and pre­ dictable formal characteristics. An apple tree tends to have a certain size and shape, and its fruits are quite similar. If the poet is like a tree whose fruits are poems (or like a gardener whose tomatoes, cabbages, and carrots are poems), he presumably more resembles Wyatt writing sonnets, epigrams, and songs than Olson composing The Maximus Poems” (202–3). And as Wilbur asserts, the common association of “open” poetics with nature is selective at best and often inaccurate in terms of how nature actually operates: “For some years now, in America, certain professors have been using ‘structured’ as a cuss­ word and ‘open-ended’ as a term of approval; it has been said that the artist should not impose himself upon his work and its public, but should imitate

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nature—nature in this case meaning not the beehive or the sand dollar or human nature but the indeterminacy of subatomic particles” (Catbird’s Song 171). The unfounded conflation of free verse organicism with naturalness and formalism with artifice should not, therefore, prevent us from considering Wilbur a poet of ecocritical interest. Moreover, such simple oppositions, usually expressed polemically in manifestos, ignore the more complex fact that poems which appear formal originate organically, at least in the case of Wilbur: “However artificial many of my forms seem, they are organic in origin and, when successful, organic throughout—in the same sense in which a free verse poem may be said to be organic” (Conversations 4–5). Although he commits himself “to the metri­ cal precedents which [his] first lines set” (“Richard Wilbur” 7), and writes many poems that, in their finished state, are stanzaic, rhyming, and metri­ cally regular, his forms are not vessels. Instead, his initial stages of composi­ tion witness the mysteriously autonomous power of language to direct form: My practice is absolutely the reverse of saying, well let’s write a sestina now, let’s see if I can write a rondeau. I’ve never found myself doing that kind of thing. It’s always a matter of sensing that something wants to be said, something of which, as yet, I have a very imperfect knowledge, and letting it start to talk, and finding what rhythm it wants to come out in, what phrasing seems natural to it. When I’ve discovered those things for a couple lines, I begin to have the stanza of my poem, if I’m going to have a stanzaic poem. In any case, the line lengths declare themselves organically as they do, I suppose, for a free verse poet. (7)

thus wilbur’s organicism cuts two ways: a poem’s form is a conse­ quence of something that originally “wants to be said” before the choice of a set pattern, and once that pattern is established, it spurs the imagination in unexpected ways. By following “whatever formal difficulties the poet chooses to overcome in the writing” of a poem, in other words, he or she inevita­ bly discovers ideas, images, and lines of reasoning that otherwise would not have emerged. Formal “constraints” are thus catalysts and not fetters on the imagination, as prosodists have always known.2 For Wilbur, then, a poem is the product of both the inherent wildness of language and the poet’s ardu­ ous formal craftsmanship; these occur simultaneously and are not opposed to each other. The poem as a meeting ground of wildness and formalism relates to Wilbur’s conception of physical place, a “fusion of human and natural order, and a peculiar window on the whole” (Responses 160). Like a poem, even

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

the wildest spot blends culture and nature (as William Cronon and other theorists of place tell us)3 and offers unique particularities with which to generalize about most places (as a poem points to a general truth through specific images and metaphors). Though many of Wilbur’s poems unfold in natural Berkshires settings, and though he laments the modern denigra­ tion of natural places, he does not resort to the fantasy of total separation from culture on behalf of nature: “I should hate to get the reputation of favoring nature . . . [I]ndeed, I’d like to think of the city as a part of nature” (Conversations 106). He takes issue with Snyder’s “too-reflexive primitivism . . . and rejection of cities” (Conversations 192). And although he admires Thoreau’s “power of vision and communion,” he hopes readers will “reject in him the neurotic opposition of nature and society” (Responses 159). For Wilbur, civilization itself is not the problem; culture and nature are inevita­ bly tied to each other, for better and worse, and the question at issue is what the proper relationship to each other is. Fleeing to the wilderness does not encourage recognizing the entangled relationship of the two or the possibil­ ity of developing a sense of place in less pristine areas: It is not merely gorges and virgin forests in which the feeling of place awakens, and we find ourselves in surroundings that answer to the spirit. A Vermont town sitting well in its valley, or an Italian town on its hill, looks no more artificial than a beehive. Seen from a rocky slope by Constance Richardson, the city of Duluth is in key with earth and water . . . Cities and suburbs estrange us from the world only when they rape and obliterate their sites (as El Paso is now ingesting its mountains) and spread about so widely and drearily as to lose all focus, character, and congruence with extra-human nature. From such “mate­ rial phenomena” the senses pull back, to the spirit’s cost. (Responses 156–57)

the constructions of civilization—poems and buildings alike—must be situated appropriately in their environments. Like a sensitively planned and built town, a poem must also maintain “congruence with extra-human nature,” according to Wilbur. Despite his belief that nature and culture are part of each other, many of Wilbur’s poems take place in woods and meadows rather than cities. He writes so many poems involving natural scenes and creatures, however, not because he deems them more pure than humanly built environments, but because rural scenes are what he knows intimately from having been raised on a farm in North Caldwell, New Jersey, near virtually wild forest: “Being brought up in the country had a lot to do with the way I feel about the

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materials of poetry—it comes natural to me to use, in particular, botanical materials” (Conversations 37). As Robert Sayre points out, Wilbur has been unfairly cast (by Leslie Fiedler, for example) as a “suburban” poet catering to the bourgeoisie, when in actuality he is of the country, having grown up in a “pre-Revolutionary stone house in a corner of a rich man’s coun­ try estate” (154), what Wilbur describes as a “pocket of resistance to subur­ bia (since infiltrated)” (qtd. in Sayre 154). And although he is aware of the extent to which his early “natural” environment was humanly constructed, he remains significantly influenced by the presence of the “extra-human” in his childhood: But there was nature of other and wilder sorts around, and that’s what I really reacted to. We had (I guess it couldn’t have been virgin forest, but the owner of the farm on which I grew up used to pretend it was) lots of woods; and then the farm was an unprofitable but beautiful undertaking, and on it you could find something of everything: cherry trees, plum trees, peach trees . . . [I]t was [a toy farm] in a way; it was the plaything of an industrialist; but all the things that happen on real farms happened there. I got to ride on the haywagon and play hide-and-seek in the corn field and to see the chickens beheaded and the pigs have their throats cut, and all that. (Conversations 46–47)

that wilbur not only grew up but also settled in New England encour­ aged the development of his attuned sense of place and attention to the details of the uniquely local, which requires a long inhabitation. Likewise, he takes an unusually long time composing each poem, and the intense care Wilbur takes in crafting each poem comes from that same impulse to pay long and close attention to the particularities of place: “For me it’s very dif­ ficult to be sufficiently intense about anything unless I’ve been around it for a long time. It’s getting to be a joke with me, or on me, that for more than a quarter of a century I’ve spent much time each year in Key West, and have still not in any poetic way responded to its flora or waters. Whereas it’s the fields and forests of New England that seem to me to have a lot to say” (“Richard Wilbur” 11). But just because the rural and (relatively) wild areas of New England have “a lot to say” to Wilbur does not mean that he rejects urban environ­ ments. Rather, the “things of this world” to which Wilbur is drawn include the humanly constructed as well as the natural: “I had rather not make the distinction between nature and the city. I’d like to see cities as objects quite as natural as bee-hives. Cities are natural things for men to construct. I have

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

no cause, in other words, for using as much natural imagery as I do . . . I attribute my use of natural imagery to simple affection and long acquain­ tance” (Conversations 13–14). Like Sylvia Plath, Wilbur uses the figure of the beehive to complicate the distinction between artifice and nature, city and country. To express the fullest “resistance” of reality, poems should include urban as well as natural images: After a struggle of approximately one and one-half centuries, our poetry has managed to accept mills, railroads, airfields and bulldozers as legitimate mate­ rial, worthy of consorting with its more traditional images. It was vital that this should occur, it being poetry’s perpetual task to include in itself all the data of any period, and to make these data as far as possible available to sensibility. In various ways, all of the arts have now “received” the industrial revolution. It would now seem one important need of our culture to repair its relations with the natural world,—to see our mills, railroads and airways as a part of that world,—to feel our surroundings as an ensemble and to take them personally. (“Poetry and the Landscape” 89)

as an environmental thinker, wilbur is dedicated to repairing culture’s “relations with the natural world,” but such a repaired relation requires that nature—in the broadest sense of the word as physical reality—be understood as including the artificial and technological. This idea is similar to the his­ torian Richard White’s metaphor of the “organic machine” to describe what the Columbia River (and much of the rest of nature) has become: partially engineered and controlled while retaining an element of unpredictable wild­ ness (such as flooding or drought). When we see that nature envelops artifice (dams and poems alike), we are more prone to consider responsible ways of relating the two instead of resorting to images and ideas of “pure” nature. Wilbur’s belief in the simultaneous distinction between artifice and nature that “resists” it and insistence on the inseparability of the two is, of course, paradoxical, a “difficult balance.” Paradox was one of the key ele­ ments of the New Critical climate in which Wilbur became a poet. A good poem according to New Critics is paradoxical, autonomous, and imper­ sonal, and Wilbur still produces poems that follow these aesthetic standards (although his work has become increasingly more personal). An appreciation of paradox is thought to encourage political quietism or inaction; thus the New Criticism has been accused of being apolitical or even reactionary. Yet for Wilbur, a paradoxical perspective is ethical, not only because reality itself is paradoxical, but also because, like Keats’s “negative capability,” it allows us

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to feel the full resistance of reality pushing back against our own political and aesthetic biases, our “irritable reaching after fact & reason,” as Keats puts it (370). Paradox best expresses that messy middle ground between culture and nature that is reality. But Wilbur most likely would have been attracted to paradox even with­ out New Critical conditioning, partly because of his Christian belief, what the theologian Marcus Borg would describe as “panentheism,” which literally means “everything in God.” Panentheism offers a view of reality in which God is neither merely immanent nor merely supernatural but both simultane­ ously. Whereas pantheism (“everything is God”) “identifies the universe with God” and “affirms only God’s immanence and denies God’s transcendence,” panentheism affirms both immanence and transcendence (Borg 32). Both supernatural theism and deism, which have dominated modern Christianity, emphasize deific transcendence and conceive of God as a distant, monarchi­ cal authority. According to Borg, the Bible contains descriptions of both God’s immanence and transcendence, but for a number of cultural and his­ torical reasons modern Christianity (especially since the Enlightenment) has mainly emphasized God’s transcendence (27). Panentheistic worship such as Wilbur’s is bidirectional: it reveres and takes delight in the pervasive Spirit that animates animals, plants, and all of creation, and it intuitively reaches out toward the aspect of Spirit that is always beyond (but not spatially dis­ tant from) normal human cognition. Along this line of reasoning, humans and nature are of God even as God surpasses us, analogous to Wilbur’s idea of landscape, which in a sense creates us even as we create it, as Jorge Guillén evocatively puts it: “The landscape imagines me” (qtd. in Wilbur, Responses 155). Wilbur values the “things of this world” not as ends in themselves but as ways of accessing spiritual reality. (Indeed, Wilbur’s title “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” is a phrase borrowed from Saint Augustine.) For Wilbur, the imagination “in best health neither slights the world of fact nor stops with it, but seeks the invisible through the visible” (Responses 159). Thus in an early poem, “Poplar, Sycamore,” the speaker concludes aphoristically, “My eye will never know the dry disease / Of thinking things no more than what he sees” (452). Ironically, although this is to an extent an anti-Imagist sentiment, the speaker comes to his conclusion only after closely observing the “tattered lights” of the sycamore’s motley bark, the “Rapids of lacing light and dark.” Only by first looking intently at nature can one see “beyond” it. Wilbur’s spiritual outlook can thus appear dualistic at first (especially since language often seems to operate in dialectical oppositions), but a careful

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

assessment of his thought and poetry reveals his position that spiritual reality is inside this world, not opposed to it. The paradoxical belief of panentheism is best expressed for Wilbur through metaphor. Indeed, all poetry, and not just his own, is “essentially religious in its direction,” according to Wilbur, on account of its funda­ mental reliance on metaphor, “the highest-voltage kind of comparison” (Conversations 54). Both panentheism and metaphorical thinking are ways of drawing connections that result in concurrent distinctness and insepa­ rability—between God and creation or between humans and the rest of nature. Wilbur’s description of the underlying unity of all things as religious is quite similar to the ecological emphasis on the interrelations of a biore­ gion viewed holistically: “To insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things . . . I mean that poetry makes order and asserts rela­ tions (sometimes of a surprising kind) out of a confidence in ultimate order and relatedness. Nothing more orthodox than that” (54). Wilbur thus works from a notion of metaphor far more encompassing than its usual meaning as a specific kind of figure. A poem’s particular metaphor does not merely demonstrate the unusual connections between two seemingly unlike enti­ ties; it also serves as proof that the world is fundamentally interconnected. Wilbur aligns himself with an Emersonian tradition of deciphering the “book of nature,” yet he avoids his predecessor’s tendency to fix the “cor­ respondences” between nature and spirit too rigidly. This typological way of thinking, common in nineteenth-century New England (especially in tran­ scendentalist circles), occurs in the poems of William Cullen Bryant, whom Wilbur criticizes for his symbolic determinism: Nor does one feel, as often as one would like to, that the world of which [Bryant] speaks offers much resistance to the flow of his speech—that it has a life of its own. In “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,” we meet “the squirrel, which raised paws erect,” and cannot believe that he will ever move: he is a generic and illustrative squirrel, a step in a melodious argument and not a critter. Later, the “trunks of prostrate trees,” because the poet is contending that unfallen Nature is glad, are obliged to “breathe fixed tranquility.” I am prepared to be persuaded of the goodness of all Nature, or of all things, but I would like to see some struggle toward that conclusion, some admission of contrary evidence, as in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Bryant’s poem simply imposes the notion on its data—though it must be granted that the beautiful closing lines about the wind,

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chapter 3 because they allow the wind some initiative and because its behavior is plausible, go far toward saving the day. (Catbird’s Song 2–3)

wilbur knows that a certain amount of subjective projection onto nature is inevitable. “But,” he says, “I don’t think that I conceive a nature so instruc­ tive as William Cullen Bryant’s” (Conversations 51). In other words, while Wilbur is a part of the symbolist line of poets, he is skeptical toward transcen­ dentalist typology. The “book of nature” metaphor serves his poetics, that is, only insofar as we experience nature not as a fixed language but as “resisting” the meaning we ascribe to it (much as actual language often resists meaning). Wilbur opposes himself not only to Poe, whose work embellishes and extends transcendentalist idealism, but also to Yeats, in whose poetics “the mind creates the world. For such a poet there can be only a limited sense of place, and even the rocks and moorhens of the later verse are symbols which seldom threaten to assert a life of their own. The celebrated ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is not an island at all, but a projection in natural images of the state of reverie” (Responses 154). Like Robert Frost, Wilbur wants to respect both one’s “inner weather” and the “outer weather” of reality without confus­ ing the two. He also recognizes in Stevens, equally influential on Wilbur, a healthy respect for the “fact” of reality without which the poetic imagination cannot sustain itself: One does not think of Wallace Stevens, who so stressed the transforming power of imagination, as having much in common with Frost, and yet Stevens would agree that the best and happiest dreams of the poet are those that involve no denial of the fact. In his poem “Crude Foyer,” Stevens acknowledges that poets are tempted to turn inward and conceive an interior paradise; but that is a false happiness; we can only, he says, be “content, / At last, there, when it turns out to be here.” We cannot be content, we cannot enjoy poetic happiness, until the inner paradise is brought to terms with the world before us, and our vision fuses with the view from the window. (Responses 104–5)

wilbur, like the other poets in this book, operates from the pragmatic paradox that only by distinguishing ourselves (as humans) from the rest of nature can we truly respect it: “Please understand that I am not out to deny the distance between myself and the club-moss. It is ‘sickroom’ thinking, as William James would say, to admit no distinction between things and one’s thoughts and feeling concerning them; it is ‘bracing,’ as he would say, to recognize their alterity” (“Poetry and the Landscape” 89). Simple identifica­ tion or “at-one-ment” with nature too often masks what is merely human

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

projection and appropriation. As decades of feminist and ethnic criticism have established, ethical relationships necessitate an acknowledgment of dif­ ference, not just equality. For Wilbur, ethically inflected human difference from nature is effec­ tively experienced through the “necessity” of artifice, specifically poetry’s fundamentally metaphorical nature. Even in his earliest book of poems, The Beautiful Changes (1947), which is often considered his most aesthetically detached and impersonal volume, Wilbur confronts the ethical implications of metaphor applied to nature. The penultimate poem, the sonnet “Praise in Summer,” starts by figuring nature and then questions the speaker’s own tendency to do so: Obscurely yet most surely called to praise, As sometimes summer calls us all, I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead; I said the trees are mines in air, I said See how the sparrow burrows in the sky! And then I wondered why this mad instead Perverts our praise to uncreation, why Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry. Does sense so stale that it must needs derange The world to know it? To a praiseful eye Should it not be enough of fresh and strange That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day? (461)

wilbur recalls gerard manley hopkins in his theme of “praising” the beauties and wonders of nature. (Hopkins concludes his paean to nature’s “dappled things” in “Pied Beauty” by nodding to the spiritual entity he senses behind nature: “Praise Him” [69–70].) Wilbur also nods to Hopkins in his slightly contorted (or “deranged”) syntax and unusual diction: “Should it not be enough of fresh and strange.” And most important, like Hopkins, Wilbur is concerned with finding the proper language to convey his praise in a way that ultimately honors the praised without getting carried away and merely drawing attention to its own figures and sounds. The speaker realizes that poetic defamiliarization of nature can go too far—“wrenching things awry”—resulting in Poe’s world-renouncing aestheticism with which Wilbur “quarrels.”

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And yet what is the alternative to language that is excessively figurative, to flying moles and burrowing sparrows? The last two lines seem to refer directly to reality with a clear perception cleansed of the figurative: trees merely “grow green,” and moles and sparrows have been returned to their proper habitats, the ground and sky respectively. Like the speaker of Plath’s “Elm,” who includes “she said” to accentuate the tree’s personified status, Wilbur’s speaker stresses the artifice of the prior figures by repeating “I said” each time he introduces a figure, whereas the latter figures are presented directly, as if closer to reality. This repetition of “I said” three times empha­ sizes that the poem is more concerned with how to represent nature than the natural referents themselves. But even the final lines betray the “necessity of artifice.” First, the self-conscious alliteration of “grow green” and “can course in clay” draws attention to the sounds of the words even as they point to the world. This alliteration also prepares us for the highly poetical final line: “And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day.” Thus the “yes” that we are supposed to offer in response to the rhetorical question that concludes the sonnet—“Should it not be enough?”—means something slightly other than we might first expect. It should be enough, not that the poem offers us nature directly, but that we experience nature through the appropriate figurative language. The “fact” of reality has struck the speaker so in all its beauty that he is inspired not to abandon figure but to engage in figurative revision. He offers up two different ways of figuratively experiencing nature to show the inevitability but also the naturalness of metaphor in our perceptual experience. In a later poem, “Advice to a Prophet,” Wilbur addresses again the place of figurative language in perceiving nature, but this time in the form of an explicitly political statement stirred by the cold war politics and bomb para­ noia of the 1950s and 1960s. He ties an ethical concern for nature to the neces­ sity of artifice and language. Working with the conventional juxtaposition between “word” and “world,” the speaker nonetheless complicates their usual associations. He ironically links “word” with the facts—the “long numbers that rocket the mind”—of nuclear danger while he links “world” with the vocabulary that the world offers us as well as the ability of language to offer us our meaningful place in that world: “Spare us all word of the weapons . . . Speak of the world’s own change”: What should we be without

The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?

Ask us, prophet, how we shall call

Our natures forth when that live tongue is all

Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean

Horse of our courage, in which beheld

The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose

Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding

Whether there shall be lofty or long standing

When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close. (258–59)

this is one of wilbur’s most political poems, speaking out as it does against nuclear annihilation. And yet it is by no means conventionally politi­ cal, as Wendy Salinger recognizes: “The final, urgent plea of ‘Advice to a Prophet’ is that we not destroy vocabulary! Wilbur’s most moving political poem is at its heart about language” (17). Not only must we rely on language to relate to the natural world, but also human existence itself “is only con­ ceivable in the language of the natural world, the poem says. The death of that world would mean the loss of the images, the words (‘lofty,’ ‘longstand­ ing’) through which we imagine ourselves” (17). Indeed, elsewhere Wilbur explicitly links the loss of natural environments to the loss of the vocabulary we use to describe them: “Certain ways and means of perceiving nature are fast being lost to us. The small farm is vanishing, and the experience of great solitudes is harder to come by. The common language of rural topography— that vocabulary of dell, swale, coppice, and coomb which Hardy used so well—has fallen into disuse, so that we are relatively speechless before the landscape. In New England, the precise word ‘intervale’ begins to sound consciously old-Yankee, there being less and less practical reason to specify ‘a low tract of land between hills, especially along a river’” (Responses 158). Wilbur thus reconciles—even renders mutually reliant—love of nature and love of language. Similarly, “Advice to a Prophet” argues that achieving peace hinges on the recognition that culture and nature rely on each other: just as vocabulary and classical allusion (the river “Xanthus”) require the natural referents that existed first, nature needs us to love these fruits of culture so that we do not mindlessly obliterate nature. Like “Praise in Summer,” “Advice to a Prophet” concerns itself with the

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appropriate level of (inevitable) defamiliarization when it comes to natural representation. Ironically, even the literal, and not just the figurative, can confound our perception of reality. The literal nuclear threat of “weapons, their force and range” and the facts associated with them—the “long num­ bers that rocket the mind”—utterly estrange our experience of reality. The literal can thus “derange the world” (as “Praise in Summer” puts it) to the extent that our “slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, / Unable to fear what is too strange.” Poetic language, however, while engaging in its own alterations of reality, nonetheless presents nature in a way that means something to humans with their unavoidable cultural associations. Thus the speaker does not presume to offer a purely factual representation of nature. The personified “jack-pine” which “loses its knuckled grip // On the cold ledge,” the allusion to classical “Xanthus,” the triple entendre of “twinkling” (as in the sudden atomic flash, the trout’s natural tendency to reflect light, and the fleeting moment of time), the balance of iambs and alliterated “d” and “r” sounds on either side of the caesura in “The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return”—all of these literary and poetic devices infuse nature with mean­ ing, thus making it simultaneously vibrant in itself and vital to human selfknowledge: “These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken.” The literal significance of nature (as in its proliferation and preservation of cultural signs) ties humans to the matrix of the earth. But it also gives humans means of understanding themselves: “Ask us, prophet, how we shall call / Our natures forth when that live tongue is all / Dispelled.” The plural “natures” obviously refers to human nature, but that word also suggests nature in its more general sense, again emphasizing the entanglement of the two. Like art, nature conveys meaning, but not in a static, fixed way; the “live tongue” of nature is as ambiguously rich with meaning as is language. Indeed, lan­ guage relies on nature; the poem recalls Stevens’s dictum that “All of our ideas come from the natural world: Trees = umbrellas” (Opus Posthumous 189). The final lines of the poem allude to the “book of nature” read by Puritan and transcendentalist typologists, who “come demanding / Whether there shall be lofty or long standing / When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.” Of course, we would not experience nature as a “book” or the oak as containing “annals” without the prior existence of these metaphors; figure drives percep­ tion, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue: “Human thought processes are largely metaphorical . . . [T]he human conceptual system is metaphori­ cally structured and defined” (6). And yet the poem also suggests that without the oak’s priority, we would not have words like “lofty” or “long standing.”

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

Indeed, that these words are not italicized in the poem suggests that not just vocabulary but the concepts themselves rely on nature’s precedence. The poem specifically juxtaposes two kinds of personae—the “mad-eyed,” doom-saying prophet and the wise adviser-speaker—and in so doing explores the proper way to persuade an audience. Such an emphasis on rhetoric encour­ ages us to see the poem as an ars poetica, a statement about the ethical role of poetry as it relates to reality. Through the lens of “Advice to a Prophet,” we can read most of Wilbur’s other poems as indirect statements against the destruc­ tion (nuclear or otherwise) of the natural world. That is, the speaker’s “advice” in this poem is to follow the strategy of many of Wilbur’s poems: give equal attention to both word and world, demonstrate their entanglement, and trust in the ethical consequence of recognizing such entanglement, which is to grow in love and respect for a nature from which we are distinct yet inseparable. The entanglement of word and world raises the problem of which has priority—concept or percept—a problem Wilbur takes up in “Lamarck Elaborated,” a poem prefaced by an epigraph from Lamarck, “The environ­ ment creates the organ”: The Greeks were wrong who said our eyes have rays;

Not from these sockets or these sparkling poles

Comes the illumination of our days.

It was the sun that bored these two blue holes.

It was the song of doves begot the ear

And not the ear that first conceived of sound:

That organ bloomed in vibrant atmosphere,

As music conjured Ilium from the ground.

The yielding water, the repugnant stone,

The poisoned berry and the flaring rose

Attired in sense the tactless finger-bone

And set the taste-buds and inspired the nose.

Out of our vivid ambiance came unsought

All sense but that most formidably dim.

The shell of balance rolls in seas of thought.

It was the mind that taught the head to swim.

Newtonian numbers set to cosmic lyres

Whelmed us in whirling worlds we could not know,

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chapter 3 And by the imagined floods of our desires

The voice of Sirens gave us vertigo. (317)

the first three stanzas illustrate the epigraph straightforwardly, rein­ forcing Lamarck’s argument concerning the thoroughly formative powers of the natural environment. The poem concretizes Jorge Guillén’s evocative (Wilbur calls it “infinitely bracing”) way of putting it: “The landscape imag­ ines me.” This sentiment, which Wilbur shares to a certain extent, reverses the social constructionist idea that we create what we see. (In a much later, one-couplet poem, “A Short History,” Wilbur again posits the priority of environment: “Corn planted us; tamed cattle made us tame. / Thence hut and citadel and kingdom came” [37]). Elsewhere Wilbur again gestures toward Lamarckian environmentalism in his description of how a desert landscape painter had to adapt to his environment: At first the dunes, mesas, mountains, and sky had impressed him as vast, empty, and paralyzing, and he had made out only four or five colors. It was a whole half-year before he apprehended great motions in the landscape, and a granular subtlety of color which called, so he judged, for a species of pointil­ list attack. Observation, the adaptation of his technique, and the discovery of what in himself the scenery might declare had at last made it possible for him to paint. He had invented New Mexico: what I like about his account, however, is that it implies no easy affinity, no facile personalization or imposi­ tion of mood, but a struggle with something powerfully other. Could one not just as well say that the desert, in requiring of the painter a fresh self, had in its own good time imagined him? (Responses 158)

like this painter who at once creates his landscape and is created by it, the speaker of “Lamarck Elaborated” does not stop with the environmental formation of the senses. That is, he not only “elaborates” Lamarck but quali­ fies him as well when he expresses his simultaneous belief in the priority of “mind,” “that most formidably dim” sense that “taught the head to swim.” Thomas Kuhn describes the scientist who, after a paradigm shift in his or her understanding of reality, perceives “a different world” (111): “[A] paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’ ” (113). Likewise the absorption of Newtonian thinking into popular consciousness in Wilbur’s poem “Whelmed us in whirling worlds we could not know.”

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

In another poem Wilbur again sidesteps environmental determinism and instead presents the autonomy of “mind,” which in its purest play is like some bat

That beats about in caverns all alone,

Contriving by a kind of senseless wit

Not to conclude against a wall of stone. (“Mind” 314)

wilbur’s simile likening mind to a bat recalls Stevens’s “mind of winter” and Plath’s “mind of the hive.” Each instance of “mind” can function as a synecdoche for the whole human since we commonly refer to our intellec­ tual abilities (including language) as distinguishing us from the rest of nature; thus each poet’s figure, in the relationship it draws between mind and some aspect of the natural environment, evokes the complex relationship between humans and the rest of nature. To what extent are we of nature, and to what extent are we distinct from it? In its third stanza Wilbur’s “Mind” turns its focus on itself: “And has this simile a like perfection,” the speaker asks, to the bat’s “perfect courses through the blackest air”? Yes and no: “The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save / That in the very happiest intellection / A graceful error may correct the cave.” By definition a simile (like rhyme) presents a mere likeness, not identicalness, between two entities, so the speaker’s concluding distinction between a real and figurative cave emphasizes the “precise” use of simile. Indeed, the speaker’s one-word sentence (thus emphatic) “Precisely” is meant to qualify the “like” of the previous sentence. Ironically, a precise use of simile always includes its own resistance to preciseness-as-sameness, and the poem concludes not “against a wall of stone” but by “correcting” the simile and cave: “The poem must end with this correction of the cave, this modification of the simile which, of course, wins consent by enacting the very exception it proposes. Limits are always pushed and overturned by thought, as in this poem” (Brunner 27). Thus Wilbur refuses to give priority to either percept or concept, choos­ ing instead to explore what Stevens would call “something subtler” in their relationship. Wilbur’s brief “Epistemology” sums up the paradoxical simul­ taneity of the two: I Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

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chapter 3 II We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, “You are not true.” (361)

first the speaker mocks empiricism—specifically Samuel Johnson’s flat-footed attempt to debunk “Bishop” George Berkeley by proving the solidity of matter—but then he turns around and chastises Berkleyan ide­ alism, the belief that matter does not exist as an independent substance. (Berkeley’s most famous motto is “esse is percipi,” to be is to be perceived.) Wilbur presents a paratactic relation between parts I and II; the second part is not meant to replace the first as a more correct view of reality. For Wilbur, reality exists somewhere in the “difficult balance” between Johnson and Berkeley, his figures for empiricism (or objectivity) and idealism (or subjectivity). The form of the poem—humorous couplets that, like those of Alexander Pope, present witty aphorisms—reinforces Wilbur’s resistance to dogmatic philosophic positions at either end of the materialism-idealism spectrum. Such resistance may strike some as inhibiting the possibility of clear com­ munication. Wilbur’s main impulse, however, comes not from intellectual coyness but from the desire for plurality of signification. Indeed, his poems consistently demonstrate the proliferation of meaning, as in their many instances of wordplay and ambiguity, instead of the restriction of meaning to a single philosophical or political standpoint. As Edward Brunner asserts, although critics complain that Wilbur’s formalism is too tightly controlled, this tightness actually enables a profusion of signification: A Wilbur poem is not only satisfied with the tight spaces in which it finds itself—it revels in them, flourishing there, delighting in close quarters. For the Wilbur poem wants to be packed with a surfeit of meaning. It yearns to brim over with significance. What the poems are about is how much there is to appreciate. Tightness in a Wilbur poem, that sense of being full-to-bursting, is not a product of restraint but the result of abundance. There is always, in Wilbur’s universe, more. Some short poems in which two voices speak . . . are essentialized versions that demonstrate that one fullness leads to another full­ ness that surpasses even the first . . . Wilbur’s expansions, then, are never per­ manent displacements since no one set of terms is exposed as dominant over the other. Instead, a new perspective reveals how one set encapsulates the other, incorporating it even while going beyond it. Wilbur’s poetry blocks our attempt to assign priorities. (28)

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

one way wilbur figures the location of richest signification is through images of edges, borders, and “Marginalia,” as in his poem by that title which begins by describing the surface of a pond, which gathers both what floats to the top and what drops from above: Things concentrate at the edges; the pond-surface Is bourne to fish and man and is spread In textile scum and damask light, on which The lily-pads are set; and there are also Inlaid ruddy twigs, becalmed pine-leaves, Air-baubles, and the chain mail of froth. (339)

the pond surface represents the juncture between humans and nature—it is “bourne to fish and man”—therefore it is here where not only “things concentrate” but also meaning proliferates, or “surfaces.” The pond gathers both the beautiful and lowly, the “textile scum and damask light.” It also joins the natural with the artificial, evident not only in the manmade connotations in the figurative “textile” (this word suggests, beyond the woven appearance of natural “scum,” the literal possibility of pollution from a textile factory), “baubles,” and “chain mail,” but also in the way the speaker perceives the natural scene as if it were a still-life painting; the “lily-pads are set,” as if someone arranged them there. Likewise, that the “ruddy twigs” are “inlaid” suggests aesthetic intention. (Like many other of his poems, “Marginalia” expresses Wilbur’s painterly instincts, much influenced by his artist father.) The word choice “and there are also” reinforces the idea that edges and margins support plurality, not singular meaning or things. Wilbur may have in mind an “ecotone,” or transition zone between two or more ecosystems, which typically contains increased species diversity and biologi­ cal richness. “Our riches are centrifugal,” the last stanza begins, offering yet another way to describe this idea. Instead of gathering toward a unified center (cen­ tripetal force), meaning multiplies toward the margins, especially through metaphor and other strategies of indirection. Wilbur believes in spiritual truth, but for him it is fleeting and can be accessed only indirectly and care­ fully, like the music of crickets in the middle stanza: “The crickets’ million roundsong dies away / From all advances, rising in every distance.” While Wilbur practices natural theology like his fellow New England forebears (both Puritan and transcendentalist), his practice is “centrifugal,”

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recognizing that the book of nature is full of paradox and slippery significa­ tion. That explains why, as Brunner says, there is always “more” in Wilbur’s universe, evident in his many polyvocal poems, such as “Two Voices in a Meadow,” which cannot be satisfied with only one perspective: A MILKWEED Anonymous as cherubs Over the crib of God, White seeds are floating Out of my burst pod. What power had I Before I learned to yield? Shatter me, great wind: I shall possess the field. A STONE As casual as cow-dung Under the crib of God, I lie where chance would have me, Up to the ears in sod. Why should I move? To move Befits a light desire. The sill of Heaven would founder, Did such as I aspire. (257)

both the milkweed’s mobility (and reproductivity) and the stone’s sta­ bility are necessary for the existence of an actual meadow. Wilbur also pres­ ents both spiritual aspiration and humility as necessary, but in a surprising way. Echoing John Donne’s holy sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart, three person’d God”), the milkweed asks to be humbled—“shatter me, great wind”—and knows that any “power” it has to “possess the field,” or inherit the earth, requires such meekness. The stone, by contrast, resists being spiritually trans­ lated to a “higher” realm, but in spite of its humble appearance, it heartily claims, in the final two lines, to buttress heaven (and what is less humble than proclaiming one’s own humility, as the stone does?). Inside the milk­ weed’s ambitious mobility, in other words, lies humility, whereas the stone’s meek exterior hides grand aspirations. Whereas Robert Frost’s famous birch tree envelops both spiritual aspiration and earthward humility, as it initially

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

points toward heaven but then bends earthward (because “Earth’s the right place for love”), Wilbur presents spiritual truth as somewhere in between the “two voices.” The old relationship between reality and the imagination, which Stevens spent his whole poetic career exploring, provides Wilbur with another opportunity to practice his “centrifugal” poetics of plurality. For, like Stevens, Wilbur treats reality and the imagination as inextricably bound together, not opposed. Indeed, Wilbur’s “All These Birds” echoes both the theme and imagery of Stevens’s “Autumn Refrain,” in which the grackles of reality replace the “evasions of the nightingale,” the bird of poetic cliché, even as the “residue” of figure and poetic sound effects remains. In the first stanza of Wilbur’s poem, the speaker immediately “agrees” with a realist or naturalist auditor that too many birds of poetry are overly mythological or figurative and divorced from the actual earth: Agreed that all these birds, Hawk or heavenly lark or heard-of nightingale, Perform upon the kitestrings of our sight In a false distance, that the day and night Are full of winged words gone rather stale, That nothing is so worn As Philomel’s bosom-thorn. (342)

our poetic conventions concerning birds have become too famil­ iar, the speaker argues, which causes us to view nature through complacent, unnoticing eyes. He wants us to feel what Wilbur elsewhere calls the “resis­ tance of reality” against domesticating literary convention, to observe that the gull “dives like nothing human” and “that we seek / Vainly to know the heron.” Instead of habitually fitting the birds into our symbolic taxonomy, the speaker argues, we should let them “be polyglot / And wordless” and let a clear and bitter wind arise

To storm into the hotbeds

of the sun,

And there, beyond a doubt,

Batter the Phoenix out.

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The final two stanzas offer, as the conclusions of many of Wilbur’s poems do, a clever twist in the argument of the poem. After positioning himself, at least at an immediate level, against an excessively figurative and mythological treatment of birds, the speaker suddenly reveals his allegiance to the imagination: Let us . . .

tell the imagination it is wrong

Till, lest it be undone,

it spin a lie

So fresh, so pure, so rare

As to possess the air.

by continually refuting the “stale” products of the imagination, that is, we force the imagination not to desist but to renew itself, to make itself at once striking and naturally fitted to physical reality. For, as the final stanza powerfully argues, a perennially refreshed and assertive imagination is itself as natural as the birds it figures: Why should it be more shy Than chimney-nesting storks, or sparrows on a wall? Oh, let it climb wherever it can cling Like some great trumpet-vine, a natural thing To which all birds that fly come natural. Come, stranger, sister, dove: Put on the reins of love. (342–43)

on the one hand, like the Romantics and post-Romantics (such as Stevens and Plath), Wilbur valorizes a kind of imagination at odds with a merely factual or scientific perception of the world, as indicated by the word­ play of the penultimate stanza, even as it supports at an immediate level the departure of worn-out figures and myths: “Let us, with glass or gun, / Watch (from our clever blinds) the monsters of the sky / Dwindle to habit, habitat, and song.” The “glass”—whether binoculars, microscope, or telescope—of scientific objectivity seems to offer us an accurate and clear perception of nature, but “glass” also connotes the warping effect of any measuring device, as well as the antiquated meaning of glass as mirror, suggesting the idea in

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

modern physics that any act of observation implicates the observer. Also, “from our clever blinds” rings with a self-mocking tone and suggests that our hiding places of supposedly pure objectivity inevitably involve their own “blind” spots, their own selective views of reality. On the other hand, Wilbur also opposes the world-renouncing Roman­ ticism of Poe, in which the imagination soars free from the earth, as Donald Hill recognizes in the poem: “Instead of seeking out ancient or unearthly or supernatural realms, the imagination, as a ‘natural thing’ itself, should estab­ lish itself on earth and become a refuge for all natural things” (170). Wilbur’s final line borrows a phrase—“the reins of love”—from Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella,” sonnet 28: When I say Stella, I do mean the same Princess of beauty for whose sake The reins of love I love, though never slake And joy therein, though nations count it shame.

the speaker admonishes his auditor not to read his poem merely within “allegory’s curious frame,” but to experience his language, which is packed with figure, as speaking his love directly: “know that I in pure sim­ plicity / Breathe out the flames which burn within my heart, / Love only read­ ing unto me this art.” (163–64). Despite significant differences between the two poems, both speakers want to experience imagination and its figurative fruits as relating directly and freshly to reality. Though the two speakers expe­ rience a different kind of “love,” it is love nevertheless that causes them to yearn for an earthbound imagination. Indeed, the whole poem operates from this yearning for imagination stripped of convention and properly fitted to the earth. For the overarch­ ing irony of “All These Birds” is that even the bulk of the poem (five of its six stanzas), which argues that the imagination is so often “wrong,” relies heavily on imaginative strategies to convey that argument. As Stevens puts it, “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined” (Collected Poems 503). For example, even the stanzas that insist on naturalistic accu­ racy—“Agreed . . . / that it is, in fact, the male / Nightingale which sings”— employ elaborate figurative maneuvers and intricate sound effects: Agreed . . .

that all these creatures wear

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chapter 3 Invisible armor such as Hébert beheld His water-ousel through, as, wrapped or shelled In a clear bellying veil or bubble of air, It bucked the flood to feed At the stream-bottom. Agreed That the sky is a vast claire In which the gull, despite appearances, is not Less claustral than the oyster in its beak.

the naturalist hébert was reportedly the first to witness the water ouzel (or “dipper”) “fly” through river water and walk along the bottom, and Wilbur’s striking metaphor of the bird’s “invisible armor” or “bubble of air” reproduces the amazement he imagines such an observation would inspire. The thick alliteration and internal rhymes of “shelled,” “clear,” “bellying,” “veil,” “bubble,” “bucked,” “flood,” “feed,” “stream-bottom” enact in sensu­ ous poesis the intensity of the ouzel’s experience and Hébert’s experience observing it. The speaker likens the gull to “the oyster in its beak” to show that both are closed off, “claustral” (cloistered) from humans’ ability to know them completely (like Emily Dickinson’s self-signifying gnomic spider in “A Spider sewed at Night” [F1163, A]). Yet he conveys this also by compar­ ing the gull’s sky to the oyster’s “claire,” according to the OED, a “pond or basin (usually artificial) of sea water for the cultivation of oysters” (emphasis added). Ironically, “claire” literally refers to an artificial habitat, even as it is meant primarily to operate figuratively. Also, in aurally suggesting clarity, “claire” points two ways; the sky may be “clear,” free of figures inappropriate to it, including mythological clichés, but the speaker relies on imagination (the artifice of “claire” and figure in general) to evoke reality. The necessity of imagination’s “lie / So fresh, so pure, so rare” in offering the startling reality of the world recalls Wilbur’s poem “Lying,” in which he again poses the reliance of the literal upon the figurative. After such careful observations as the horse’s neck Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones Beginning now to tug their shadows in And track the air with glitter

and

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed To one side on a backlit chopping-board And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail

the speaker comes to the central realization of the poem: “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened” (83–84). Wilbur thus subverts Plato’s famous criticism of poets as liars and valorizes their capacity to render the real through metaphor. Among Wilbur’s later poems, “Mayflies” most powerfully takes up this entanglement of reality and figure, nature and artifice, while also involving the persona of the speaker more directly than his earlier, relatively detached work: In somber forest, when the sun was low,

I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies

In their quadrillions rise And animate a ragged patch of glow With sudden glittering—as when a crowd Of stars appear Through a brief gap in black and driven cloud, One arc of their great round-dance showing clear. It was no muddled swarm I witnessed, for In entrechats each fluttering insect there Rose two steep yards in air, Then slowly floated down to climb once more, So that they all composed a manifold And figured scene, And seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold, Or the fine pistons of some bright machine. Watching those lifelong dancers of a day

As night closed in, I felt myself alone

In a life too much my own, More mortal in my separateness than they— Unless, I thought, I had been called to be Not fly or star

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chapter 3 But one whose task is joyfully to see How fair the fiats of the caller are. (36)

in some ways this poem conforms to the conventions of the American nature writing tradition: a solitary human makes an excursion into the wild, observes a natural phenomenon, and extracts meaning from the experience having to do with his or her place in nature, resulting in a humbling reassess­ ment of what it means to be human. But the poem exceeds those conven­ tions in its use of paradox, wordplay, sound effects, and cultural references. The poem also gathers together many of the concerns of Wilbur’s career: the entanglement of nature and artifice, the appropriate way to represent nature poetically, the necessity of culture’s artifice, and the spiritual ramifications of perceiving nature in a certain way. The speaker wanders a “somber forest” at twilight, a gesture to the selva oscura of Dante’s Inferno, before he witnesses the “sudden glittering” of may­ flies in a “ragged patch of glow.” Mayflies live for only one day, as even their Latin name suggests: Ephemerella subvaria. The epiphanies nature effects are only partial and temporary, the poem suggests, as the ephemeral mayflies are like stars that suddenly “appear / Through a brief gap in black and driven cloud, / One arc of their great round-dance showing clear.” The woods, that is, are still largely obscure; any illumination the speaker feels is figured as both temporally and spatially circumscribed: a “brief gap.” Still, such boundaries to perception and knowledge only intensify the observed scene. To reiterate the claim of “Marginalia,” meaning “concen­ trates at the edges” of the knowable; like Dante in his woods, where obscu­ rity necessarily precedes insight, Wilbur’s speaker perceives the mayflies and stars as dazzling partly because of the “somber” background. He not only represents the mayflies in striking visual terms—they are like stars, dancers, weavers, and machine pistons—but also reproduces the mayflies’ alternating rising and floating-down motion in the cadences of his poem: each stanza begins with two lines in pentameter, followed by a trimeter line, another two lines of pentameter, a short dimeter line, and two more pentameter lines. The pairs of longer pentameter lines suggest the mayflies’ “slow float[ing]” toward earth, while the shorter trimeter and dimeter lines enact their delicate upward “dance.” (Two of these shorter lines explicitly mention this rising motion: the first stanza’s “In their quadrillions rise” and the second stanza’s “Rose two steep yards in air.”) The speaker also uses sound to heighten the first appearance of the mayflies: the alliterated “s” sounds that give way to

Richard Wilbur's Natural Artifice

“z” sounds enact the way what appears to be “mist” coheres (partly) into the ephemeral cloud of mayflies: “I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies / In their quadrillions rise.” While the poem thus behaves at the level of form somewhat like the mayflies, the inverse is also true: the flies behave like the poet. The second stanza expresses how graceful the mayflies are by comparing them to dancers who perform “entrechats,” the act of striking one’s heels together repeat­ edly while leaping. (This quick footwork captures the “fluttering” motion of the flies as they rise through the air.) The term “entrechats” simultaneously introduces a note of strangeness—of formality—and, in its delicate sound, captures the luminous, fragile cloud of insects. Each of the following figures describing the mayflies increases in its level of artifice, from “the weavers of some cloth of gold” to the mechanistic “fine pistons.” The wordplay in the same stanza also voices this entanglement of nature and culture: the mayflies “all composed a manifold / And figured scene.” Like dancers, the mayflies have an intricate choreography. But “composed” and “figured” suggest as well the figurative language of poetic composition, revealing the speaker’s fancy that the mayflies are somehow composing themselves into figures without his help (recalling the tension between natural and poetic perfor­ mance in Hopkins’s “The Windhover”). What the speaker experiences as the mayflies’ creative autonomy thus foreshadows his existential insecurity in the third stanza, when, he says, “I felt myself alone / In a life too much my own, / More mortal in my separate­ ness than they.” Indeed, if something as fragile and fleeting as a “mist” of mayflies can compose such a “manifold / And figured scene,” what place is there for the poet, who watches as “night closed in,” signaling the impending end of the flies but also bringing to mind the speaker’s own mortality? The flies may live for only one day, but that whole day is spent dancing; they are “lifelong dancers of a day.” Like the speaker of Plath’s Bee sequence, who must learn to distinguish herself from the bees, Wilbur’s speaker comes to the limit of figure. In spite of the poem’s metrical undulation, mimicking the mayflies’ motion, and in spite of the poem’s own elegant “dance” of sound effects and metaphors, including most significantly the link between poetic composition and the “figured scene” the mayflies compose, the speaker real­ izes his inevitable human “separateness.” While this human condition can produce loneliness—“I felt myself alone / In a life too much my own”—it also enables the speaker to produce art, to praise the mayflies, and draw them in to human experience. In this

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poem’s turn, the speaker, in his separateness from the rest of nature, subse­ quently realizes his place in nature, his idea that I had been called to be Not fly or star But one whose task is joyfully to see How fair the fiats of the caller are.

in their multiple instances of wordplay, these few lines not only let the speaker of “Mayflies” come to terms with his separateness but also sum up Wilbur’s ars poetica. “Task” perfectly describes his attitude toward poetry as craft rather than prophecy; Wilbur has said that he considers himself a poet only when he is actually writing a poem. That being said, the speaker also presents this task in religious terms, as he was “called” to be a poet. “Called” points forward to the last line’s metaphor for deity, the “caller,” which simul­ taneously points back to the middle stanza’s dance metaphors in suggest­ ing one who announces, or “calls,” step changes. The speaker is not “fly or star”—he is distinct from them—but he is also spatially between them, taking up the position of “difficult balance.” Wilbur feels it part of his task to keep his eyes both earthward and heavenward. “Joy,” as a common biblical word, supports the spiritual idea of the “caller” and points to the repeated “fiat” in Psalms to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth” (98:4), the underlying task of much of Wilbur’s poetry. The “fiats of the caller” are “fair” in two senses, of course; they are just and beautiful. “Fair” thus weaves ethics and aesthetics together into one word. The speaker realizes that his role is to honor the beauty of creation through poetry, even though both may be as ephemeral as mayflies. Wilbur’s poems strive to be “fair” in both the aesthetic and ethical sense of the word, praising the world because that is their felt obligation. In Wilbur’s ecopoetics, language relies on nature as its matrix but is not to be confused with it. His poems operate from a similar “live formality” (327) as the sycamore he observes, yet nature always surpasses poetic formalism. The natural world, in other words, is “Not subject to our stiff geometries,” for it is replete with its own formalism: “Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray / Or spirals in a pine cone” (12). In that distinction between word and world lies not only a necessary “resistance” to solipsism and artistic hubris but also the greatest capacity for wonder and gratitude, which are the first requisites of any enduring environmental ethic.

Chapter 4 SYLVIA PLATH’S PHYSICAL WORDS

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espite the New Criticism’s warning against the “intentional fallacy,” poststructuralism’s assertion that the author is “dead,” and the New Historicism’s emphasis on ideology and historical context, much of the lit­ erary criticism devoted to Sylvia Plath has relied heavily on her biography. This is partly due to Plath’s unfortunate categorization as part of the “confes­ sional” school of poets, whose work, in reaction against the impersonality and irony of the high modernists, instead seems to draw directly on the poet’s “real” life, particularly his or her inner emotional torment. Such a view of Plath is still ubiquitous despite her own dismissive description of confes­ sional poetry: “As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion” (Unabridged Journals 355). As both cause and consequence of Plath’s categorization as a confes­ sional poet, the dramatic and famously tragic events of Plath’s own life have also contributed to the abundance of biographically driven criticism: “Before one has read much of her work, one has tumbled into the gossip, into the tabloid flattening of her artistic accomplishment, and the poems have begun to line up as lurid illustrations, vivid diary entries, exhibits for the defense or the prosecution if she or her former husband, her mother and father, or anyone else, happens to be on trial” (Young 18). Her troubled marriage to and separation from Ted Hughes and her suicide in 1963 at the age of thirtyone have given rise to wildly different readings of her work, which are simul­ taneously and perhaps mainly readings (and misreadings) of her life. “As a 123

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result of the poet’s troubled and well-publicized personal life, as well as the extremely emotional and personal subject matter of the Ariel poems, these later poems have received far more attention for what they are saying than for how they are saying it,” Sarah Hannah observes (232–33). That is, Plath’s sympathizers and detractors alike have frequently read her poems merely thematically, largely overlooking formal concerns, and also as keys into her psychology. In the worst examples, critics read Plath’s poems as proof that she was self-obsessed, hysterical, and driven toward death from early on. The disappearance and destruction (by Hughes) of Plath’s last journals, written during her difficult final year, have only exacerbated critics’ obses­ sion with her death and her relationship with Hughes. Into this mysterious textual gap in Plath’s work have poured, in the most extreme cases, both misogynistic and feminist perspectives of critics whose political agendas clearly predate and supersede Plath and her work. Like Dickinson, Plath has become a cultural icon onto which we project our own concerns; we use her life to justify and dramatize our beliefs (literally dramatize, in the case of the 2003 film Sylvia). Marsha Bryant describes the particularly American habit of consuming cultural figures: “Sylvia Plath is not only one of America’s major poets, but also literary culture’s ultimate commodity” (17). Despite the perhaps necessary function of cultural icons, the unfortunate result of Plath’s persona is a lack of attention to the craft and technique of her poems themselves. Although over five hundred articles and eighty-five full-length books have been published on Plath, only a tiny minority deal specifically with the formal aspects of her poems. (See the work of Karen Jackson Ford, Sarah Hannah, and John Frederick Nims as representatives of this minority.) One significant result of emphasizing Plath’s interiority and confes­ sional mode is that many critics overlook and even flatly deny her connec­ tion to the outside world, including the nonhuman. For example, although Helen Vendler sensibly dismisses the fashion of applying psychiatric terms to Plath’s poetry, in her review of Crossing the Water, Vendler charges Plath with solipsism: Plath refuses “nature any honorable estate of its own” and “binds nature into a compass much smaller than it deserves” (Part of Nature 273, 274). Instead of Plath responsibly granting otherness to nature, “all of nature exists only as a vehicle for her sensibility” (274). Many critics share this view, and even admiring critics of Plath continue to level the charge of solipsism, as Adam Kirsch does in his book The Wounded Surgeon: “Plath’s poetry never transcribes events in the real world, or even reacts directly to them. Instead, she creates a world in her own image, with only the most

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

tenuous and contingent relationship to reality” (261). Kirsch describes Plath’s late poems as representing the “intoxicating power of the completely unre­ strained imagination” (265). When the ecocritic Terry Gifford argues that Plath “uses nature imagery to [externalize] her inner life” (150), he doesn’t make a uniquely ecocritical claim but rather expresses the common opinion that Plath’s use of natural imagery is merely instrumental to her personal psychology. For most critics, the only sense in which Plath’s poems do relate to the “real world” is that they serve as direct psychological transcriptions of her actual feelings as an oppressed woman angry with her husband, parents, and female rivals. Tracy Brain points out the critical limitations (not to men­ tion the “unkindness”) of considering Plath merely as a victim or an angry woman: “To treat Plath’s writing in this way is to belittle her work, for the implication of such an exercise is that Sylvia Plath was too unimaginative to make anything up, or too self-obsessed to consider anything of larger histori­ cal or cultural importance” (15). Of all the work published on Plath, only a few exceptions to these char­ acterizations exist, such as Robin Peel’s Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics, which examines the influence on Plath’s later writing of politics and the events of the early 1960s as well as the effect of Plath’s transatlan­ tic shuttling and her relationship to specific locales. Peel argues that Plath’s poetry “performs,” or “writes back,” in disguised reaction to would-be con­ trolling forces of the state and its institutions. Peel works from the materialist view of Plath’s prose and poems as “reconstructed barometers of their time rather than diverse expressions of autobiography” (19). Though Peel does not include any sustained discussion of Plath’s unique kind of environmental­ ism, her criticism grants Plath’s work considerable breadth. Also, Peel focuses more on historical context than on poetic form, but she does assert that Plath was a “deeply formal writer” and that she “saw traditional form as liber­ ating rather than a constraint” (22). Another materialist reading and notable exception to the pattern of criticism that emphasizes Plath’s interiority is “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising,” in which Marsha Bryant claims that “Plath’s volatile domestic scenes were as attuned to American consumer culture as they were to her disintegrating relationship with Ted Hughes” (21). Most notably, Tracy Brain has written a full-length study of Plath’s con­ nection to the outside world, The Other Sylvia Plath, including a chapter titled “Plath’s Environmentalism.” Brain positions herself against the fal­ lacious notion in the main current of Plath criticism that “Plath and her

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fictional personae are interchangeable” (14), usefully pointing out (as does Janet Malcolm) the degree of perspectivism and lack of pure impartiality even in the most straightforward biographies of Plath. Despite the ironic distance Brain grants between Plath and her poetic speakers, she argues that Plath’s “poems and fiction not only make our world more vivid, but . . . they are deeply, politically engaged with that world.” Brain writes: Above all, Sylvia Plath’s writing is sane—and I mean sane in at least two senses, neither of which in the least concerns Plath’s own mental state. First, Plath’s writing is sane in its argument and subject matter. Insistently, the writing con­ cerns itself with real political and material issues, with “definite situations” . . . Second, the writing is sane in so far as it is controlled, methodical, and carefully wrought—a circumstance to which Plath’s manuscripts in the archives testify. Both of these senses of sanity are the very opposite of the myth of Sylvia Plath as mad, depressed and pouring out her distress in an ink of blood. (37)

as the sole critic who has considered Plath ecocritically, Brain makes a strong case for the influence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, widely deemed the scientific and literary catalyst for the modern environmental movement, on Plath’s “toxic consciousness” (her awareness of the negative consequences of toxic mobility throughout ecosystems), showing that Plath’s images of contagion and illness are not merely symbolic but referential as well. Brain reconsiders Plath as responding “emphatically,” in Plath’s own words, to the “things of this world” (a phrase Richard Wilbur also uses), as opposed to Robert Lowell’s now ubiquitously held opinion that “everything in [Plath’s] poems is personal, confessional, felt” (ix). Brain traces the influence on Plath’s poetry of Carson’s 1962 exposé of the negative effects of pesticides on the environment. According to Brain, Plath’s treatment of nature goes beyond mere Romantic adulation to deal soberly with the vulnerability of the body to toxic pollution, as well as the danger of real or imagined isola­ tion. Rather than being obsessed with death (a common view of her), Plath expresses the ecological idea that death is often linked to alienation from one’s environment and fellow creatures, whereas life requires interaction with one’s environment and other beings. Plath was indeed aware of and concerned about the aftereffects of nuclear fallout on humans and the environment, but there are also other, less foreboding reasons to consider Plath an ecological poet. First is her obvious love for the outdoors dating from her childhood. In her early journal entries, when Plath was still a student, she expressed the conventional (and typical

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

for a busy student) view of nature as something on the other side of school and its attendant books: “Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is tired at the end of the day one must sleep, and the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more” (8). Along the same lines, she often expressed a desire for Thoreauvian direct “contact” with nature, again set in opposition in her early journals to the intellect and language: “Outside it is warm and blue and April. And I have to digest Darwin, Marx, and Wagner. I’d like to rip out my brain and set it to assimilating the printed hieroglyphics in this book, and send my body down to the tennis courts in animal imbecility to jerk muscles in proper coordination and feel only the bestial and sensuous delight of sun on skin” (58). Though her desire for sensuous embodiment and direct experience in nature was continuous throughout her life, Plath’s poems and journal entries also show the development of a more sophisticated stance than the tradi­ tional opposition between mind and body, art and nature. Sometimes in spite of herself, in other words, Plath quickly became a practitioner of sensu­ ous poesis, expressing the wildness and vitality she craved in nature through language itself. As a later journal entry shows, she wanted her poems to be very “physical in the sense that the worlds are bodied forth in my words, not stated in abstractions, or denotative wit . . . Small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power: of Naming the name of a quality: spin­ dly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied. Say them aloud always. Make them irrefutable” (285). Besides her simple love of nature, another obvious reason to categorize Plath as an ecological poet is her concern about industrialization and the destructive consequences of modern, technologized life, which she expressed periodically in her journals: “I dislike apartments, suburbs. I want to walk directly out my front door into earth and into air free from exhaust” (346). She also concisely expresses this troubled attitude toward motorized moder­ nity in the third stanza of “Private Ground”: Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well I need hardly go out at all. A superhighway seals me off. Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon. (130)1

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the one-dimensional (because flat and linear) image of the highway violently forces nature into its own image, as the snakes are flattened. Not only does modern technology, in the form of cars and the superhighway, “poison” the environment (including the drivers themselves), but also it “seals” the speaker off from the woods and natural beauty of her friend’s property. As an alternative to industrialized landscapes, including her cramped quarters in Boston, Plath occasionally depicts, in admiring terms, the grand landscapes of mountain wilderness, as she does in “Two Campers in Cloud Country (Rock Lake, Canada).” Here she presents the wilderness in a sub­ lime way, as the “man-shaming clouds,” giant rocks, and twilight’s “huge splurge of vermilions” dwarf the humans, who are rendered insignificant despite their uniquely human power to signify: “No gesture of yours or mine could catch their [the clouds’] attention, / No word make them carry water or fire the kindling” (144–45). Such a scene recalls Stevens’s depiction of the climactic encounter between the “scholar of one candle” and the intimidat­ ing “Arctic effulgence” in “The Auroras of Autumn.” Plath’s “two campers” do not experience terror, however, in the conventions of sublimity. On the contrary, they experience relief in the impressively impersonal landscape as it contrasts with the overly organized nature of city parks: “Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation / Where trees and clouds and ani­ mals pay no notice; / Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses” (144). In line with the classic country-city divide, the campers spend “three days driving north to find a cloud / The polite skies over Boston couldn’t possibly accommodate,” and there the speaker admits that “It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little” (145). Of course, we shouldn’t deny the possibility of a hint of irony in the speaker’s claim to “mean so little,” as “mean” carries a double signification; the primary sense is to “matter so little,” but “mean” also suggests “to sig­ nify.” Despite the concluding image of the campers waking “blank-brained as water in the dawn” (recalling Stevens’s “mind of winter”), the poem itself does not strive to be blank or devoid of “meaning.” The speaker says that the wilderness drowns out human speech—“The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs”—and that language is powerless to shape the wil­ derness, but formally the poem itself is not silenced by nature’s awesome presence (145). In long stately lines and elegantly composed sentences (all grammatically complete) poised in tercets, all of whose second two lines offer carefully slanted rhymes, the poem itself does not try to be wild like

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

the landscape. The final line and short sentence (compared to the others)— “We’ll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn”—formally approximates the intensity of the speaker’s experience of mental purging: the opening four heavy stresses give way to three easy iambs, and the thick alliteration is offset by the assonance of long, open “a” sounds (145). But as a whole, the poem differs from Plath’s later work (particularly the Ariel poems) in its formal imperviousness to the theme of mental remaking in the wilderness. The speaker may claim to lose her voice, but the poem demonstrates that she is in full control, or that if she ever was mentally transformed, she can only recollect it now in a calm, measured tone that beautifully explains but fails to enact fully the initial experience. Apart from the poem’s effectiveness, Plath’s sense of irony and linguistic awareness puts her in a different category from that of a mere nature lover. Her love of nature was, even early on, often interwoven with her self-reflexive concern for aesthetics. Already as a college student Plath wanted to avoid an obvious, conventional kind of nature poetry, as an early journal entry shows: “Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems entitled RAIN pour in from across the nation” (9). A simple response to the natural elements is not enough to make a good poem, and Plath’s pun in describing poems that “pour in” emphasizes the fallacy of too facilely associating poems and natural phenomena. Even when recounting a direct and intense experience of nature, Plath categorizes the experience according to literary history: “I felt what the 19th century roman­ tics must have felt: The extension of the soul into the realm of nature. I felt that my feet were growing into the hill, and that I was a jutting outgrowth of the elements . . . a humanized tree stump, or something equally improbable” (51). One wonders if the young Plath would have had such an experience without first reading Wordsworth or Shelley; perhaps this was an instance of Oscar Wilde’s insistence that nature imitates art. Still, Plath’s modernist sense of irony and linguistic self-reflexivity did not completely expel Romantic tendencies, such as her desire for transcen­ dence in and through nature. Indeed, her combining and negotiating of modern and Romantic impulses, often in the same poem, is one of the things that makes her a distinctive nature poet. Her 1956 poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” illustrates such an instance of Romantic modernism. Plath’s early poetry has too often been devalued for being merely deriva­ tive, imitative of the poets she admired—Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H.

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Auden, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke—whereas her later Ariel poems are heralded as exhibiting the emergence of Plath’s “true voice.” Indeed, critics are nearly unanimous in their dismissal of Plath’s early poems; if they say anything positive about them, it is that Plath “had” to write these, as formal exercises, in order eventually to produce the brilliant and authentic Ariel poems. But a closer look at poems such as “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” reveals that already in 1956 Plath writes with sophistica­ tion about the relationship between humans and nature. Indeed, a refocus­ ing away from the drama of Plath’s biography makes possible the observation of thematic continuity in the body of her work, despite the formal pyrotech­ nics of the later poems. The most striking thing about “Black Rook” is the way it rhetorically achieves the “radiance” the speaker experiences without ever falling into sentimentality or over-earnestness (57). Indeed, the radiance the poem describes and expresses is, by the end, convincing partly because of its juxtaposition with the rhetoric of qualification and understatement in the rest of the poem. The poem’s tone and formal devices, that is, are key to understanding the significance of the speaker’s encounter with the rook. Unlike other poems by Plath, such as “Blackberrying” and “Finisterre,” “Black Rook” offers only a vague, undetailed landscape. The poem does not concern itself with scene the way Plath’s Bee sequence does. Neither does it fulfill the promise of its title: it is not, finally, about the rook, and it is even less about the rainy weather. How can we call this a nature poem, much less an ecological poem, if it does not focus on either landscape or animal? The poem deals primarily with attitude, with the possibility of feeling awe­ struck by nature despite existing in a (high) modernist atmosphere of irony, aesthetic distance, and the threat of meaninglessness. Although the trope of revelation in nature, from Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” experience to Annie Dillard’s observation of the “tree with the lights in it” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, has become a cliché in contemporary nature writing,2 Plath’s poem avoids being formulaic or sentimental through its many careful quali­ fications, understatements, and rhetorical shifts. It is not that her experience of transcendence is itself careful or qualified, but that the tone and rhetoric, by augmenting the speaker’s initial claim that she will most likely not wit­ ness a “miracle / Or an accident /To set the sight on fire,” or any “design” in nature, serve to authenticate and intensify by contrast what comes across as surprising and genuine, if ephemeral, radiance in nature (56–57). In the second stanza, the speaker claims that she lives in a post-Darwin­ ian universe devoid of intelligent design, operating instead through entirely

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

physical processes: “let spotted leaves fall as they fall, / Without ceremony, or portent” (57). Yet already, in the next stanza, the speaker belies these seem­ ingly calm concessions to modern naturalism in the choppy syntax and comma-riddled confession that she still craves communion with nature: “Although, I admit, I desire, / Occasionally, some backtalk / From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain” (57). The speaker’s awkward stammering expresses an agitation not felt in platitudes such as “I can’t honestly com­ plain,” which have begun to ring hollow. The speaker seems to settle for “a certain minor light,” which “may still” illuminate “the most obtuse objects” with a “celestial burning,” Thus hallowing an interval Otherwise inconsequent By bestowing largesse, honor, One might say love . . . (57)

perhaps the cliché to be avoided above all others in poetry, the word “love” quietly blooms at the center of the poem (and the center of its line), fenced in by qualifications: “Love. That fatal word has been smuggled into the poem loaded with diminishments” (Alexander 13). “Love” is packed in with qualifiers such as “certain,” “minor,” “still,” “obtuse,” and “inconse­ quent.” “One might say” it is love, further distancing the speaker from the earnest expressiveness associated with “love.” The speaker’s aversion to—even distaste for—too easily experienced love, radiance, or design in the landscape makes her moment of revelation that much more powerful and convincing: I only know that a rook Ordering its black feathers can so shine As to seize my senses, haul My eyelids up, and grant A brief respite from fear Of total neutrality. (57)

again, the speaker’s casual wordiness in “I only know” accentuates by contrast the intensity of the observation. Like the rook, which is simul­ taneously revelatory (“so shine”) and organized (“ordering its black feath­ ers”), the stanza describing this scene both enacts the speaker’s rapture in the heavily enjambed lines and conforms to the poem’s unusual rhyming

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pattern. Line one of each stanza rhymes, line two of each stanza rhymes, and so on: ABCDE, ABCDE . . . Such a subdued rhyme scheme, not immedi­ ately noticeable (especially as set against the enjambments), gives the poem a quiet restraint, a muted formalism through which the drama of the speaker’s thought process is expressed. This balance, at a formal level, between restraint and rushing forward thus enacts the qualified radiance toward which the speaker’s thinking moves. The poem does not try to undermine the modern­ ist mentality of irony and aesthetic distance through its careful achievement of revelation—“spasmodic tricks of radiance” (57). Rather, it is through its careful qualifications that such revelation comes: “Perhaps miracles require such moves in the second half of the twentieth century” (Alexander 14). Plath exhibits her typically modern sense of acute attention to the oper­ ations of language in her journal entries, literary texts in themselves that she diligently produced in tandem with her poems and fiction. Indeed, she used her journal not just as a place to record her observations and thoughts, but as a literary practice palette on which she experimented with language, mixing words as if they were colors and then standing back to look. In one short entry she offers landscape description: “The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous moon, which sprouts in the soiled sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on the quivering black water” (87). Immediately after this passage, Plath steps back and reflects on her own language, minutely analyzing her own word choice: I am my best in illogical, sensuous description. Witness the above. The wind could not possibly blow a moon up over the sea. Unconsciously, without words, the moon has been identified in my mind with a balloon, yellow, light, and bobbing about on the wind . . . [T]he moon is “bulbous,” which is an adjective meaning fat, but suggesting “bulb,” since the visual image is a com­ plex thing. The verb “sprouts” intensifies the first hint of a vegetable quality about the moon. A tension, capable of infinite variations with every combina­ tion of words, is created by the phrase “soiled indigo sky.” Instead of saying blatantly “in the soil of the night sky,” the adjective “soiled” has a double focus: as a description of the smudged dark blue sky and again as a phantom noun “soil,” which intensifies the metaphor of the moon being a bulb planted in the earth of the sky. Every word can be analyzed minutely—from the point of view of vowel and consonant shades, values, coolnesses, warmths, assonances and dissonances. Technically, I suppose the visual appearance and sound of words, taken alone, may be much like the mechanics of music . . . or the color and texture in a painting. (87–88)

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

It is clear that already (as a student) Plath was intensely attuned to the materiality of language and did not treat it as a simple transparency through which nature shines. Language, like nature, has a texture and vitality for Plath. Ironically, Plath uses death to depict the animate nature of language in “Stillborn.” The central metaphor of the stillborn children as poems brings to mind the old association of the creative process with gestation—both involv­ ing “labor”—usually made by male poets. The main argument of the poem is that, by “giving birth” to her poems, the poet sees them as not just independent of her (usually a good thing) but disturbingly autonomous in their “death,” the result of the poet’s failure to make them animate despite her formal diligence: “They are proper in shape and number and every part” (142). A reading in line with the mostly psychological and biographical criticism of Plath would emphasize the preoccupation with death in “Stillborn” (not only are the poems dead, but also “their mother” is “near dead with distraction” [142]) and what it reveals about Plath’s harsh and sometimes debilitating self-criticism. But such a reading overlooks an important and more interesting aspect of the poem. While the poem associates language with animate organisms—even in their “death” the poems “smile and smile and smile and smile at me”—it also makes a subtle evolutionary claim (142). The poems “are not pigs, they are not even fish, / Though they have a piggy and a fishy air—” (142). At one level these lines suggest Plath’s experience when she toured a medical room full of fetuses pre­ served in jars: she recognized the biological similarity and shared evolutionary ancestry between humans and other organisms. At another level, more in line with the metaphorical logic of the poem, these lines throw language into the evolutionary mix; instead of separating us from the rest of nature, language, with its animate, autonomous nature, reminds the speaker of her own place as a creature within evolutionary history. Thus not just human babies but lan­ guage itself, which is so often described as what distinguishes the human spe­ cies, here has a “piggy and a fishy air”: language is an animal attribute. In addition to her sense of biological kinship with nonhuman nature, Plath also felt intensely drawn to particular organisms, and she expresses extreme empathy toward various animals and even plants in her journals and poems. As Marjorie Perloff argues, Plath’s animistic sympathies are coun­ terbalanced by her simultaneous “angst” toward humans, including herself, whom she often portrays as merely thing-like. Plath’s mature poetry, accord­ ing to Perloff, has “two poles: (1) human beings are, in themselves, simply things, objects, machines—‘Museum mammoths,’ but (2) such ‘thingness’

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can be transcended either in the joy or in the suffering that results when man identifies imaginatively with the life of animals, or plants, or of inanimate objects. The central paradox at the heart of Sylvia Plath’s poetry is thus that human beings are dead, inanimate, frozen, unreal, while everything that is non-human is intensely alive, vital, potent” (57). Plath felt deep empathy for other organisms even as a young child, as she recounts in her autobiographi­ cal short story “Ocean 1212-W”: “I never could watch my grandmother drop the dark green lobsters with their waving, wood-jammed claws into the boil­ ing pot from which they would be, in a minute, drawn—red, dead, and edi­ ble. I felt the awful scald of the water too keenly on my skin” (Johnny Panic 129). Like Stevens, Plath has sometimes been accused of being in thrall to an imagination too powerful to let her see nature on its own terms, as Vendler claims. But on the contrary, Plath’s empathy, itself a form of imagination, enabled her to get inside the lobster’s shell, as it were, and imagine life as another organism. When Plath seems to offer a metaphor in stating that her skin felt “the awful scald of the water,” her statement is not entirely figura­ tive. Her intense imaginative capacities were not simply a matter of artis­ tic intention but were also a nearly bodily compulsion. The most striking example of this occurred during a much-publicized execution. Plath was not just philosophically opposed to capital punishment; even her body recoiled: She reacted strongly to the enormous public debate over the Rosenbergs’ execu­ tion. Her old friend Phil McCurdy was marching in Washington, D.C., to pro­ test their deaths, yet when she tried to talk to her friends at the Barbizon about what she saw as the horror of their executions, she got very little response. The situation peaked on the morning of the execution, when Sylvia criticized the women eating breakfast for their lack of concern, their being able to eat “at a time like this” . . . At 9:00 A.M., the time Sylvia thought the execution was set for, she turned to her friend and said, “Now it’s happening.” Then she turned the insides of her arms to Janet. Each arm was covered with red pin­ prick bumps and, as Janet watched, they elongated into each other and formed a series of welts running up and down Sylvia’s arms . . . She often found that she was in painful empathy with troubled friends. (Wagner-Martin 99–100)

Plath’s “painful empathy” extended not only to “troubled friends” in the human world but to animals as well, as various journal entries and poems such as “Blue Moles,” “Pheasant,” and “The Rabbit Catcher” show. Plath even granted empathic imagination to fungi. In “Mushrooms,” for example, she personifies the mushrooms and even speaks from their point of view:

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot’s in the door. (139–40)

the effect of such personification is not the projection of human emo­ tion onto nature—indeed, the mushrooms display no motivation in their com­ bination of humility and insistence—but rather an astute portrayal of the way, to human perception, mushrooms appear at an individual level to be innocu­ ous, despite their communal ability to “take hold on the loam” and “shoulder through holes” (139). Even botanically speaking, it takes a large collection of mushrooms (a “mushroom ring”), connected underground, to constitute an organism; no mushroom stands alone. Thus Plath’s use of first-person plural is not merely a poetic flight of fancy; it expresses an ecological verity. In a noteworthy variation on this expression of empathy for nonhu­ man nature, Plath’s speakers also occasionally desire nature’s attention. In “I Am Vertical,” for instance, the speaker contrasts her own verticality as a living human to the verticality of trees and flowers and decides that her own horizontality, in sleep and even more so in death, indicates her at­ one-ment with nature. She feels that when she walks among the trees and flowers, “none of them are noticing” (162). This poem has been read as one more death wish on Plath’s part, but as the end of the first stanza expresses, the speaker desires what the relatively “immortal” tree has: longevity (162). Also, the calm, measured tone throughout the poem, as well as the final, long (accentuating horizontality) line suggests, it is not death but nature’s acknowledgment of her that the speaker desires: It is more natural to me, lying down.

Then the sky and I are in open conversation,

And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:

Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me. (162)

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the adjective “finally” emphasizes the thought that this death is one of natural causes, not the willful design of suicide. Still, one may argue that the poem’s gentle tone and pleasant imagery operate like the lulling powers of a siren song, that the formal elements mask and naturalize what is really just an impulse toward death. Even so, the primary movement in the poem is toward relinquishment, not violent self-extermination. If the poem is at all about death (and not just desire for communion with nature), then it suggests that death need not be thought of as oblivion. In a reversal of the conventional Christian notion that death bespeaks an escape from nature into heaven, Plath’s speaker views death as precipitating one’s absorption into nature. The speaker “shall be useful” when she contributes her body to the soil cycle. Plath’s vivid imagination indicates not what some critics label her selfobsessed removal from reality but quite the opposite: her extreme sensitivity to the outside world, expressed even at a bodily level. Plath herself was well aware of the dangers of identifying too strongly with nature, as she wryly notes in a journal she kept in England: “I must stop identifying with the sea­ sons, because this English winter will be the death of me” (193). (This entry is especially poignant given the later environmental circumstances surrounding Plath’s death: in a poorly heated London flat, Plath experienced one of the coldest winters in recorded English history, another reason not to look solely at her psychology or “inner weather,” as Robert Frost puts it.) But her acute sensitivity to the outer world, combined with her deliberate attention to the inner workings of language, resulted in unusually powerful nature poetry. Many different attitudes, themes, and behaviors enable us to see Plath ecocritically, but her greatest importance as an ecological poet lies beyond her thoughts about nature: in her formal craft, her use of sensuous poesis as a response to her environmental concerns and sympathies. Tracy Brain provides a historical context to trace environmental themes (mainly toxic consciousness) in Plath’s work, but we also need a substantive discussion of the relationship between Plath’s poetic technique, especially the function of sound in her poems, and ecological awareness. As a place to start, Plath’s ars poetica and philosophy toward language in general provide a useful background against which to examine her specific poetic technique as it relates to ecological matters. Significantly, Plath’s auto­ biographical short story “Ocean 1212-W” illustrates both her early and life­ long fascination with seaside environments—she called the ocean her “poetic heritage” (Letters Home 345)—and the beginning of her linguistic

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

self-reflexivity. The story reaches, that is, both outward toward the landscape and inward toward language as it recounts the origin of Plath’s identity com­ posed by both the ocean and poetry. Plath spent much of her early, impres­ sionable years near the ocean at her grandparents’ Cape Cod home: “My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple ‘lucky stones’ I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of mem­ ory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath” (Johnny Panic 123). As someone who felt, after marrying Hughes and moving back and forth across the Atlantic, an “in between” nationality between England and the United States (her American friends thought she sounded English, and her English friends thought she had a southern drawl), Plath felt herself to be, like the ocean, fluid and unfixed. Paradoxically, however, Plath con­ cretizes her memory of this literally fluid landscape; although both the ocean and memory itself are anything but objects, her ocean memories are like “stones” and “shells,” the “clearest thing I own.” It is as if later in life, even away from the ocean, Plath’s ocean memories continue to constitute palpable possessions. As a young child, Plath immediately fell in love with the beach and saltwater and approached the waves with gusto: “When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels” (123). This is obviously a story of origins. Not only are oceans often mythologically and biologically described as a place of ori­ gin, but also the imagery of Plath’s mother pulling her baby out of the waves suggests that Aurelia Plath is virtually delivering the baby from her other mother, the ocean. Indeed, Plath makes reference to the “motherly pulse of the sea” and describes the ocean as a “deep woman.” Emphasizing the theme of origination, Plath shifts from the “pulse” of the sea’s motherly womb to initial breath associated with birth: “Breath, that is the first thing. Something is breathing. My own breath? The breath of my mother? No, something else, something larger, farther, more serious, more weary” (123). This mysterious larger “something,” this “breath,” signals not just the birth of the self but also the possibility of speech and poetic language, another originating force. For following closely after her description of the ocean as a site of origination preceding human creation (indeed, creating humans), Plath recounts what she portrays as her first important experience with poetic

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language: “And I recall my mother, a sea-girl herself, reading to me and my brother—who came later—from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Forsaken Merman’ . . . I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy” (124). Just as submerging herself in the sea waves would do, Plath’s first memory of poetry has a physical effect on her. It is clear, given this powerfully literary experience, that Plath’s previously recounted memo­ ries of the actual ocean are partly shaped by and refracted through her experi­ ence of a literary ocean. Of course, her response to Arnold’s poem would not be as intense without her prior experience of the ocean; both ocean and ocean poetry shape each other. The imagery of salt and gills encapsulates the simul­ taneous nature of the real and the literary: “I often wonder what would have happened if I had managed to pierce that looking-glass. Would my infant gills have taken over, the salt in my blood? For a time I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids” (123). Following her sense of the ocean’s asso­ ciation with origination, Plath suggests that her ocean experience would put her in touch with her evolutionary past, not just her individual past (“gills” pointing to both the fishlike experience of a floating fetus and the evolution­ ary predecessors to mammals and reptiles). This biological metaphor, how­ ever, quickly slides into a mythological reference to mermaids, a highly artifi­ cial yet shaping influence on the young Plath’s experience of oceans. In other words, Plath’s description of the ocean as an originary, shaping force in her life is also framed by mythology and poetry. The very idea of origins, that is, both shapes and is shaped. Language, while not superseding reality, is as palpable and formative as the ocean. The young Plath’s attention to language precipitates her feeling of exist­ ential separation from nature when her brother is born. After his birth, “As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin. I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over” (126). But despite this sense of rupture, Plath experiences a new kind of connection to nature through, not in spite of, her “fall” into language, as Steven Gould Axelrod argues: “Words themselves frag­ mented the two-year-old’s ‘beautiful fusion’ with the world, precipitating her ‘awful birthday of otherness.’ Yet words, which caused this split, could also repair it” (6). The symbolic order in which Plath found herself functions like an ocean, preceding and giving rise to one’s own creative acts. If Plath had “fallen” into language, it was also, significantly, a “new way of being happy.” Her early literary and mythological exposure enables Plath to imagine the

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ocean as containing and producing “mermaids on rocks, chests of jewels, the fantastical” as well as to interpret what the sea churns up as a “sign of election and specialness. A sign I was not forever to be cast out” (127). The “monkey of wood” that Plath finds is both a literal product of the ocean tide and a product of her literary imagination, a kind of “merman” which Arnold’s poem enables her to see: “Out of the pulp of kelp, still shining, with a wet, fresh smell, reached a small, brown hand. What would it be? What did I want it to be? A mermaid, a Spanish infanta? What it was, was a monkey. Not a real monkey, but a monkey of wood. Heavy with the water it had swallowed and scarred with tar, it crouched on its pedestal, remote and holy, long-muzzled and oddly foreign” (127). Thus both poetry and the ocean itself, in its offer­ ing of the “Sacred Baboon” as a “sign”—“the sea, perceiving my need, had conferred a blessing” (127)—foster Plath’s emerging sense of her identity as a poet, her “election and specialness.” Again using the language of Genesis, Plath suggests that her “fall” from direct experience of nature was never a thorough expulsion; she sees that she is not “cast out” from nature through the “sign” she interprets. Despite its necessary degree of separation from the rest of nature, language reconnects Plath to nature as it is part of nature itself. Still, Plath seems at times to describe language not merely in opposition to nature but as a tool with which to order and control nature: “Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master” (Unabridged Journals 516). Even in this brief quotation, however, Plath both makes an argument concerning language as constituting her oppo­ sition from “the physical world” and complicates that argument through the use of metaphor. By describing her words as snails (with retractable “horns” for sensory intake), she presents words as physical themselves, even if not always sensitive enough to “order” and “arrange” nature appropriately. Similarly, in “Poems, Potatoes,” Plath’s use of figure complicates any simple notion of the relationship between language and nature. In the first three stanzas the speaker reiterates an old argument concerning the inad­ equacy of art to represent the ideal: The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous, In establishments which imagined lines Can only haunt. (106)

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she seems to demean written language by comparing it to “sturdy” pota­ toes and stones, which stubbornly “endure” and “shortchange me continu­ ously: whether // More or other, they still dissatisfy” (106). Both potatoes and stones are subterranean, figuratively opposed to the higher ideal of “mistier” and “imagined” thoughts or unwritten language. Yet in the fourth and final stanza, the speaker contrasts her poems with potatoes and stones, praising the latter for their superiority: “Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato / Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly / Superior page; the blunt stone also” (106). Similar to Hopkins’s strategy of praising the windhover and seeming to demean his own ability to represent it even as his language performs like a falcon, Plath’s concluding words, while not potatoes themselves, enact in sensuous poesis the characteristics of the potatoes and stones. The bumpy sounds of “the potato / Bunches its knobby browns” are themselves bunched in together, and the terse last half of the last line, with its three consecu­ tive strong stresses and alliteration of “n” and “t” sounds—“the blunt stone also”—is as aurally blunt as the stone it describes. The figurative flexibility of the potatoes and stones—first they are simi­ les for poems and meant to demean language; later they are literalized on the metaphorical “page” of nature and presented as superior to poems—com­ bined with the sound effects belie the poem’s seemingly Emersonian thesis that nature and the ideal are superior to poetic language and art. Even the cliché expression “vastly superior” suggests a tone of irony in the concluding lines. Furthermore, the paratactic title “Poems, Potatoes” implies an equiva­ lence rather than an opposition between art and nature, as does the veiled pun “poem” and “pomme,” as in the French word for potato, pomme de terre (apple from the earth). “Poems, Potatoes,” among other poems and journal entries by Plath, expresses the idea that, on the one hand, poetry has its own irreducible naturalness, even wildness, coextensive though not identical with the natural world. On the other hand, poetry and nature in a certain sense require each other; they exist dialogically rather than in opposition. One way Plath dramatizes this simultaneous distinction and insepara­ bility of poetry and nature is through her complex use of the poetic speaker, such as in “Elm,” based on an actual tree outside Plath and Hughes’s house, which Hughes describes in the endnote to this poem: “The house in Devon was overshadowed by a giant wych-elm, flanked by two others in a single mass, growing on the shoulder of a moated prehistoric mound” (292). In “Elm,” Plath anticipates and problematizes both the claims of the ecocritics who would accuse her of extreme pathetic fallacy (ostensibly a symptom of

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

anthropocentrism) and the biographically oriented critics who quickly con­ flate the personified elm and the real Plath, brushing “the unusual choice of speaker aside as a mere distraction and eagerly diagnosing all sorts of writerly agony behind it” (Young 19). Of course, the poem is highly imaginative on Plath’s part—she is not presuming to express the “elmness of the elm” in a simple, referential way—but to ignore the presence of elm as speaker is, as David Young bluntly puts it, “reductive and boring, and it blurs a useful distinction between nature and art. Let the tree talk, and be sure you try to listen” (19). Indeed, the poem puts into stark relief the problems inherent in talking and listening, both in terms of poetic speakers and their interlocu­ tors and in terms of humans in relation to nonhumans. The poem presents human figuration of nature—in this case, personification—as inevitable, yet what the tree “speaks” is largely its difference from humans and its resistance to control rather than any colonizing ventriloquism on the part of its human interlocutor. Through figure, that is, the poem accentuates both the elm’s constructedness and its autonomy. The first line of “Elm” includes two vital words—“she says”—that reveal the poem’s preoccupation with figure itself (rather than just the “agony” behind it): “I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: / It is what you fear. / I do not fear it: I have been there” (192). There is no imme­ diate reason why the poem requires this reference to the elm in the third person; without “she says,” the poem would cohere in a consistently firstperson perspective. But the inclusion of “she says” requires us to consider the entire rest of the poem in quotations and to read the elm’s speech as part of a dialogue, not as a monologue. More to the point, these words act as a subtle yet powerful marker of a human interlocutor’s—a second speaker’s—pres­ ence. The poem reveals very little about this “overspeaker,” not even her or his gender, but the inclusion of that human voice makes us hear the elm’s words at second hand, thus foregrounding figure at the outset of the poem. We are not to forget, that is, that the elm is being personified. This does not mean, however, that the elm merely gives a transparent look at the inner life of the human; rather, in a reverse apostrophe, the elm addresses its human interlocutor and emphasizes the difference between them. This apostrophiz­ ing, as well as the attention drawn to the human overspeaker, emphasizes the act of communication itself, as Jonathan Culler makes clear: “Apostrophe . . . makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself ” (139). But what is the difference the elm communicates? A tree of knowledge,

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she speaks with confidence in declarative sentences. She claims to “know the bottom” and does not fear it like the human because she has “been there.” Instead of traditional apostrophe, in which an aspect of nature or some inert object passively takes on the attributes the human speaker projects upon it, the elm seems to taunt the human by tossing out various interpretations it might be given: “Is it the sea you hear in me, / Its dissatisfactions? / Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?” (192). The tree may speak, but only to point out the human tendency to hear its own “madness” in the wind through the leaves, which sounds like the hiss of sea spray, evoked by the alliteration of “Its dissatisfactions.” This sound effect, combined with the failure implied by “dissatisfactions,” serves to taunt the human with her incessant but always limited figuring of nature. The elm may have a voice, but what it gives voice to is partly the sensuous aspects of language itself, coextensive with the meaningless physical play of nature’s sounds, which resist being interpretively pinned down. Continuing to thematize sound, the poem alludes to another of Plath’s wild figures, the horse: “Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. // All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously” (192). The elm’s impera­ tive “Listen” emphasizes what increasingly becomes the most powerful tech­ nical aspect of Plath’s poetry: the function of sound. At a figurative level, the elm refuses to be confined, and it manifests its autonomy by offering choice after choice of sounds: the sound of the “sea” or the “voice of nothing,” the sound of “hooves” or the “sound of poisons,” and the “rain now, this big hush” contrasted with a more rough sound, “Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs” (192). Unlike the aeolian harp, the elm is animated not by a “west wind” of inspiration but by a hostile “wind of such violence” that “Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek” (192). The shriek, like Stevens’s “desolate cry” in “Autumn Refrain,” suggests sound in its most raw state, stripped of reference. Biographically deterministic readings that ignore the gap between elm and human accentuated by “she says” would claim that the tree is merely a vehicle for the poet’s inner turmoil and psychological troubles. But what the poem instead expresses is a tension between natural forces and the possibility of nature operating as a vehicle for human emotion. Just as the elm apos­ trophizes its human interlocutor, it also engages in reverse personification when it “naturalizes” the human, who has died: “All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, /Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, / Echoing, echoing” (192). As in “I Am Vertical,” death is portrayed as central to realizing

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

that we are part of nature. But in “Elm,” this process is not presented as the human calmly being absorbed into the “turf ”; rather, the elm experiences human contamination in both literal and figurative terms. Despite the elm’s strong tone and aggressive posturing, that is, “she” also admits to being victimized by both natural elements—the “atrocity of sunsets,” the violent wind, the “merciless” moon that “scathes me”—and a vaguely artificial “poison” in the rain, the humanly introduced “fruit” of which is “tin-white, like arsenic” (192). But the most insidious thing the elm decries is the owl-like presence that has infected and “possessed” it. The last five stanzas deal with this “dark thing / That sleeps in me” (193), but the poem leaves ambiguous whether it is a real owl the elm is endowing with evil char­ acteristics or part of what the human speaker has projected onto the elm, as the last line before these five stanzas suggests: “How your bad dreams possess and endow me” (192). This line signals the crisis about personification at the heart of the poem. The elm feels most victimized by the human speaker it has been attempting to confound, and thus the last five stanzas present a differ­ ent kind of personification from that in the first nine stanzas. No longer aggressively independent, the elm now feels the fear it claims only the human feels at the outset of the poem: “I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malig­ nity” (193). This change in tone seems to result from the elm’s realization of the natural processes of death, decay, and renewal as it literally incorporates the human body, a process that ultimately unites them in a physical sense. But the elm also feels contaminated by the human—not only through the acid rain but through personification as well. The tree still asks questions, but not, as it did before, to demonstrate its imperviousness to singular inter­ pretation; now it questions, in earnest, its own interpretive abilities and rela­ tionship to its environment: Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?

Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.

What is this, this face

So murderous in its strangle of branches? (193)

the poem dramatizes, by means of personification itself, both the pos­ sibilities and limitations of personification through the crucial shift the elm

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experiences from being the possessor to being possessed. That is, in the first nine stanzas the elm seems to be in charge of its own figuration, as well as “endowing” the human with natural characteristics in the “stone” and “little turf ” line, whereas the last four stanzas show the elm possessed by the owllike “dark thing,” which originated in the “bad dreams” of the human. In these stanzas the elm does not question whether or not it is “inhabited”; figurative singularity has replaced figurative multiplicity. The elm—which confidently began the poem with “I know”—expresses its resulting disem­ powerment in a key line: “I am incapable of more knowledge” (193). The overall intensity of “Elm,” its urgent tone, dark imagery, and appar­ ently despairing conclusion all make it tempting to read the poem “confes­ sionally,” as Plath quickly and furiously transposing her inner torment to the page. But such a reaction merely testifies to the technical effectiveness of the poem, which underwent major effort and revision, as Hughes tells us: “This poem grew (21 sheets of working drafts) from a slightly earlier fragment . . . a premature crystallization out of four densely crowded pages of manuscript. In her next attempt, some days later, she took them up and developed out of them the final poem ‘Elm’ ” (292). One major revision Plath made was to give the elm a first-person perspective. In the “earlier fragment” the speaker merely describes the tree in the third person: She is not easy, she is not peaceful;

She pulses like a heart on my hill.

The moon snags in her intricate nervous system.

I am excited, seeing it there.

It is like something she has caught for me. (292)

by shifting the perspective, plath foregrounds personification itself (especially with the early “she says”). Again, the elm is a self-conscious fig­ ure; it knows it is being “endowed” with certain traits and emotions. Also, Plath’s initial choice of simile in the fragment—“She pulses like a heart on my hill”—draws together the human (or her “heart”) and the tree in a way the final poem does not. The (revised) elm speaks almost entirely in similes and metaphors, but never explicitly to compare herself to the human. Especially in the first nine stanzas, the tree repeatedly makes compet­ ing claims, as in the two perspectives she offers on her relationship with the moon:

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me

Cruelly, being barren.

Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. (192)

such figurative revision results from the increasingly confused rela­ tionship between the overspeaker and the personified elm. The last four stanzas show the impossibility of keeping the two voices apart, and such entanglement “poisons” the elm; the “malignity” she feels suggests both evil possession (supported by the medieval idea of owls as satanic) and a cancer­ ous tumor. We need to be wary, “Elm” seems to communicate, of any human perception of nature and emotional identification with it, which always risks a dangerous “possession” in both senses of the word. The idea that only by distinguishing ourselves from the rest of nature can we truly “hear” what it speaks is a central but largely overlooked point of Plath’s sequence of Bee poems.3 Written in less than a week in October 1962, the five Bee poems—“The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” and “Wintering”—map the trajectory of a speaker who moves from self-delusion to self-awareness. The speaker’s relationship to both language (especially figure) and nature are requisite in this process, which can also be described in terms of moving between two different kinds of “possession,” to echo the vocabulary of “Elm.” At the beginning of the Bee sequence, that is, the speaker acts possessed, in thrall to her own wild misperceptions of real­ ity linked to the spell-like play of language she casts around herself. Part of the speaker’s confusion involves her inability to make necessary distinctions between the real and the figurative and between herself and the bees. By the end of the sequence, the speaker’s self-induced possession has given way to selfpossession in the positive sense of “getting hold of herself ”: she has ventured into the “cellar” of her own psyche, taken stock of what is there, and gained mental tranquillity. Such peaceful self-awareness hinges on her ability to see herself as distinct yet inseparable from the bees she “keeps,” or possesses: Possession.

It is they who own me.

Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant. (218)

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through their own activity, the bees determine the actions of the beekeeper, yet the beekeeper simultaneously sustains the bees, offering them “Tate and Lyle” to “make up for the honey I’ve taken,” in yet another sense of possession (218). This mutual possession-as-reciprocity between the bee­ keeper speaker and the bees serves as Plath’s most powerful metaphor for the relationship between humans and nature. Such a metaphor, which combines the control and domesticity of human­ ness with the wildness of nature’s processes, brings to mind the environmental writer Michael Pollan’s similar use of the garden as a governing metaphor. Unlike the ideal of pristine wilderness, Pollan argues, the idea of the garden captures the realistic middle ground between nature and culture where the most effective and ethical human action takes place. Significantly, in his book The Botany of Desire, subtitled A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, he also considers the pollinating bee’s relationship to pollen-bearing plants as metaphorically illustrating the way both humans and plants mutually shape each other; they both adapt to each other’s needs (thus countering the traditional view of humans as active and nature as merely acted upon). While Plath uses bees in a differently figurative way and is obviously not just addressing human treatment of nature in her Bee sequence, she anticipates Pollan’s argument in her choice of the bee­ hives as a simultaneously domestic and wild setting in which to work out the speaker’s proper relationship to herself, language, and external reality. Like many of her other poems, as well as her early perception of the sea in “Ocean 1212-W,” Plath’s Bee sequence blends actual experience with mythology, fairy tales, and world history. As a girl Plath observed her ento­ mologist father’s beekeeping practice and read his book Bumblebees and Their Ways. (Plath expresses her ambivalent feelings toward the symbolic power she perceives her father to have wielded as a beekeeper in “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” which she wrote three years before the Bee sequence.) Later, when she lived in a cottage in Devon with Hughes, Plath kept her own hive of bees and attended meetings of the local beekeepers’ association. This activity was, as well as a way to connect to the Devon community, part of Plath’s effort to “learn about life,” as she wrote in her journal, to learn “how the leaves grow on the trees. Open your eyes . . . Open your nostrils. Smell snow. Let life happen” (438). She frequently expresses a longing for more intimate knowl­ edge of nature’s processes: “I should study botany, birds and trees: get little booklets and learn them, walk out in the world. Open my eyes” (523). Still, beekeeping entailed more than mere passive observation; it demanded that Plath not only open her eyes but also literally reach into nature’s processes

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

and risk being stung in an effort to manage the hives. During the sum­ mer prior to Plath’s rapid composition of the Bee sequence, her marriage with Hughes began to break up. As she faced an uncertain future in rural England (far from the London literary establishment) of single motherhood and another harsh winter, Plath’s beekeeping must have served partly as an ordering activity, a provisional structure in her day amid the chaos in her personal life. Beekeeping was also thus analogous to writing poetry, another meeting ground of craft and structure with unpredictability and inspiration. Of course, beekeeping as it is represented in Plath’s five poems also metaphorically expresses a female speaker’s struggles against patriarchy, as many critics agree (although they disagree over whether this struggle is suc­ cessful or not). For instance, Carole Ferrier argues that the Bee sequence represents female endurance and strength in opposition to a controlling father figure, and she reads “Wintering” as an empowering “shift away from the centrality of the father or indeed any male figure . . . and toward an assertion of the persona’s own separate identity independent of any ‘other’ ” (215). Plath weaves classical mythology (specifically the Daphne myth), the Cinderella fairy tale, and Napoleonic history into her description of bee­ keeping to dramatize the speaker’s gendered struggles, very much informed by Plath’s own marital troubles (Hughes’s having an affair and leaving her with two small children) and lifelong effort to achieve poetically a powerful, autonomous voice in a male-dominated world. For these reasons, most critics understandably treat the bees and the speaker’s beekeeping merely figuratively and lose sight of the fact that the poems’ bees also refer to actual bees; Plath’s consideration of physical nature is also in the mix with her other concerns. Many readers therefore not only too easily confuse the sequence’s speaker with Plath herself but also commit the same error as the speaker, who is initially unable to distinguish between figurative and realistic ways of perceiving the bees. Of course, the sequence is about gender and even, to a certain extent, Plath’s biography. But it is not exclusively about these things. By focusing only on what Plath com­ municates concerning gender, we lose the quite powerful role nature plays in the poems. Indeed, the problems (and provisional solutions) the speaker experiences over gender are themselves linked to how the speaker relates to the natural world. For these reasons it is important to read the bees and their hives not merely metaphorically and symbolically but as synecdoches as well. They stand in for the rest of nature, particularly as it is experienced in a semi­ domestic way by humans.

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The speaker’s experience of the bees in the sequence does not make an absolute shift from metaphor to synecdoche—in some senses the bees are still slightly metaphorical at the end—but they obviously function quite dif­ ferently for the speaker in the last poem, “Wintering,” from the way they do at the opening of the sequence in “The Bee Meeting.” This has everything to do, of course, with the speaker’s perception of them and not any substantive change in the bees themselves. Notably, not only does the speaker curb her “manic metaphor-making” (Van Dyne 168) by the end of the sequence— instead she practices what I’ve described in Stevens as ecocentric “figura­ tive restraint”—but also she lessens her use of sensuous poesis, sound effects meant to enact natural phenomena. For this speaker, learning to distinguish herself from the rest of nature involves a new way of speaking. Language that too closely resembles nature accompanies the speaker’s self-delusion. This is particularly clear in the second poem of the sequence, “The Arrival of the Bee Box.” The first poem of the sequence, “The Bee Meeting,” focuses more on the speaker’s hysterical and paranoid self-absorption than on the bees them­ selves; formally this translates into long, turbulent lines, abrupt changes in focus, and a series of urgent questions, mostly about the community mem­ bers. Some of the questions are followed by a reasonable answer, creating a schizophrenic effect: “Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers— / The rectors, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees” (211). It is as if the speaker is talking to herself in two different voices, and the calm clarity of the answer, not to mention the actual harmlessness of the community members, only heightens the sense of the speaker’s irrational fear and feeling of vulnerability: “I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?” (211). Her feeling of alienation from the human community is linked to a confusing relationship with nature. It is unclear, for example, to what extent her vulnerability is the consequence of her feelings toward the bees or toward the human figures. Sometimes the speaker experiences her fellow humans as offering protection: “Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock, / Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees” (211). Other times, sinister imagery makes it clear that the speaker’s fear is directed primarily at the villagers, whom she imagines as cor­ rupting (“molding”) her and drawing her into sinister rituals: “Now they are giving me . . . / a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them. / They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives” (211). She passively (indeed, she even speaks in the passive voice: “I am led through

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

a beanfield”) misreads the villagers’ efforts to include her and protect her with the proper beekeeping gear, which in her imagination becomes partly a death mask. The “shorn grove” with its pagan circular imagery, the “circle of hives,” suggests a meeting place for witches; the speaker even alludes to Nathaniel Hawthorne—“Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick? / The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children” (211)—whose Young Goodman Brown, like Plath’s speaker, is “a dubious judge of the intentions of the vil­ lagers” (Ford, Gender 142). The speaker seems to act out the fear that she imagines the bees feel as they are smoked out of their hives: “The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything. / Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics” (212). While the bees may act perturbed, the “hysteria” the speaker seems to witness is largely a projection of her unstable state of mind. The speaker’s particularly excessive use of figure is central to her confusion; every element of the scene is personified in monstrous terms, thus ironically dehumanizing the entire landscape. In an instance of what Perloff calls simultaneous “ani­ mism and angst,” the speaker’s landscape comes to life, in this case in a gro­ tesque way, just as she masks the particular humanness of the villagers behind her extravagant metaphors: “Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors, / Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits” (211). Again the speaker undermines any real sense of threat in the image of black knights with the innocuously domestic “breastplates of cheesecloth.” She feels fearful, that is, but we are meant to see her fear as unfounded. In any case, the landscape the speaker personifies is doubly estranged since the “persons” in the poem are themselves grotesquely depicted. The “strips of tinfoil winking like people” thus refer to no ordinary people in the speaker’s eyes. Her personifications also escalate in their morbid self-projection of fear, from the harmless “Feather dusters fanning their hands” to the “bean flow­ ers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts” and the flowers that are like “blood clots” (211). Once the speaker makes a particular figure, it sets off a chain reaction of more figures, each instance of which removes her further from reality. Thus she confuses her own mind with the “mind of the hive”; though the bees may act alarmed, they cannot have a dramatic sense of an impending “end of everything,” which the speaker herself feels. In her confusion, while the speaker personifies the landscape and bees, she also naturalizes herself. Like Daphne, who became a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s sexual advances, the speaker wishes she could metamorphose into a plant to elude the threat she imagines in the bees and less directly in the

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villagers. Once she is outfitted in her “white shop smock,” she feels that she is “milkweed silk, the bees will not notice” (211). Later, she hopes the bees will think she is “cow-parsley, / A gullible head untouched by their animos­ ity, // Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow” (212). Such figurative crisscrossing, in which nature is personified and the human is naturalized, would seem to betoken a drawing together of the human and nonhuman, a blurring of the boundary between these categories that would excite contemporary post-humanists. But in the case of Plath’s Bee sequence, this blurring is only symptomatic of the speaker’s inability really to experience nature on its own terms. The human/nonhuman bound­ ary is more porous than we conventionally think, as we see in many of Plath’s poems, but here Plath also dramatizes the pitfalls of taking such bound­ ary dissolution too far. By the end of the sequence the speaker has learned that she need not be Daphne; she need not let her humanness be subsumed by nature, which was never really possible anyway. In fact, her imaginative excesses in “The Bee Meeting” suggest that the opposite occurs. Of course, a certain degree of figuration is inevitable in observing a land­ scape, as Plath makes clear in a discussion of relativism and perspectivism in her journal several years before writing this poem: “Even the neutral things seen would be colored by personal attitudes toward them . . . Each person, banging into the facts, neutral, impersonal in themselves . . . interprets, alters, becomes obsessed with personal biases or attitudes, transmuting the objec­ tive reality into something quite personal” (121). Like Stevens, another postRomantic, Plath was fascinated with the relationship between concept and percept, with how, as Wordsworth puts it, we both perceive and “half cre­ ate” what we see. But by the time of “Elm” and the Bee sequence, Plath is less enamored with the positive aspects of relativism. Instead, she explores the dangers of hypersubjectivity, showing how the speaker’s initial paranoia, alienation, and fear are linked to a misperception of nature colored by her own imagination. For the speaker in Plath’s Bee sequence, the more deluded her perception is, the more she engages in figurative excess and sensuous poesis. This is clearly expressed in the middle of “The Bee Meeting,” in which the speaker again scales back her figurative excess in another juxtaposition of manic questioning and sober answering: “Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string? / No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible” (211). The speaker’s personifications have escalated in their goriness, from the “black eyes” of the bean flowers to the “leaves like bored hearts.” Whereas these figures are stated in assertions, giving the impression that the

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

speaker is at least somewhat aware of her own figure making (especially in the simile), the culminating question about blood clots makes it seem as though the speaker has begun to put too much faith in her own figures; she seems actually to see blood. Although the poem later falls back into self-delusion, the next line is the steadiest of the poem. Here the speaker assures herself that she is only seeing red flowers; she insists on a distinction between real­ ity and imagination in order to calm herself down. Even the repetition of “no, no” expresses a reasonable, calming tone, as a parent would say “now, now” or “there, there” to a child afraid of the dark (as opposed to other uses of repetition in the poem, such as “my fear, my fear, my fear” [211], which only express the speaker’s morbid obsession). Furthermore, this line’s imagery foreshadows the conclusion of the sequence, in which the speaker wonders in “Wintering” if the gladiolas (red like the “scarlet flowers”) will “Succeed in banking their fires / to enter another year” (219). The hopeful assertion that the scarlet flowers will “one day be edible” points forward to the positive conclusion of “Wintering” when the bees unconditionally “taste the spring” (219). In a sense, the lines in “The Bee Meeting” containing “blood clots” and “scarlet flowers” summarize the difference between the beginning and end of the entire sequence. The “scarlet flowers” replace the “blood clots,” and the speaker evolves from morbidity and confusion to self-possession and hope. As these lines and the opening and concluding poems for which they are synec­ doches show, the speaker’s perception of nature is key to this self-evolution. In the second poem of the sequence, “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” the speaker struggles to come to terms with her relationship to the bees. Initially she seems much more stable than the speaker of the first poem, but any seem­ ing stability turns out to be fleeting. The speaker’s early figurative restraint in the poem seems to accompany an ethical stance, as the first line immediately expresses her sense of accountability toward the bees: “I ordered this, this clean wood box” (212). In another instance of self-correction, she is tempted to project her morbid imagination onto the bee box until she takes into account the sound of its contents: “I would say it was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby /Were there not such a din in it” (212). The onomatopoeic “din in it” accompanies the speaker’s effort to distinguish between her imagination and the reality of nature. Despite the impression of reasonableness and stabil­ ity communicated by this opening and the shorter lines of this poem in con­ trast to the sprawling, panicky lines of the first poem, the speaker quickly succumbs to her morbid imagination again. Her emotional trouble is linked to her inability to know how to relate properly to the bees. In these first two

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poems the speaker vacillates between extremes. In “The Bee Meeting” she indirectly confuses herself with the bees, which she perceives as helpless vic­ tims of the villagers, and in “The Arrival of the Bee Box” she overcompensates in reaction to her own sense of vulnerability by assuming the posture of a dictator or cruel monarch despite her realization that she is “not a Caesar”: “They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner” (213). This false confidence is belied by the speaker’s return to the Daphne myth as a refuge from the threat she perceives in the bees: “I wonder if they would forget me / If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree” (213). At the heart of the speaker’s anxious relationship with the bees is a prob­ lem of language. Like the speaker of “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” this speaker initially puts her “eye to the grid” yet is only foiled in her attempt to compre­ hend the bees visually. But sound quickly takes over as the medium of confu­ sion. Even the stanza that begins with the speaker’s eye concludes with thick alliteration and a droning humming sound meant to conjure the bees aurally: “angrily clambering” (213). The next stanza gives way semantically as well to sound: “It is the noise that appalls me most of all, / The unintelligible sylla­ bles” (213). The ten syllables packed into these last three words, as well as the internal rhymes tightly woven together and more thick alliteration, aurally enact the “din” of the bees. For the speaker, the intimidating wildness of the bees is coextensive with the wildness of language as it is pushed toward pure, nonreferential (thus “unintelligible”) sound. The onomatopoeia of “din in it,” “angrily clambering,” and “unintelligible syllables” aurally compensates for the speaker’s mental inability to get hold of the bees (not to mention of herself ). She fails to relate successfully to the bees because she thinks she must master them, be “sweet God” to them. According to the logic of this poem, such mastery relies on an understanding of the bees at the level of language, which is not possible: “I lay my ear to furious Latin. / I am not a Caesar” (213). The speaker has not learned yet that a proper relationship with the bees requires neither self-erasure (being “turned into a tree”) nor selfaggrandizement (being “a Caesar” or “sweet God”), but the symbiotic “pos­ session” of “Wintering.” By this fifth and final poem of the sequence, the speaker’s frenzied tone, cacophonous sound effects, and “manic metaphor-making” of the previous poems have receded. She has also stopped resorting to the Daphne myth as a form of escapism in reaction to the apparent threat of the bees. Daphne’s laurel tree has been replaced by a “cradle of Spanish walnut” (219)—one of the poem’s several images of hope and future possibility—perhaps holding a

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

human baby. Encased in wood, the baby indirectly recalls Daphne, but the cradle is, like the bee box, “only temporary” (213). There is a common tendency among critics to read this poem negatively, or at least as falsely hopeful. For instance, Janet McCann argues that “the concluding ‘taste of spring’ contradicts the rest of the poem” (34), and she hears a negative tone in the poem at odds with its promising words. But read­ ings like these too often confuse the speaker of the Bee sequence with the real Plath. Ironically, these critics tend to commit the error Ted Hughes, who changed the order of Ariel and concluded it with the suicidal-sounding “Edge,” would have wanted them to make: they read the inevitability of Plath’s suicide into her late poems instead of noticing the degree to which poems such as “Wintering,” in their hopefulness, push against the grim cir­ cumstances of Plath’s final year. They either ignore or dismiss, moreover, Plath’s remark that her own sequencing of Ariel “began with the word ‘Love’ and ended with the word ‘Spring’ ” (Collected Poems 14–15). True, Plath’s “Edge” and “Words,” which seem to coincide thematically with her despair and impending suicide, postdate her composition of the Bee sequence, but the Bee sequence stands as the culmination of her artistry, the “full measure of her poetic achievement” (Ford, Gender 165). For this reason many critics fail to see (or turn a blind eye to) the hope and calm acceptance of “Wintering,” for such a reading would render inconsistent the myth of Plath as “mad, depressed and pouring out her distress in an ink of blood” (Brain 37). Still, the speaker of “Wintering” does enter into a dark space in the first half of the poem. She must venture within her own psyche and take stock of what is there before looking outward at the bees from a balanced perspec­ tive. Indeed, her healthy view of the bees requires that she first face up to and distinguish herself from the darkness that has affected her prior outlook. The speaker experiences winter as an introspective season; she goes inside not only the house but also the wine cellar, the “heart of the house,” a metaphor for her own subconscious mind (218). She admits that she has been previ­ ously unaware of what goes on there, that introspection is a new process for her: “This is the room I have never been in. / This is the room I could never breathe in” (218). Her jars of honey quickly become gothic—“Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar” (217)—like the other images there: The black bunched in there like a bat, No light But the torch and its faint

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Chinese yellow on appalling objects— Black asininity. Decay. (218)

facing the cellar’s and her psyche’s contents directly and giving a name to them, the speaker is able to separate herself from them. Her memories and previously unconscious modes of perception are “appalling” and “asinine.” They are no longer fully present, but are outmoded, as the word “decay” and the antiquated gothic imagery suggest. The poem, and the sequence as a whole, pivots on the one word of the fourth stanza’s middle line: Chinese yellow on appalling objects—

Black asininity. Decay.

Possession.

It is they who own me.

Neither cruel nor indifferent. (218)

one of the few one-word lines in the entire sequence, “Possession” car­ ries multiple meanings and is central (as it is literally central in the stanza) to understanding both the speaker’s psychological development—her relation­ ship to herself—and her relationship to the bees. Given what words come before it, “Possession” at first seems to suggest that the speaker’s “appalling objects,” or dark memories, possess her. Such sinister possession fits with the gothic tone of the black cellar and points to the speaker’s wild perception of the earlier poems of the sequence, where she often acted possessed by demons of paranoia and irrational fear. Yet the next line and sentence after this pivotal word, “It is they who own me,” transforms the meaning of “Possession” in crucial ways. By syn­ tactically emphasizing the pronoun “they” (instead of just stating “they own me”), the speaker argues that instead of the “appalling objects” of the cellar, it is the bees that possess her, though not in any negative way: “Neither cruel nor indifferent, // Only ignorant” (218). Furthermore, by emphasizing “they,” the speaker subverts the usual sense of beekeeping, so that the bees possess her rather than vice versa. The bees are not possessive tyrants, however, the way the speaker might have experienced them earlier in the sequence; they are “so slow I hardly know them” (218). In fact, it is clear that the “possession” of beekeeping is reciprocal. The bees may “own” the speaker, in that they

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

shape her activities as a beekeeper, but the bees also rely on her, especially in the winter: they file

like soldiers

To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I’ve taken.

Tate and Lyle keeps them going,

The refined snow.

It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.

They take it. The cold sets in. (218)

the bees calmly accept the artificial food, just as the speaker calmly accepts herself and her role as beekeeper. She has finally, fully learned that “she is a beekeeper not a bee” (Ford, Gender 143), and this perspective enables her to observe the bees empathically. The significatory richness of “Possession,” which hovers (bee-like, indeed, its first syllable rhymes with “buzz”) alone in the middle of its stanza and thus points in different direc­ tions at once, mirrors the speaker herself, who, like the word, is capable of change and is not limited to static meaning. The “–ing” verb title, “Wintering,” also emphasizes dynamism like the transformations of the speaker’s persona and the shifting meanings of “Possession.” The title refers to the processes that occur during winter—the “easy time” for the beekeeper, the “time of hanging on for the bees” (217, 218). But more important, the title also suggests the fact that winter, like any other season, is more properly considered a process than an exact period of time. Just as day bleeds into night and night into day, the seasons overlap, cyclically and gradually shifting from one to the next. Wintering is some­ thing all creatures do during winter, and winter is itself a process of winter­ ing that always enfolds pieces of the future season, spring and its processes. The speaker concludes the poem with this fundamental natural fact, stating that the bees “taste the spring” even though it is still winter. In other words, winter here is not the conclusion of a year (or, figuratively, a life) so much as it is prologue to spring and rebirth. The idea that winter contains both literal and figurative seeds of renewal counters both the poetic cliché of winter as a metaphor for death and critics’ insistence that “Wintering” coincides with the inevitable, impending death of the speaker and (or as) Plath. On the contrary, especially after the pivotal word “Possession,” “Winter-ing”

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concerns itself very much with life and continuity rather than death and finality. The bees express this by forming a community so tight-knit that the speaker again compares them to a single mind: “Now they ball in a mass, / Black / Mind against all that white” (218). But whereas the speaker of “The Bee Meeting” projects her own apocalyptic imagination onto the bees—“The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything”—this speaker merely observes the way bees cling together so closely, especially in winter, that they appear to behave like one organism. And whereas the bees fend off death through community cohesion, the speaker is now solitary. Yet in a sequence of associations, she moves from the bees, who “are all women,” to an image of a human woman: “The woman, still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut, / Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think” (219). The woman is at once solitary and watching over a cradle, an image that suggests the continuity of life even in moments of emotional isolation. The woman herself may be like a “bulb,” possibly pregnant but in any case storing her energies in the winter like the “ball” of bees, but the cradle is also bulb-like in its hard brown shape and in its promise of future growth. Even the word “still”—the woman is “still at her knitting”—carries two connotations: inaction and continuity. The woman’s “dumbness” refers to the silence of stillness, not stupid­ ity. The poem’s evocation of silence is just one way it nods toward Stevens’s “The Snow Man” in the latter poem’s stripping away of figurative excess and movement toward “nothing.” Both poems also use a winter setting in which to explore the relationship of “mind” to a snowy, stark reality, and like Stevens, Plath practices figurative restraint (relative to the early poems of the Bee sequence) as a way to gesture toward such an interwoven relation­ ship. Likewise, the woman’s dumbness is a form of verbal restraint as well as another way to indicate her storing up of energy during winter. Stevens’s “mind of winter” has been replaced by the bees that have massed together, “Black / Mind against all that white.” The stark black and white contrast helps to emphasize that this winter setting is, for the speaker, a time when she is able to make helpful distinctions—between herself and the bees and between herself and her past habits of mind (the psychic cellar’s contents). At a more immediate level, the bees as synecdoches for nature are themselves set in contrast to snowy reality. Still, the snow is personified—“The smile of the snow is white” (218)—which suggests that these distinctions are not absolute or final (as we have seen in seasonal categories) despite relative, minor dis­ tinctions between humans and nature and inside nature itself.

Sylvia Plath’s Physical Words

These nuanced, subtle observations indicate that the speaker is now sta­ ble enough not to project with abandon her own state of mind onto nature, while at the same time she doesn’t presume total objectivity. She can simul­ taneously observe the natural fact that the bees now are all female, while also humorously making them critical of the males: “They have got rid of the men, // The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. / Winter is for women—” (218–19). The playful internal rhymes and consonance of the middle line, which evokes the word “bumblebee,” belie critics’ insistence that the speaker (and/or Plath) expresses hatred here for men. In any case, the speaker’s natu­ ral observation is emotionally hopeful; the female albeit communitarian bees inspire the image of the self-sufficient woman with the baby. Plant imagery also helps the speaker feel hope and the continuity of life. In a strikingly beautiful image, she literalizes the “bulb,” previously a metaphor for the woman’s body, to ask (in different metaphorical language), “will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires /To enter another year?” (219). By asking questions, the speaker recalls her similar tendency in “The Bee Meeting,” but her later questioning now emphasizes how much she has evolved; in contrast to the initial poem’s frantic, irrational questions, which hurriedly gush out in long lines, the speaker of “Wintering” asks only a few questions, and the longest, middle question about the gladiolas is broken up over three lines, thus creating a slower pace and calmer tone. The gladiolas (containing the word “glad”) are not “extinguished,” even temporarily, in the winter; “banking their fires” suggests that they are still, in a sense, aglow, even if only internally. Furthermore, the action of “banking” a fire suggests a level of self-control and thoughtfulness that the speaker has achieved; her passions still burn, but not in a destructive or delusional way anymore. “Christmas roses,” in its allusion to the birth of Christ (and proximity to the cradled baby), is yet another image of starting anew (219). The poem concludes with the optimistic idea that wintering, despite being a time of gathering in (banking) one’s being, includes bees “flying” (another “-ing” verb accentuating process) and anticipating the spring in the taste of the Christmas roses. Lest one consider this an overly “rosy” reading of the ending of the Bee sequence, we should recognize that it does not conclude with complete revelation or joyful certitude despite the direct declaration of the final sen­ tence: “They taste the spring” (219). The last stanza’s series of questions gives a tentative feel to the poem, which does not actually conclude with bloom­ ing gladiolas or spring in any fully bloomed sense. The bees get just a “taste”

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of spring. Still, even if the poem concludes more with anticipation and hope than with what is anticipated, its conclusion is remarkably positive given how the sequence begins. This juxtaposition recalls the carefully wrought revela­ tion of “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” in which the speaker’s experience of nature’s “spasmodic tricks of radiance” is achieved not in spite of but partly because of her initial skepticism and claims to live in a materialistic uni­ verse. In the Bee sequence, the speaker’s tentative gestures toward hope and renewal at the end of “Wintering” come across as radical precisely because her quiet tone and careful observations of the bees contrast so sharply with the panicky phobias of the opening poems of the sequence. The speaker’s perception of nature, whether cause or consequence of her state of mind, is central to her transformation over the sequence. In “The Bee Meeting” she relies on her misinterpretations of the bees and the villag­ ers to portray herself inaccurately as a victim of dire circumstances. She also confuses herself with the bees and fails to distinguish clearly between figure and reality. In “Wintering,” however, she has learned to make such distinc­ tions. This does not mean that she abandons figure. Just as “I Am Vertical” uses natural imagery to make death normal and acceptable, “Wintering” naturalizes life and continuity. The Bee sequence shows that nature can be used (and misused) to illustrate varying and conflicting arguments. Does this mean that any and all arguments that use nature for justification are equally valid? In the context of the Bee sequence, the speaker’s use of natu­ ral imagery in “Wintering” comes across as more accurate than the morbid imaginings of “The Bee Meeting.” But in a larger context, Plath’s oeuvre shows that what Dana Phillips calls the “truth of ecology” is situational and provisional. While there is no one “right way” to represent nature in poetry, Plath’s poems derive their power from the generative friction between speak­ ers and a nonhuman world that offers real resistance to figurative appropria­ tion. For Plath, this resistance is itself to be figured forth, creating the formal reverberations with which her poems still startle us.

CONCLUSION Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

sS

T

he 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

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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 free-verse 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

nature’s form. A. R. Ammons, for example, employs zigzagging lines in “Corsons Inlet” to emphasize the asymmetry and irregularity of the shore­ line, which inspires him to leave behind the “straight lines” and “boxes” of symmetrical verse as it appears on the page: I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight . . . in nature there are few sharp lines. (5–6)

ammons does reluctantly acknowledge symmetrical forms and pat­ terns in nature, but he quickly dismisses them and emphasizes instead the large view, no lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together and against, of millions of events: this, so that I make no form of formlessness. (8)

trained in biology, ammons employs chaos theory to describe the “pos­ sibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness” in nature (7). As Paul Lake points out, however, Ammons relies on theories from the science of chaos that are now outdated. (Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems was published in 1965.) Chaos theory today (sometimes termed “anti-chaos”) employs fractal geometry to show that what appear to be random occurrences and shapes in nature actu­ ally contain distinct patterns and surprising symmetries. It turns out that natural phenomena, including Pound’s tree and Ammons’s coastline, operate according to principles similar to those of formal poetry, such as repetition with a difference: “Thanks to these new discoveries [in fractal geometry], we now know that the ‘order tight with shape’ [Ammons] observes in a tiny snail shell is the same order seen in ‘the large view’ in coastlines, weather systems, sand dunes, mountain ranges, and galaxies. That the laws govern­ ing the growth of trees—as well as of leaves, ferns, pinecones, and sunflow­ ers—[are] the same law[s] that govern . . . the growth of human organs,

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snowflakes, tornadoes, bird wings—and . . . the elegant, broken symme­ tries of formal verse” (Lake 160). Inversely, practitioners of traditional verse forms, such as Richard Wilbur and the New Formalists, often experience poetic composition organically. Their poems are not static objects like vases but, like complex natural systems, simultaneously “top-down” and “bottom­ up phenomena”; like a self-organizing storm, the “initial lines determine the shape of the finished poem, yet the overall shape and tone of the finished poem is what draws the initial lines into being” (Lake 163–64). Therefore in some crucial ways traditionally formal verse is more organic than free verse since it more consistently expresses the combination of chance and order we find in nature. Working with Heidegger’s notion of writing poetry as a way to inhabit the earth meaningfully, Jonathan Bate makes a similar claim about the ecocentrism of verse forms: Ecopoetics asks in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling-place—the prefix eco- is derived from Greek oikos, “the home or place of dwelling.” According to this definition, poetry will not necessar­ ily be synonymous with verse: the poeming of the dwelling is not inherently dependent on metrical form. However, the rhythmic, syntactic and linguistic intensifications that are characteristic of verse-writing frequently give a peculiar force to the poiesis: it could be that poiesis in the sense of verse-making is lan­ guage’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself—a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat—is an answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself. (Bate 75–76)

Indeed, the sound patterns of verse do not merely “echo” the rest of nature; they are nature. More specifically, sound is one way nature in its broadest sense pushes through the poem at the level of form. Thus Finch feels drawn to the “immanent particularities of poetic structure: pattern, repetition, spell, charm, incantation,” all aurally experienced and part of her “physical” poetics. She is “led to linger in rhyme and repetition, to glory in the surprising artifices of poetry’s body” (27). The body of a poem—its form, its sound—is part of the body of the world. When a poet takes the world’s sounds to form the body of a poem, he or she participates in a physical world. Although Marilyn Nelson does not always write in traditional verse forms, she has produced one of the most ambitious formalist works of the early twenty-first century, a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets, A Wreath

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

for Emmett Till (2005). An elegy for Till, an African American teenager mur­ dered by white men in Mississippi in 1955, Nelson’s Wreath offers a complex working of the intersection of traditional poetic formalism and the environ­ ment—an environment for Nelson, Till, and other African Americans that differs profoundly from the natural world of most Anglo-Americans. In the context of slavery and sharecropping, of course, pastoral landscapes were not places to escape to from the city; rather, they were places of backbreaking labor and cruelty for most African Americans. In fact, for millions of African Americans during the Great Migration of 1910–1930, the northern city sym­ bolized freedom from the hardships of the rural South (even as, sadly, the northern city met them with its own forms of racial injustice). Likewise, as a consequence of the horrific legacy of lynching, the tree image often connotes racial violence, as Lucille Clifton, Sarah Webster Fabio, and other African American poets have shown. Literary critics have therefore assumed that racial justice has been a more important literary subject than nature for African American writers. For example, Elizabeth Dodd suggests that “African American writers [have not] embraced nature writing [in the same manner as Anglo-Americans because] the literary attempt to deflect attention away from human beings . . . might not be appealing for writers who already feel politi­ cally, economically, and socially marginalized” (177). Such a claim is only partly accurate. African Americans have, in fact, forged distinctive alliances with the natural world, historically for purposes of survival while enslaved on plantations and as escapees fleeing north through the woods: Recognition of the connectivity with worlds beyond the human is revealed as a necessity of spiritual and physical survival . . . Those bound into slavery needed to know how to cultivate crops for the market as well as crops for their own gardens or shelters. Knowing what, how, and when to grow and harvest meant survival. Were a slave to choose another mode of existence, to chance freedom, running away likely involved periods of time in the wild. Knowledge of which direction moss grew on a tree, of how to throw a dog off a scent trail, what ber­ ries were edible, how to make a poultice for a wound, and of how to recognize which snakes were harmful—and which only looked that way—could mean the difference between another hour in freedom or an encounter with sudden danger or certain death. (Dungy xxiv–xxv)

contemporary african american poets like Marilyn Nelson have formed strong bonds with the natural world as well. She is also quite con­ cerned about environmental issues on a global scale, as Nelson’s description

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of her Poetry and Meditation class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point makes clear: We discussed the impact of industrialization and globalization on the environ­ ment. We discussed factory-farming. We discussed human population growth. We discussed the effects of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl on the envi­ ronment, and . . . the half-life of nuclear waste . . . We related human manipu­ lation of the environment to the manipulation of the human world by the gods in The Iliad. At the end of our class time I read four nature poems to [the students] and told them to be aware of the small signs of spring (a crow had cawed close to our open window during our five-minute meditation) for the next poems they would write for the class. (“Fruit of Silence” n.p.)

a wreath for emmett till, however, addresses the deep national violence that underwrites these sorts of environmental problems, and thus its con­ tribution to ecopoetics is more profound—if also more subtle—than terms such as “environmentalism” or “nature poetry” can convey. Nelson decided to write her elegy for Till in the extremely demand­ ing form of a heroic crown of Petrarchan sonnets. A crown of sonnets is, in Nelson’s words, “a sequence of interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes the first line, sometimes slightly altered, of the next,” and a heroic crown of sonnets is “a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets, in which the last one is made up of the first lines of the preceding fourteen” (Wreath n.p.). As if that weren’t formally ambitious enough, the concluding sonnet in Nelson’s elegiac sequence is in the form of an acrostic, whereby the first letters of each line vertically spell “R.I.P. EMMETT TILL.” (Perhaps most remarkable of all, given her disturbing subject and difficult form, is the fact that Nelson’s intended audience for this work is young people—people about the age of Till when he was murdered at fourteen. Even the beauti­ ful illustrations by Philippe Lardy and the format of the book seem geared toward youths, albeit youths with sophisticated aesthetic tastes.) Nelson’s choice of a poetic form that originated in white Europe is significant, given the long and complex debate about form among African American poets, herself included. Whereas Harlem Renaissance poets of the early twentieth century such as Countee Cullen and Claude McKay sought to be innovative within received European poetic forms, including the son­ net, Black Arts Movement poets of the 1960s programmatically rejected such “white” forms in favor of what they perceived as more authentically African American ways of embodying black experience. According to Sarah Webster

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

Fabio, for example, traditional prosody such as a line from a sonnet is similar to a rope that “lynches” African American writers: “Black writers, finding themselves up a tree with ‘the man’s’ rhetoric and aesthetic, which hangs them up, lynching their black visions, cut it loose. All the way—swinging free” (190). The shift in modern and contemporary poetry in general toward free verse and away from traditional forms has informed the work of many poets of color who, for political and ethical reasons, strive toward a poetics of immediacy and transparency, wanting to draw attention to racial injus­ tices, for instance, rather than the artifice of their own poetic craft. In this sense, such poets work from a similar political impulse as many feminist and environmentalist poets (and membership in these categories often overlaps, of course). More recently, however, African American poets such as Nelson, Rita Dove, and June Jordan have embraced traditional forms such as the sonnet, which they have made their own rather than experienced as innately white. Nelson describes her response to the “literary separatism” Amiri Baraka and others called the Black Aesthetic: “Baraka’s generation threw out the baby [of traditional verse forms] with the bathwater [of racial injustice]. In their single-minded quest for a revolutionary poetry they paid a great personal and artistic cost” (“Owning” 9). Nelson’s work, like that of most of the poets discussed in this book, falls somewhere between free verse and formal verse, though she makes a strong case for the “music” of traditional forms, even when these forms originated in Anglo-American culture (her “we” refers to African American poets): I hesitate to become involved in the current debate between the so-called new formalists . . . and the organic poets . . . I cannot in good conscience take either side. Certainly free-verse poems can sing. Yet I hear the music more clearly, more compellingly, when I write with an ear to tradition: Hearing either the music of my people, or the rhyme and meter of the master’s tradition . . . The Angloamerican tradition belongs to all of us, or should. As does the com­ munity into which the tradition invites us. That means the metrical tradition, too . . . As we own the masters and learn to use more and more levels of this language we love, for whose continued evolution we share responsibility, the signifiers become ours. We must not stand, like trembling slaves, at the back door of the master’s house. (“Owning” 13, 15, 16).

For Nelson, the ethical impulse behind her work does not conflict with the artifice of poetic form. Her Wreath especially draws attention to its own

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elaborate artifice, not only in the form of the heroic crown of sonnets but also in its many literary allusions, from Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “The Haunted Oak” to Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” These three allusions in particular emphasize the act of remembering, but even “the allusions that do not thematize memory convey the importance of memory through the very form of allusion itself ” (Ford, “Sonnets” 370). Nelson’s formalism, that is, her thickly allusive heroic crown—is not at all at odds with the moral aim of her project, to memorialize Till and place his murder squarely in public memory. Indeed, her formal choices are crucial to this process: In Nelson’s volume, then, allusion and the sonnet are structures of remem­ brance precisely because they are traditional and thus signify the past. And further, the formal control she learns from the literary traditions actually makes her difficult task of elegizing Emmett Till possible. Here, conventional AngloEuropean literary forms enable rather than thwart African American artistic expression, and the sonnet, in particular, is no longer something that “lynches” black writers. It is, in fact, a form that can preserve the history of lynching precisely because of its distinct place in literary history. (Ford, “Sonnets” 370)

Nelson clearly makes the heroic crown of sonnets form her own, and it serves as a powerful elegizing structure that preserves the memory of Till and his murder, the central concern of her book. Nelson chose her rigorous struc­ ture because of, not despite, her disturbing and emotional subject matter, as she explains in her opening “How I Came to Write This Poem”: I was nine years old when Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. His name and history have been a part of most of my life. When I decided to write a poem about lynching for young people, I knew that I would write about Emmett Till. He was lynched when he was the age of the young people who might read my poem. After revisiting what I knew about lynching, reading more about it, and growing increasingly depressed, I also knew that I would write this poem as a heroic crown of sonnets . . . The strict form became a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter, and a way to allow the Muse to determine what the poem would say. I wrote this poem with my heart in my mouth and tears in my eyes, breathless with anticipation and surprise. (Wreath n.p.)

one benefit of nelson’s strict formal strategy here is that it catalyzes the proliferation of meaning rather than limits it; it enables her to be surprised

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

by her own poem more than if she did not work within the demands of the heroic crown. As Karen Jackson Ford puts it, “Nelson joins a long line of poets who find the constraints of traditional prosody enabling rather than disabling, especially when representing volatile emotions like grief ” (“Sonnets” 369). In addition to its primary purpose of elegizing Till, however, A Wreath also meditates on the complex relationship between language and nature. Indeed, this language-nature relationship is made even more complex in the context of race. A Wreath demonstrates that nature is integral to Nelson’s response to historical horrors such as Till’s murder. The speaker’s understand­ ing of how to respond to his death includes within it a process of under­ standing how language and nonhuman nature do and do not conjoin. The opening sonnet of the sequence, in fact, begins by positioning language and nature together: Rosemary for remembrance, Shakespeare wrote: a speech for poor Ophelia, who went mad when her love killed her father. Flowers had a language then. (n.p.)1

the allusion to shakespeare as well as the traditional use of flowers to communicate (Emily Dickinson referred to her poems as flowers) empha­ sizes, as Ford argues, the elegiac act of remembrance itself by placing this crown of sonnets into literary history. But this language of flowers also intro­ duces another important theme of the sequence: the human need to make nature signify, particularly in response to atrocity. Furthermore, the speaker does not merely replicate the symbolism of flowers she has inherited through literary history. She constructs her own flower language: What should my wreath for Emmett Till denote?

First, heliotrope, for Justice shall be done.

Daisies and white lilies, for Innocence.

Then mandrake: Horror (wearing a white hood,

or bare-faced, laughing). For grief, more than one,

for one is not enough: rue, yew, cypress.

the speaker takes a literary trope—flowers as language—and makes it her own, thereby transforming the crown of sonnets into an elegiac wreath

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(suggesting a wreath placed on a casket). Furthermore, in re-signifying the flowers, the sonnet registers a provisional form of control in response to the chaos of Till’s murder. The second sonnet alludes to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1903 ballad “The Haunted Oak,” in which a personified tree describes a lynching that took place on one of its own limbs. In Dunbar’s poem, the murder and the tree’s memory of it materialize as a blight: And never more shall leaves come forth

On a bough that bears the ban;

I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,

From the curse of a guiltless man. (220)

similarly, nelson’s sonnet links racial violence to environmental degradation: Dendrochronology could give its age in centuries, by counting annual rings: seasons of drought and rain. But one night, blood, spilled at its roots, blighted its foliage. Pith outward, it has been slowly dying, pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood.

both poems suggest that racial injustice is like a toxic pollutant, anath­ ema to ongoing life and out of place within an otherwise harmonious and healthy natural environment. The poems are clearly about human atrocity toward a human and not the destruction of nature, but the figurative logic of both works causes us to see actual blight or toxicity as ecologically harmful, wrong, even evil. In discussing the science of dendrochronology, Nelson’s poem in particular literalizes the tree, to the end of presenting a stark contrast between natural seasonal markers (“drought and rain”) and unnatural blight caused by Till’s spilled blood. Nature recoils at his death. Along the same lines, in the third sonnet the personified tree distinguishes between natural cycles of life and death—“the songs of creature life, which disappears / and comes again . . . Two hundred years of deaths I understood”—and unnatural death such as Till’s murder, a dissonance at odds with the natural “music of the spheres”: “Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night, / shivering the deep silence of the stars.” In the middle sonnets of the sequence, the speaker ruminates on the

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

phenomenon of evil in the world, the chain of horror that links Till’s murder to the thousands of deaths at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the tenth sonnet, however, the sequence veers away from despair to a calm, reflective state in an environment of spring wildflowers. But the speaker is not fleeing history to take refuge in pristine, innocent nature. Rather, she has set herself a task—another instance of provisional order against back­ ground chaos—of collecting wildflowers for an elegiac wreath. She is, in other words, responding to history with art, in the form of crafting a wreath of wildflowers, which are, of course, also the sonnets. In addition, even if the speaker had intended to escape history and become “at one” with nature, it does not absorb her, at least not in a simple way; rather, she wanders through pathless woods, beneath the choirs of small birds trumpeting their powers at the intruder trampling through their bowers, disturbing their peace.

like emily dickinson’s “a bird, came down the Walk –,” Nelson’s poem emphasizes a crucial distinction between humans and nature. This distinc­ tion is crucial because it provides the space necessary in which to make art of nature—a wreath made of wildflowers, a poem made of sounds—in response to evil. This distinction also enables the speaker to interpret and experience spring wildflowers as hopeful symbols of rebirth. Furthermore, they remind her of her faith

that innocence lives on, that a blind soul

can see again. That miracles do exist.

In my house, there is still something called grace,

which melts ice shards of hate and makes hearts whole.

The wildflowers the speaker picks, though, include in the twelfth sonnet the strange and grotesque Indian pipe, bloodroot. White as moonbeams,

their flowers. Picked, one blackens, and one bleeds

a thick red sap. Indian pipe, a weed

that thrives on rot, is held in disesteem.

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embodying the etymology of “wild” as “self-willed” rather than subject to the will of humankind, this wildflower thwarts any human expectation that it will behave like other flowers picked for a bouquet or wreath. Rather than merely being pretty—subject to human aesthetic will—the flower “thrives on rot” and seems to bleed, but “it does have its use in nature’s scheme, / unlike the rose.” This qualification expresses the speaker’s admira­ tion for the flower’s ecological niche involving decomposition, unlike the conventionally pretty but domesticated rose. The rose is also, of course, a cli­ ché as poetic symbol, whereas the Indian pipe—a wild figure, not just a wild­ flower—is a more appropriate inclusion in a wreath to commemorate Till. (The Indian pipe also points to the other major blight—besides slavery—on the conscience of the United States: genocide of Native Americans and their forced removal from their homelands. The flower “pipes” the truth of its evil in its whiteness as well as the source of its common name—Anglo-America.) Its “thick red sap” and associated “rot” signify bloody murder, as does the “red sap” of the self-explained “bloodroot poppy.” The inclusion of these flowers in the wreath demands that we never forget Till’s victimhood and that we “bear witness to atrocity,” as the fourteenth sonnet urges. Even so, the ominous flowers are assembled with the hopeful trillium, Queen Anne’s lace, and apple blossoms, all “woven with oak twigs, for sincerity,” encourag­ ing us to share the speaker’s faith in “innocence” and “miracles.” Whether the wildflowers signify death or rebirth, however, is a matter of interpretation and not an innate quality, according to the sonnet sequence. Till’s murder may have been “unnatural” in relation to the everyday natural deaths the personified tree witnesses, and spring wildflowers may offer com­ fort to the grieving speaker, but she understands that nature is ultimately amoral. In the thirteenth sonnet, for example, the full moon “smiled calmly on his death,” and the passive wildflowers grow “beside the path / a boy was dragged along, blood spattering / their white petals.” Such imagery expresses the “consciencelessness of the atmosphere” and the inability of nature to take sides or intervene during instances of human cruelty. After all, even the tree that is imagined as bearing witness to Till’s murder and consequently whose “heartwood has been scarred for fifty years” (third sonnet) cannot prevent this violence. In treating flowers as linguistic, Nelson both evokes literary history (specifically Shakespeare, though Emily Dickinson and oth­ ers also codified flowers) and distinguishes herself within that history by including new flowers with new significations. For instance, she replaces the

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

white poppy, which traditionally “means forgetfulness,” with the bloodroot poppy, which in this sonnet sequence means just the opposite: remembrance of racial violence. Nelson’s Wreath suggests that nature means what we need it to mean, particularly when responding to the horrors of history. But is nature merely instrumental, subservient to human will, even if merely at the level of figurative language? Emerson argues that nature “is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Savior rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful” (40). For Nelson, wildflowers certainly serve her purpose of elegizing Till, and she uses the personified tree to present his death as beyond the pale of natural order. Nature for her, though, is not as “meek” as Emerson claims it is; it resists being symbolically classified in too rigid a manner. The Indian pipe wildflower, again, may connote bloody murder and is “held in disesteem” for its association with “rot,” but it nev­ ertheless has “its use in nature’s scheme.” The wildflower serves its figurative purpose to signify death without being evil itself. In fact, the poem suggests in ecocentric humility that humans would hold it in higher esteem if we understood its ecological role and that its effectiveness as a figure relies in part on ecological ignorance. Nelson is careful, that is, not to let her figura­ tive use of nature eclipse ecological truth. “Nature’s scheme” precedes and exceeds the poet’s scheme. Partly through its form, Nelson’s Wreath also encourages us to ponder the relationship between poetic craft and the wildness of nature. The form of the sequence—the heroic crown of sonnets—is itself one theme of the sequence, as the image of the elegiac wreath (constructed of flowers that themselves have “a language”) partly symbolizes the book itself. That the book is titled A Wreath for Emmett Till, after all, clearly establishes both that the book is about the speaker’s process of assembling this wreath and that the book is the wreath. The sonnets are formally linked together just as the wildflowers are linked together. Furthermore, the flowers are wild, not from the garden; the speaker must “search” for them “in the greening woods for hours / of solitude” while wandering through “pathless woods” (tenth son­ net). Similarly, the poet must navigate a lexical wilderness, searching for the best words, images, and sounds. The raw sounds that compose language are coextensive with nature rather than opposed to it; therefore, language is at bottom more than just figuratively “wild” like the flowers. Language really is, as most writers will attest, wild, unpredictable, slippery. It has the curious tendency to act autonomously and direct thought (and not just vice versa);

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in other words, to evoke again the etymology of “wild,” language seems to have its own “will” and not just to be subject to human will. It turns out that neither language nor nature is, in Emerson’s words, merely “made to serve.” This is why Nelson prefaces her sonnet sequence with a description of her “strict form” as “a way to allow the Muse to determine what the poem would say. I wrote this poem . . . breathless with anticipation and surprise.” In other words, she had to venture ever farther into the “pathless woods” of language to find words that best express her themes and fulfill the exacting requirements of her form. Her heroic crown of sonnets, particularly with the volatile rather than regular meter, therefore expresses the same combination of chance and order found in a wreath of wildflowers. Such a wreath, after all, weaves together the wildness of the flowers with the craft of the wreath maker. Sometimes categorized as a Language poet, Susan Howe is even more devoted than Nelson to the inherent wildness of words, as both Howe’s poems and prose convey. She is, in fact, so language-centered that the wild­ ness of the nonhuman world is difficult for us to imagine while reading her work. The term “Language Poetry” describes more of a disposition than a poetic “movement” or “school.” (As Lee Bartlett writes, “the idea of a school is often a useful fiction” [741].) Still, Language poets (such as Howe, Michael Palmer, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Barrett Watten) share at least these tendencies: an attraction to “the critical activity of deconstruction, of investigating a text as an endless play of subtexts”; a devotion to language itself and ways of making meaning; an embrace of intertextuality, wherein one’s poem alludes to and contin­ ues to make meaning out of prior texts; and a critical stance toward main­ stream “workshop poems” for their naïve acceptance of coherent subjectivity reproduced on the page, their unblinking referentiality, and their failure to question the “historical, social, and economic context” (Bartlett 742, 748). Language poets such as Howe avoid the traditional verse forms used by the New Formalists, but both groups share a belief that the artifice of language need not be broken through or made transparent, as if that were possible any­ way. (Seeming transparency, immediacy, and presence are, of course, effects produced through poetic craft.) Thus both Annie Finch, a New Formalist, and Charles Bernstein, a Language poet, describe a poem’s form (particularly its sound) as its body. We need not and should not transcend the body of poetry. Instead of using language merely as a tool to point to wildness “out

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

there,” beyond the page, Howe creates a wilderness of words on the page. This is especially true—and apt, considering the subject—of her Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. This work takes as its inspiration the colonialist Reverend Hope Atherton’s account of his actual wanderings in the New England wilderness in 1676. After a failed attempt to subdue neighboring Spakeag, Nipmuck, Pokumtuck, and Mahican tribes, Atherton and 160 local militiamen turned back to Hatfield, Massachusetts. On the return journey, however, Atherton lost his horse and became separated from his company, and he wandered the woods for days before finding his home. His fragmen­ tary narrative of his experience not only inspired Howe’s Articulation but also provided her with words, phrases, and images for her work. The open­ ing poem in her book, for instance, reproduces even the abbreviation and archaic spelling in Atherton’s prose: Prest try to set after grandmother revived by and laid down left ly little distant each other and fro Saw digression hobbling driftwood forage two rotted beans & etc. Redy to faint slaughter story so Gone and signal through deep water Mr. Atherton’s story Hope Atherton. (n.p.)2

later in howe’s book, her language recedes even further from sense toward pure sound: rest chondriacal lunacy velc cello viable toil quench conch uncannunc drumm amonoosuck ythian scow aback din

flicker skaeg ne

barge quagg peat

sieve catacomb

stint chisel sect.

It is difficult to make one’s way through such language, and this very dif­ ficulty gestures toward Atherton’s wilderness wandering; we are as bewildered

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as he. Though inspired by Atherton’s actual experience in the wild, Howe’s work is clearly not about actual wilderness at all, Atherton’s or otherwise; rather, it is about the sounds of words, the difficulty of making meaning, and Howe’s experience of Atherton’s language. Indeed, as Howe herself explains, her poem was born out of an almost entirely textual experience: “I vividly remember the sense of energy and change that came over me one midwinter morning when, as the book lay open in sunshine on my work table, I discov­ ered in Hope Atherton’s wandering story the authority of a prior life for my own writing voice” (“Writing Articulation” 199). She does include a detail of her physical environment—the midwinter sunshine—but Howe’s epiphany is primarily textual. Similarly, while her move to Guilford, Connecticut, with its landscape of “granite outcroppings, abandoned quarries, marshes, salt hay meadows, and paths through woods to the center of town put [her] in touch with [her] agrarian ancestors” (200), it was her experience of Yale’s Sterling Library, and not the nonhuman world, that had the biggest impact on her writing: In the dim light of narrowly spaced overshadowing shelves I felt the spiritual and solitary freedom of an inexorable order only chance creates. Quiet articu­ lates poetry. These Lethean tributaries of lost sentiments and found philoso­ phies had a life-giving effect on the process of my writing . . . In Sterling’s sleeping wilderness I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable phantoms. The future seemed to lie in this forest of letters, theories, and forgotten actuali­ ties. I had a sense of the parallel between our always fragmentary knowledge and the continual progress toward perfect understanding that never withers away. I felt a harmony beyond the confinement of our being merely dross or tin; something chemical, almost mystical, that, thanks to architectural artifice, these gray and tan steel shelves in their neo-Gothic tower commemorate in semidarkness, according to Library of Congress classification. (200)

echoing thoreau’s syntax, diction, and even some his phrasing, Howe replaces the nonhuman world (to which Thoreau was responding) with an entirely textual world: I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots—to go to meet a narrative’s fate by immediate access to its concrete totality of singular interjections, crucified spellings, abbreviations, irrational apprehen­ sions, collective identities, palavers, kicks, cordials, comforts. I wanted jerky and tedious details to oratorically bloom and bear fruit as if they had been set at liberty or ransomed by angels . . . I wished to speak a word for libraries as

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry places of freedom and wildness . . . Sauntering toward the holy land of poetry, I compared the trial of choosing a text to the sifting of wheat, half wild, half saved. (201–2)

howe’s experience of the “forest of letters” in the “sleeping wilderness” of the library compellingly makes the case for the consideration of language as itself wild, part of nature broadly conceived. Like (the rest of ) nature, language comes before us and exists beyond us; language shapes the writer— indeed, calls the writer into being—as much as the writer shapes language. Of course, the wildness of Howe’s poetry in Articulations (and indeed the incomprehensibility of much of it) is a result of her careful craft. Does one experience in her poetry, that is, the innate wildness of language or merely her deliberate, radical defamiliarization of it? Perhaps both, but this does point to a chicken-and-egg conundrum concerning Language poets such as Howe. Their poetry clearly demonstrates preestablished deconstructionist inclinations, so that theory always already determines the kind of nonrefer­ ential poems that result. To be fair, every poet produces poems shaped by his or her conscious or unconscious worldview. But if all language is, at a funda­ mental level, truly wild—self-willed—then it is possible to experience that wildness in even the most apparently controlled traditional verse. In fact, this linguistic wildness is often most powerfully produced by the friction between sound and sense; paradoxically, orderly form creates the conditions for chaos to push back against—and through—form. In another paradox, the wildness of Howe’s poetry is in fact disguisedly domesticated—made to appear wild according to her intentions and beliefs about language. Still, Howe and other Language poets helpfully challenge us to take the inherent wildness of language seriously. Even if, as Bartlett suggests, this group is “theoretically top-heavy, and even if in time the poetry fails to hold a place in our imagination” (750), Language poets play a vital role in contem­ porary American ecopoetry. Their work serves as an ongoing corrective to a prevailing aesthetic (especially within mainstream poetry) of unquestioning referentiality, and they are unwilling to “let us deny the myriad mysteries embedded in the very fabric of the poem” (Bartlett 750). Ecopoetry can take seriously these mysteries without in the process losing sight of the mysteries of the nonhuman world, of which language is a part but which language can never replace. “Organic formalism” best describes the work of such poets who respond at a formal level to the complexity of nonhuman nature, lan­ guage, and the relationship thereof.3 There is, of course, no programmatic way of expressing in poetry nature’s

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own organic formalism. One need not employ traditional verse forms or write in meter or rhyme, as Richard Wilbur, Marilyn Nelson (in some of her poems), or the New Formalists often do, to demonstrate the central role of form in our “naturally artificial” relationship with nature. For example, John Witte’s 2005 book of poems, The Hurtling, demonstrates that the question of poetic form is not just an ancient but a continually fresh and invigorating one. His poems repeatedly turn to nonhuman animals and raise important ecological questions, and poetic form is central to his treatment of nature. Although they do not employ meter or rhyme, Witte’s poems in The Hurtling should not be labeled simply “free verse,” a category much too broad—there are countless ways to write nonmetrical, nonrhyming poems— and misleading since “free” implies a lack of pattern. Like the other poets in this book, Witte resists the fallacious opposition between “formal” and “organic” poetry, preferring instead the term “organic formalism” to describe how his poems in The Hurtling take shape. While he does not use sonnets or other received forms, all of the poems in The Hurtling conform to the same pattern: unrhymed, unpunctuated tercets, each one beginning with a very short line, followed by a medium-length line, followed by a very long line.4 The lack of punctuation, the heavy enjambment, and increasing line lengths have a simultaneously accelerating and restraining effect, as in the first two tercets of the opening ars poetica, “The Soloist,” about a performance by the violinist Itzhak Perlman as witnessed from the front row of a concert hall: This close his lips pursed we could tell how the slow opening phrase rose and broke through him his face clogged his bow arm rising and rowing how the music eddied how he labored bearing the weight of memory and longing. (15)5

the image of the music “eddying” corresponds to the way Witte’s stan­ zas operate throughout the book. A river’s eddy, the recirculation of water behind a rock, flows in the opposite direction to the main course of the river, and Witte’s lines capture this tension, or movement in opposite direc­ tions: “One editor called the form ‘whiplash triplets’ ” (Witte qtd. in Ruble 5). On the one hand, the mostly enjambed lines in each tercet accelerate as they accrue in length, culminating in the long line that “hurtles” across the page. On the other hand, this motion is suddenly stopped short after

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

each long line, as the subsequent white space followed by the short line of the next stanza reins in the tempo. Furthermore, the lack of punctua­ tion causes one to hurtle through the stanzas, but it also frequently hinders movement by creating, in conjunction with the line breaks, grammatical ambiguity that forces one to consider which way the language is pointing. For example, in the lines “the slow opening phrase rose and broke through him his face // clogged his bow / arm rising and rowing,” the soloist’s face is both the grammatical object through which the musical phrase broke and the subject that clogged his bow arm. Similarly, in the poem’s later lines “how the body bends the mouth / works open gawping slaunchways” (15), the mouth is both the grammatical object of the body, which bends it, and the subject that “works open.” Through these tension-producing effects, along with often violent dic­ tion and dissonant sound effects, Witte expresses the sometimes painful energy of contemporary life: “I’ve tried to invent a form that might capture the fleeting quality of our life, its acceleration and breathlessness. I’m try­ ing to get from these triplets a formal sense of cohesion containing, under strain, the chaotic swerving of our experience.”6 Significantly, the “strain” of his poems would not occur without their formal regularity, which gives them the “cohesion and tensile snap of a sonnet” even as they also con­ vey, through their unusual formal effects, “the chaotic rush” of modern life: “There is a loosely syllabic form, and its violation. Order threatened by chaos” (“Hurtling Words” 4–5). Witte thus is innovative with form but does not reject it, for he knows that a poem’s energy derives largely from the ten­ sion between pattern and differences within that pattern. Poetic “violation” requires a background “order” to violate. Although Witte created the particular form of his Hurtling poems him­ self, an entire book of three-line stanzas also undoubtedly recalls other tercets in long poems and books of poems, most famously the terza rima of Dante’s Divine Comedy but also including the long, late poems of Wallace Stevens, such as “Auroras of Autumn.” Furthermore, while some of Witte’s subject matter demands the disorienting yet energizing effect of his form (another way it is organic), his form also evolved slowly over ten years, at some point becoming the norm for his book and presumably determining some of the subject matter. Even though they appear fresh and energetic, in other words, Witte’s poems emerge from rigorous craft: “I work very, very hard. I really believe in the perfectibility of language. I’m really old-fashioned this way. A number of people have noticed this—a lot of people don’t like this writing

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because it’s just too rich for their taste, there’s too much going on, it’s too dense.”7 In his work as editor of the creative writing journal Northwest Review, Witte encountered much of the “general floppiness” Pound was beginning to see in American free verse: “I wish I encountered more often in young writers a sense of serious vocation. A willingness to sweat—even bleed, if necessary—to get the story or poem right. Much of the writing we see in our work as editors . . . is uninhabited, the poetry little more than lineated prose and the fiction vapid” (“Hurtling Words” 5). Apart from his desire to write good poetry, Witte’s work ethic can be explained by his belief in the inadequacy of language, its inability to connect entirely with the world even though “language is the best tool we have” to do just that (personal inter­ view). If language neatly captured nature, then composition would be easy, but for Witte, language can only creep up on reality: If you work very hard you can occasionally approach this place where word and world come within sight of each other . . . [A]t least they are maybe close enough that there is a little synaptic charge that happens. For me that would be the way to describe a pure poetic event, or a success . . . I used to love doing this as a kid, inching magnets together, and they suddenly connect. And there’s that instant in a poem [between word and world]—it’s not that one disappears into the other, but by God they’re connected. There is this mysterious internal pull they are exerting on one another; they don’t want to let go. Word and world are locked together. Maybe two or three times it happens in this book. (personal interview)

witte’s linguistic skepticism thus causes him not to throw up his hands but to work that much more carefully at negotiating the relationship between language and nature, a process that requires a great deal of time and attention to form. Witte’s poem “As If ” both registers his linguistic skepticism and reveals his use of sensuous poesis as an alternative to conventional representation of nature. The speaker observes a phenomenon on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, when at twilight in the spring and fall, up to forty thousand Vaux’s swifts form a spiral together above the Agate Hall chimney before descending into it for the night: A swift two or three flitting over the abandoned school then more plunging into the chimney

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

a blurry funnel their chee and chirring overhead a multitude scattered across the sky it’s their coming back that gets us the air trembling troubled as memory whistling satiny feathers arranging and rearranging in the dark cramped shaft over the dead furnace birds hurrying down now like smoke billowing back into the chimney as if smoke could return to its fire the wood to its tree in the sun on the hill as if flesh returned wheeled back through the locks and chambers back into its clothes onto the crowded train backing away. (45)

on the one hand, the poem expresses—and its title emphasizes—the gulf between language and actual, irreversible historical atrocities like the death camps of World War II. Words have only an “as if ” relationship with the world. The title phrase not only refers to the self-conscious simile, thus emphasizing the artificial status of language, but also suggests the speaker’s feeling of unfulfilled longing, as if he were saying, “If only it were possible, if only we could turn back time, like the smoke going back into the chimney, turn back history, turn back horrific events” (personal interview). On the other hand, the formal features of the poem express the physical reality of the swifts. Even though Witte feels “very frustrated by the inadequacy of lan­ guage really to connect with the world,” and “the stammering quality of a lot of the language is meant to suggest that frustration,” his poem also suggests what he calls an “onomatopoeic connection” between the formal effects of the language and the reality of the swifts (personal interview). In other words, he employs sensuous poesis. The vacillation of line lengths and frac­ turing of syntax connote the erratic movements of the swifts, which veer, flicker, appear, and disappear. The first two lines of each tercet especially are meant to express the “flitting movement” and “sporadic sounds” of the

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swifts, while the long third lines suggest an opposite movement and feeling: the “long, swirling motion of the whole cloud, which is not at all uneasy or nervous” (personal interview). Individual instances of onomatopoeia such as “flitting,” “chee,” “chirring,” and “whistling” add to the larger, figuratively onomatopoeic relationship between poem and phenomena. The language of the poem behaves like the swifts, but the inverse is also true. Witte sees in the underlying order of the seemingly wild tumult of birds a “hidden analogy” for poetry: “I really did think of the swifts as a poetic, as like the work of a poet. Tens of thousands go into this chimney, and they are three or four deep. You can only imagine what kind of commotion is going on inside there. They’re hurtling down at nightfall, and they are wildly arranging and rearranging themselves and finding ways to clasp on. I can see in my mind’s eye the birds inside the chimney as being like molecules arranged or like the scale patterns of a snake or the feathers of an individual bird—there is no space between them and they are all organized perfectly” (personal inter­ view). Like the swifts, language behaves wildly even as it is organized into patterns through poetic form. Indeed, Witte experiences language, particu­ larly in its aural aspect, as physical, like the natural world it points to: “To this day I don’t read with my eyes; I read with my ear and only at the pace that I would speak. I think of fiction writers as people who read with their eye and poets as people who read with their ear. So automatically reading a poem becomes a physical act” (personal interview). Consequently, in a figu­ rative sense Witte’s language echoes rather than mirrors the world. The slow evolution of Witte’s strange tercets (his previous book of poems, Loving the Days, was published twenty-seven years earlier, in 1978) came about partly from how he sees the natural world. The alternation of text and white space (after the short lines and between each tercet), for instance, corresponds with various oscillations in nature: sound and silence, light and dark, life and death, and the ebb and flow of ocean waves. Furthermore, he associates the fluctuation of line lengths with bodily functions such as the beating of a heart and breathing: Ecological interconnectedness implies a kind of order which is corollary to prosodic order, a poetic, formal order . . . The first two [lines] create a kind of gasping, and the last is a long exhalation. So [the poems] are formal, but I think of them as very physical and organic in that sense, and replicating first of all the rhythm of breathing. Mostly the intake of breath tends to be short and the exhalation is long. Beyond the body I had in mind waves and wave

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry motion in nature—the first, short line being a trigger that trips the movement, the second line being a kind of building of the wave, and the last line being a long exhalation, this rush. I see this form a lot in nature, so the poems seem organic. (personal interview)

the natural world that witte represents is no pleasant, pastoral idyll. Writing from a decidedly post-Darwinian perspective, he depicts a natural world filled with struggle, sex, and death, such as in “Rooster,” “Porcupine,” “Pig’s Ear,” “Bestiary,” and “Goat.” Throughout the book, Witte draws implicit and explicit comparisons between the struggle in nature and the struggle of artistic creation, which is figured in sexualized, violent, or natal terms (or in a combination of these). In fact, “comparison” is misleading since it implies that poetic creation is outside the rest of nature’s struggle; for Witte, artistic and natural struggle are part of the same thing. Of course, poets of all stripes, from Alexander Pope to William Carlos Williams, have claimed that their poems behave the way nature does. Still, as contemporary chaos theory reveals, the natural world in our current understanding of it operates from a combination of chance and pattern—it is neither mechanical nor totally random—and organic formalism such as Witte’s expresses this fact. “Pilgrimage,” another ars poetica, ends The Hurtling and offers several images that express organic formalism. On his way home from a journey, the speaker recalls visiting Sagrada Família (Temple of the Holy Family) in Barcelona. Construction of the church, designed by Antoni Gaudí, began near the turn of the twentieth century but has yet to be completed owing to a number of setbacks, including Gaudí’s sudden death in 1926, when he was hit by a streetcar. The church has traditional features of a cathedral, such as spires, transepts, and nave, and yet is unmistakably innovative, incorporating Gaudí’s signature organic style. Instead of employing merely geometric shapes, he incorporated the angles and curves of nature, the fluidity of water, and the way humans and trees grow and stand upright. His church is thus both formal and organic, serving as a model for the poet’s work: “That image [Gaudí’s cathedral] is intended to sum up a lot of my thinking about this [organic formalism]. It’s recognizably a cathedral, so that itself encloses a considerable amount of form. If you know nothing about it, you would know immediately that it is a cathedral. But that is the place that he embarks from—he takes a lot of liberties” (personal interview). The speaker of “Pilgrimage” experiences the church not merely as spiritually referential, pointing to God beyond the structure as cathedrals are conventionally meant to do, but as intensely physical and even life-like:

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eery helicoidal warping flutter and undulation of snail and saint a slumped column crusted with shattered cups plates and pieces of glass . . . under the ribbed dome as if on parchment the scrambled anagrammatic names of Jesus Mary and Joseph the temple breathing gently the grottoes and tender doors of a human lung he is buried inside who remained silent. (76–77)

gaudí is literally buried inside his own unfinished church, but this image also serves as a figure for the inside-out process of organic creation. Ironically, the artist lies dead whereas his creation surrounding him seems to “breathe gently,” but the cathedral’s incomplete state is not merely the result of the artist’s death. Like Elizabeth Bishop’s monument, the organic status of the cathedral demands that it remain open and unending, like nature’s processes. Gaudí knew his temple would never be completed where the work and worship are one who said we make all forms within like bees. (77)

witte is attracted to the cathedral’s resistance to closure and the idea that the process of building it is more meaningful than any finished object: “That’s why Sagrada Família is such a moving image to me, because it’s so in progress. The work is the worship. The business of building this temple is ongoing and will never be completed” (personal interview). The poem and book conclude with another image that expresses organic formalism, this time drawn from the nonhuman world. Human artifice like Gaudí’s cathedral is obviously formal but also organic, and beehives are obviously organic—constructed from “within”—but also formal, in that the bees replicate their hexagon-shaped chambers according to a strict pattern. Witte uses both Sagrada Família and the beehive as metaphors for the kind

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

of poems he constructs in The Hurtling: “In the last line about form and bees, I’m thinking about the hexagonal hive packed in, that the bees know innately. It’s not something that they have to be taught. So it’s something about form that is also innate. This is what interests me and is what the ambition of these poems is, to touch on form that is instinctual, if you will” (personal interview). Like the swifts of “As If,” the bees are formalists in an immediate, unconscious sense. Similarly, the crows that sometimes gather around Witte’s home in the south hills of Eugene seem to be “riotous and cacophonous,” yet actually operate according to their own sense of order: “I was fascinated to learn that crows have a particular, specific call for each individual. It’s their identifier. It strikes us as cacophonous, but it’s all of these individuals calling out their own names. They’re all doing it at once, but they’re all hearing each other’s names. It’s an auditory gathering, this order of crows” (personal interview). (Witte echoes Hopkins: “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came” [90].) In “Crows,” the speaker experiences this order and language of the crows as merging with and unsettling his own language: Why this why these words rasp shriek skirl why “tranquil sleepy light” one day and the next these black gloves flung between the trees why crows assembling in the limbs on the roof shadows casting shadows who summoned them why have they come our days were peaceful reading the paper on the patio after breakfast the distant haw haw haw the saltiness of the ocean gaggle and squall approaching the wish of wings the crowding in on us

of fear and joy ghosts

memories years this drift this sweat of crows this jittery

host bending

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conclusion the limbs with their numbers sighing and whispering no end to the world of their cries croaks yawps this hubbub this plight of crows crows in our sleep in our thoughts the ceaseless commotion on my tongue the familiar dark rustling of crows flocking fluttering the page squabbling unmediated ink. (41)

the poem depicts the process of crows incorporating themselves into the speaker’s language (even into individual words, like “crowding”) and psyche, but it also shows language to be crow-like, right down to the black, “flocking” letters on the page, the “unmediated ink.” Language is like a flock of crows, the poem suggests, in that it arrives not “summoned” by the poet. But there were also actual crows before this idea of language as surpassing intention: “The crows were not summoned. I did not use my voice or language to call them. They came—first they were crows—then they insisted on impressing themselves on me in a linguistic way” (personal interview). The speaker thinks he has a promising poetic phrase, “tranquil sleepy light,” correspond­ ing with his “peaceful” mornings on the patio, until the crows flock around him, demanding a new kind of vocabulary. Ironically, the real crows are first presented through figure—“these black // gloves flung / between the trees”— and as they seem to gather energy and significance throughout the poem, they turn into the poet’s new language. But is this an ecocentric process? One ecocritical response to this poem would be to complain that it translates nature into artifice, that it merely reiterates the poststructuralist idea (however misinterpreted through simpli­ fication) about the priority of language in a world thoroughly coded. Where has real nature gone? Have the crows no independent life of their own? Are they merely figurative vehicles for the speaker’s primary argument about lan­ guage? Like many of the poems considered in this book, “Crows” sidesteps the question about which has priority, art or nature, and expresses a subtle middle way: “ ‘Crows’ explores that difficult interface between language and the natural world. To that extent, it is an ecopoetic poem, a poem that is try­ ing to think about what a poem can and cannot do, the limits of language” (personal interview). The poem is indeed about language, but not as separate from the natural world that gives rise to it. Language is surprising, wild, and

Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry

even intrusive, like crows, but it doesn’t replace them. In fact, while “Crows” is in a sense a language-centered poem, what it reveals is language infused by the natural world. Neither language nor the flock of crows is “summoned” by the poet; both word and world, through their relationship with each other, possess autonomy. The crows demand a new kind of language, which itself makes its own demands on the poet. Through sensuous poesis, such as the many instances of onomatopoeia (“rasp shriek skirl,” “haw haw,” “croaks,” “yawps,” “fluttering,” “squabbling”) and the stanza structure, the poem expresses the sound and movement of the crows. For instance, from the first to the third line of each tercet the words accumulate in number, “assembling” like the crows. The third lines are literally “crowded” with words that “flock” and “squabble.” Witte thus conjures the crows without merely representing them, even as they become his tongue’s “commotion” and his pen’s “unmedi­ ated ink.” The relationship between language and nature is, after all, far too entangled for mere representation, demanding that we look ever more care­ fully at the many forms this relationship takes, always complex and often beautiful.

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Notes

introduction 1. Though Auden’s infamous line is frequently quoted out of context, the rest of the poem in which it appears, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” does not settle for what the individual line claims. Poetry may not make things happen in the world of “executives,” but it “flows south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth” (82). Poetry is itself a “happening,” and even after his death, Yeats can “still persuade us to rejoice” (83). 2. Heaney, like Auden, deserves a qualification. In the context of his 1986 T. S. Eliot memorial lecture, Heaney argues that the effect of poetry is paradoxical, simultaneously useless at a practical level and catalytic at a deeper level: “Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed” (107). Poetry does not say, “ ‘Now a solution will take place,’ it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.” Poetry is “a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it” (108). 3. Latour and his colleagues in science studies trace the interwoven “networks” between “facts, power and discourse,” which have been segregated by conventional Western thought partly as a consequence of imagining that we have experienced the modern rupture between nature and culture. What we usually label “nature” and “culture” are actually intertwined with each other, Latour argues, and he positions himself against both realists and social constructionists in his theory of hybridity: “Yes, the scientific facts are indeed constructed, but they cannot be reduced to the social dimension because this dimension is populated by objects mobilized to construct it. Yes, those

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notes to pages 18–50 objects are real but they look so much like social actors that they cannot be reduced to the reality ‘out there’ invented by the philosophers of science . . . Is it our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society?” (6). Like Latour, the poets I examine treat nature as simultaneously real and constructed. 4. E. O. Wilson defines “biophilia” as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes . . . [T]o explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents . . . [T]o the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves” (1–2). Lawrence Buell defines the “environmental unconscious” as “a residual capacity (of individual humans, authors, texts, readers, communities) to awake to fuller apprehension of physical environment and one’s interdependence with it” (Writing 22). 1. wallace stevens, eco-aesthete 1 Poems are quoted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens and cited by page in the text. 2. Deconstructionists such as J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Riddel (in his later work, after he “converted” from New Criticism) gravitate toward Stevens, whose work they see as demonstrating the tendency of language to fragment and distance the signifier from reality. Riddel nearly sounds as if he is parodying deconstruction (perhaps a fault of the newly converted) in his discussion of Stevens’s concept of “decreation,” “one dimension of which is the turning of language . . . back upon itself . . . [The search for the center of reality] is a search, of course, that must repeatedly bring into question all other centers . . . and ultimately bring into question the idea of a center itself, until in the centerless center of the imaginative activity, of the poem speaking itself, we understand the significance of the poetry of ‘play’ ” (85–86). Jacqueline Brogan attempts to make a more balanced argument when she claims that “a unitive/realist/or logocentric conception, in which the work is regarded as naming at the source of being, and a disjunctive/nominalist/even deconstructive conception of language in which the word is regarded as a deferral of being and even meaning” occur in Stevens’s work (ix). Her position usefully grants more control to the poet than orthodox deconstruction, which starts from the absolute position that all language is inherently indeterminate. 3. Lorenzo Thomas offers a useful critique of the consequences of such primitivism: “The Modernist interest in ‘primitive art’ reveals some disturbing elements. A willingness to go to school to wisdom, wherever found, is admirable. But the idea that the art of the sophisticated metropolis might be revitalized by an infusion of energy from more instinctual (that is, less ‘civilized’) peoples often comes uncomfortably close to replicating the exploitation of the same peoples by modern capitalism” (6). 4. In his own sprawling prose here, Lentricchia approximates the “zigzag” “jazz poetry” he describes in Stevens, whose long, late work like the “Auroras” is “a kind of prepoetry, a tentative approach to the poem, an enactment of desire, not as a state of mind, with all the inert implications of the phrase ‘state of mind,’ but as movement, and not movement in a straight line, as if he could see the end of the journey, but a zigzag sort of motion: desire as improvisational action, a jazz poetry that gives us

notes to pages 55–98 a sense of starting, stopping, changing direction, revising the phrase, refining the language, drafting the poem and keeping the process of drafting all there as the final thing because the finished thing can not be had” (160). 5. Lisa M. Steinman gives the most thorough account of Stevens’s relationship to the science of his day, particularly the new physics and quantum mechanics: “By the 1940’s, Stevens’s claim, like Williams’s, was also that his poetic style could provide the language required by modern physics even as he invoked physics to sanction modern poetry” (158). In his essay “The Noble Rider,” Stevens quotes C. E. M. Joad, who discusses how philosophy and modern physics have “dismissed the notion of substance.” Joad argues that perception is constantly changing and similarly “with external things. Every body, every quality of a body resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes” (Necessary Angel 25). 2. elizabeth bishop’s strange reality 1. Emerson describes poets as “liberating gods” who create their own laws, no longer natural mortal beings susceptible to natural law. Inspired by Emerson, Walt Whitman describes the poet as “a seer . . . [H]e is individual . . . he is complete in himself . . . He is not one of the chorus . . . he does not stop for any regulation . . . he is the president of regulation” (715–16). Whitman’s emphasis on personal freedom is reiterated, albeit less brashly, by modern poets such as Wallace Stevens (“There is such a complete freedom now-a-days in respect to technique that I am rather inclined to disregard form so long as I am free and can express myself freely” [“A Note” 1325]) and William Carlos Williams (“I have never been one to write by rule, even by my own rules” [325]). Emersonian individualism, as practiced by certain moderns, justifies any poetic form as a manifestation of the poet’s genius, as H. T. Kirby-Smith argues: “What Emerson initially intended as a metaphorical and rhetorical call for legitimate self-realization ended as authorization for egotism and eccentricity. The ‘instant dependence of form upon soul,’ if taken literally, means that the form of any work of art is idiosyncratic to that artist. Much work published as poetry at the end of the twentieth century is composed and accepted for publication on the assumption that its form owes everything to the poet’s personality, soul, being, ‘voice,’ utterance, or self-sufficient inspiration” (35). Thus modernism inherited the Romantic reasoning that poetry can be organic only if produced by an autonomous poet, free from “regulation” or “rules.” 2. Poems are quoted from Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979, and cited by page in the text. 3. richard wilbur’s natural artifice 1. Poems are quoted from Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems: 1943–2004, and cited by page in the text. 2. Perhaps most famously, Alexander Pope argued, “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance” (29). William Wordsworth, although he and other Romantics rebelled against the tight formalism of neoclassicists like Pope, still defended the sonnet form in “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room.” In his Petrarchan sonnet, he claims that what appears to be a prison “unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, / In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

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notes to pages 99–175 Not only does he feel “solace there” from “the weight of too much liberty,” but also his various faux-prison metaphors—hermits’ cells, students’ “pensive Citadels,” a weaver’s loom, bees’ foxglove blossoms—all suggest that such constraints produce meaning and do not just organize it (133). T. S. Eliot makes a similar claim about meter: “A different meter is a different mode of thought” (182), so “the poet who invented a new meter expanded the sensibilities of the age” (Brogan, “Meter” 770). Opponents of meter claim that it is an arbitrary mechanism imposed on language, but “20th-century linguistics has shown convincingly that many aspects of poetic form are merely extensions of natural processes already at work in language itself ” (Brogan, “Meter” 773). Thus the seeming dichotomy between formal and organic poetry is a false one. On the one hand, all language has form; no verse is truly “free,” as Eliot said. On the other hand, so-called formal verse is, like a tree, the product of both chance and pattern. See my conclusion, “Organic Formalism and Contemporary Poetry,” for a developed discussion of this idea. 3. Although he overstates his case somewhat and ignores the pragmatic, political necessity of designated wilderness areas, Cronon is right to assert that the idea of wilderness is culturally created: “The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history” (471). 4. sylvia plath’s physical words 1. Poems are quoted from Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, and cited by page in the text. 2. See Dana Philips for a critique of this clichéd trope in The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. 3. My analysis is indebted to the work of Karen Jackson Ford, who argues that by the end of Plath’s Bee sequence, the speaker achieves a measure of self-control accompanied by an easing of “stylistic excess.” This process depends on the speaker’s ability to retreat “from the pressures of the external world, especially the world of gender conflicts, to the inner rhythms of her own exigencies. As the influence of the exterior world diminishes, the stylistic agitation seems to abate as well” (Gender 135). My treatment of the Daphne myth in Plath’s sequence also relies on Ford, who argues that the speaker’s continual desire to become a tree—part of her figurative excess—betokens not a real connection with nature but her simultaneous paranoid fear (of the bees and villagers) and inability to distinguish herself from the bees. conclusion 1. Poems are quoted from Marilyn Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till. 2. Poems are quoted from Susan Howe, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. 3. In her 1965 essay “Some Notes on Organic Form,” Denise Levertov defines organic form, a concept she developed in conversation with the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan, as “a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories” (7). Levertov joins Emerson, Pound, and others in the belief that form follows function;

notes to pages 176–178

4. 5. 6. 7.

for her, organic form is “never more than a revelation of content” (13). Her sense of organicism is thus the opposite of traditional formalism. My concept of “organic formalism” undoes this still commonly assumed opposition between organicism and formalism and the resulting false dichotomy between form and content. Organic formalism operates from the assumption that form and content are always thoroughly entangled. It also relies on a notion of organicism more in line with how the natural world actually takes form. That is, even the most traditional verse can function organ­ ically, especially when one is looking to the formalism of nonhuman nature itself as inspiration rather than believing in a mystical “form beyond forms.” There are only two exceptions: “Genius Loci” (53) inverts the length of the lines from long to short in each tercet, as do tercets ten to thirteen in “Witte” (22). Poems are quoted from John Witte, The Hurtling, and cited by page in the text. Personal letter from John Witte, July 12, 2006. These remarks were made in a personal interview with the author on July 14, 2006. Subsequent remarks from this interview are identified parenthetically in the text.

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works cited ———.“An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop.” By Ashley Brown. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 293. ———. “It All Depends.” Mid-century American Poets. Ed. John Ciardi. New York: Twayne, 1950. 267. ———. “On ‘Confessional Poetry.’ ” Time 2 June 1967: 35–42. ———. One Art: Letters, Selected and Edited. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Black, Max. Models and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962. Bly, Robert. “The First Ten Issues of kayak.” kayak 12 (1967): 47. Borg, Marcus. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. San Francisco: Harper, 1997. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2001. Breslin, James. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Brogan, T. V. F. “Meter.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. 768–83. Brunner, Edward. Cold War Poetry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Bryant, Marsha. “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising.” College Literature 29.3 (2002): 17≠34. Bryson, J. Scott, ed. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2002. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1995. ———. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2001. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Colwell, Anne. Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. Cook, Eleanor. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Corrington, Robert S. Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. ———. Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. ———. “Wallace Stevens: The Adequacy of Landscape.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 17.2 (Fall 1993): 203–18. Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” The Great New Wilderness Debate. Ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. 471–99.

works cited Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Darwin, Charles. Autobiography and Selected Letters. Ed. Francis Darwin. New York: Dover, 1958. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1998. Dodd, Elizabeth. “The Great Rainbowed Swamp: History as Moral Ecology in the Poetry of Michael Harper.” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. 177–94. Doreski, C. K. Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. Dungy, Camille T., ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Ehrenfeld, David. The Arrogance of Humanism. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Eliot, T. S. “A Talk on Dante.” Kenyon Review 14 (1952): 178–88. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. New York: Norton, 2001. Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 92–104. Fabio, Sarah Webster. “Tripping with Black Writing.” The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison Gayle Jr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. 182–91. Ferrier, Carole. “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.” Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Ed. Gary Lane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 203–17. Finch, Annie. The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Collier Books, 1986. Ford, Karen Jackson. Gender and the Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. ———. “The Sonnets of Satin-Legs Brooks.” Contemporary Literature 48.3 (2007): 345–73. Frost, Robert. Selected Prose of Robert Frost. Ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Gifford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Gilcrest, David W. Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2002. Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Hannah, Sarah. “ ‘Something Else Hauls Me through Air’: Sound and Structure in Four Late Poems by Sylvia Plath.” Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 5.2 (2003): 232–66.

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works cited Hass, Robert. “One Body: Some Notes on Form.” Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. New York: Ecco, 1984. 56–71. Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber, 1988. Hecht, Anthony. “The Motions of the Mind.” Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ed. Wendy Salinger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 123–31. Hill, Donald L. “From ‘Studies and Aversions.’ ” Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ed. Wendy Salinger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 169–75. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 4th ed. Ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Horace. Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (“Ars Poetica”). Ed. Niall Rudd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Howe, Susan. Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. Windsor, Vt.: Awede, 1987. ———. “Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 199–204. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974. Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Ed. Robert Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. ———. “Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel.” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 3–31. Keats, John. “Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, ?27 December 1817.” John Keats. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 369–70. Keller, Lynn. “Words Worth a Thousand Postcards: The Bishop/Moore Correspondence.” American Literature 55 (1983): 405–29. Kern, Robert. “Fabricating Ecocentric Discourse in the American Poem (and Elsewhere).” New Literary History 37 (2006): 425–45. Kirby-Smith, H. T. The Origins of Free Verse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Lake, Paul. “The Shape of Poetry.” The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science. Ed. Kurt Brown. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2001. 156–80. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Laurans, Penelope. “ ‘Old Correspondences’: Prosodic Transformations in Elizabeth Bishop.” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 75–95. Leckie, Ross. “ ‘That Watery, Dazzling Dialectic’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Sublime Brazil.” Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co.: Middle-Generation Poets in Context. Ed. Suzanne Ferguson. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003. 186–98.

works cited Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens and the Seasons. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. Leonard, J. S., and C. E. Wharton. The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. Levertov, Denise. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry after Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Faber, 1987. ———. Foreword. Ariel. By Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper Perennial, 1965. xiii–xvi. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. McCann, Janet. “Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems.” South and West: An International Literary Magazine 14 (1978): 28–36. McFarland, Ronald E. “Some Observations on Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish.’ ” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 38 (1982): 365–76. McNally, Nancy L. “Elizabeth Bishop: The Discipline of Description.” Twentieth Century Literature 11 (1966): 189–201. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. Miller, J. Hillis. “Wallace Stevens’ ‘Poetry of Being.’ ” The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Ed. J. Hillis Miller and Roy Harvey Pearce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. 143–62. Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Moore, Marianne. “A Modest Expert.” Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth Bishop. The Nation 28 Sept. 1946: 354. Moore, Richard. “Elizabeth Bishop: ‘The Fish.’ ” Boston University Studies in English 2 (1956): 251–59. Nelson, Marilyn. “The Fruit of Silence.” Contemplative Mind. Web. 13 Sept. 2011. ———. “Owning the Masters.” After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. Ed. Annie Finch. Ashland, OR: Story Line, 1999. 8–17. ———. A Wreath for Emmett Till. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Nicholson, Mervyn. “ ‘The Slightest Sound Matters’: Stevens’ Sound Cosmology.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 18.1 (Spring 1994): 63–80. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. Nims, John Frederick. “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. A Technical Analysis.” The Art of Sylvia Plath. A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970. 136–52. Olson, Charles. Selected Writings of Charles Olson. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002. Perloff, Marjorie. “Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1970): 57–74.

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works cited Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Pickard, Zachariah. “Natural History and Epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop’s Darwin Letter.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 50 (Fall 2004): 268–82. Pinsky, Robert. “The Idiom of a Self: Elizabeth Bishop and Wordsworth.” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 49–60. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. ———. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. ———. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963, Selected and Edited with Commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. ———. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001. Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” Alexander Pope. Ed. Pat Rogers. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 17–39. Pound, Ezra. The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968. Quetchenbach, Bernard. Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Quinn, Justin. Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community. Dublin: University College Dublin P, 2002. Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. Riddel, Joseph. “Interpreting Stevens: An Essay on Poetry and Thinking.” boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 1 (1972): 79–97. Rigby, Kate. “Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis.” New Literary History 35.3 (2004): 427–42. Rosu, Anca. The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995. Rotella, Guy. Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004. ———. Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. Ruble, Ranee. “Hurtling Words at the Speed of Life.” Literary Reference: Newsletter of the Creative Writing Program (Winter 2005): 1, 4–5. Salinger, Wendy. Introduction. Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ed. Wendy Salinger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 1–26. Sayre, Robert. “A Case for Richard Wilbur as Nature Poet.” Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ed. Wendy Salinger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 153–61. Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.” The Poems of Shelley. Ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kevin Everest. Vol. 1. 1804–1817. New York: Longman, 1989. 542–49.

works cited Sidney, Sir Philip. “Astrophil and Stella.” Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 153–211. ———. “The Defense of Poesy.” Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 212–50. Snyder, Gary. “The Etiquette of Freedom.” The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point, 1990. 3–24. Steele, Timothy. Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1990. Steinman, Lisa M. Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Random House, 1982. ———. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.———. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1951. ———. “A Note on Poetry.” The Oxford Anthology of American Literature. Ed. William Rose Benét and Norman Holmes Pearson. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford UP, 1939. 1325. ———. Opus Posthumous. New York: Knopf, 1989.

———. Souvenirs and Prophesies: The Young Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New

York: Knopf, 1977. Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966. Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Thomas, Lorenzo. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2000. Van Dyne, Susan R. Sylvia Plath, “Stings,” Original Drafts of the Poem in Facsimile. Reproduced from the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. Northampton, MA: Smith College Library Rare Book Room, 1982. Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969. ———. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. Voros, Gyorgyi. Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. ———. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973. Wilbur, Richard. The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces, 1969–1995. New York: Harcourt, 1997. ———. Collected Poems, 1943–2004. New York: Harcourt, 2004. ———. Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Ed. William Butts. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. ———. “Poetry and the Landscape.” The New Landscape in Art and Science. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. Chicago: Theobald, 1956. 86–90.

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works cited ———. Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953–1976. New York: Harcourt, 1976. ———. “Richard Wilbur.” Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets. By William Baer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2004. 3–20. Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Random House, 1969. Williams, William Carlos. Selected Letters. Ed. John C. Thirlwall. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957. Wilson, E. O. Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Witte, John. The Hurtling. Alexandria, VA: Orchises Press, 2005. Wordsworth, William. “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room.” Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. 133. Young, David. “Tree with an Attitude: Reading Plath Irreverently.” Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 59 (1998): 18–23.

Index

Abram, David, 3, 193 Ammons, A. R., 161, 193 Auden, W. H., 3, 130, 187, 193 Baraka, Amiri, 165 Bate, Jonathan, 5, 7, 75, 162, 193 Berger, John, 4, 193 Berkeley, George, 112 Bernstein, Charles, 2, 3, 7, 172, 193 Berryman, John, 64, 95 Bishop, Elizabeth, 56–83, 159, 182, 189, 193–99; “12 O’Clock News,” 79; “The Armadillo,” 76, 79–83; “At the Fishhouses,” 68; “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” 76–79, 83; “The Fish,” 57, 70–75, 78, 82, 197; “The Imaginary Iceberg,” 65–66, 80; “The Monument,” 65–68, 75, 182; “The Moose,” 75; “Roosters,” 69–70; “The Sandpiper,” 63–64, 68; “The Sea and Its Shore,” 68 Black Aesthetic, 165, 195 Black Arts Movement, 164 Black Mountain poets, 8, 94, 97, 190 Bly, Robert, 9, 94, 194 Bogan, Louise, 91, 95 Borg, Marcus, 102, 194 Bryant, William Cullen, 103–4

Buell, Lawrence, 3, 6, 18, 89, 92, 188, 194 Burke, Kenneth, 4, 194 Carson, Rachel, 84, 126 Cézanne, Paul, 92 Clifton, Lucille, 163 Cronon, William, 32, 99, 190, 194 Cullen, Countee, 164 Darwin, Charles, 5, 16, 60–62, 74, 82, 127, 130, 181, 193, 195, 198 Davidson, Michael, 172 deconstruction, 6, 17, 27, 172, 175, 188, 195 Dickinson, Emily, ix, 9–14, 16, 17, 20, 72, 86, 118, 124, 159, 167, 169, 170, 195 Donne, John, 114 Dove, Rita, 165 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 166, 168, 195 ecocriticism, 2–4, 8–9, 27, 59, 84, 159, 195, 199, 202 ecopoetics, x, 4, 16, 18, 20, 24, 54, 56, 70, 85, 92, 122, 159, 162, 164 Eliot, T. S., 61, 63, 187, 190, 195–96, 198 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10, 20, 57, 60, 86, 103, 130, 140, 171–72, 189, 190, 195

201

202 s

index Fabio, Sarah Webster, 163, 165, 195 Finch, Annie, 160, 162, 172, 195, 197 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 52, 195 Ford, Karen Jackson, ix, 124, 149, 153, 155, 166–67, 190, 195 free verse, 39, 56–57, 94, 97–98, 160, 162, 165, 176, 178, 196 Frost, Robert, 40, 59, 96, 104, 114, 136, 195, 198 Gioia, Dana, 160 Goldsworthy, Andy, 66 Harlem Renaissance, 164 Hecht, Anthony, 94, 196 Heidegger, Martin, 45, 162 Hejinian, Lyn, 172 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 13–17, 33, 67, 69, 70–71, 105, 121, 129, 140, 159, 183, 193, 196 Horace, 4, 196 Howe, Susan, 172–75, 190, 196 James, William, 104, 110 Jameson, Frederic, 37, 196 Jarman, Mark, 160 Jeffers, Robinson, 92 Johnson, Mark, ix, 4, 108, 196 Johnson, Samuel, 111–12 Jordan, June, 165 Keats, John, 19, 33, 36–38, 66, 101–2, 160, 196 Kuhn, Thomas, 61, 110, 196 Lakoff, George, 4, 24, 108, 196 Language Poetry, 17, 159, 172, 175, 193 Latour, Bruno, 9, 187–88, 196 Lawrence, D. H., 92, 97 Levertov, Denise, 190–91, 197 Lowell, Robert, 58, 64–65, 94–95, 126, 196–98 Maclean, Norman, 18, 197 Martin, Charles, 160 McKay, Claude, 164 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6, 197

Merwin, W. S., 64, 95 modernism, modernity, 8, 13, 16–17, 20, 24, 26, 35–36, 59, 61–64, 94–95, 97, 123, 127, 129, 130–32, 165, 18–89, 194, 196–97, 199 Moore, Marianne, 61, 92, 196–98 Nelson, Marilyn, 162–72, 176, 190, 197 New Formalism, 159, 160, 162, 165, 172, 176, 197 Olson, Charles, 97, 197 organic formalism, x, 159, 175–76, 181–82, 190–91 Palmer, Michael, 172 panentheism, 102–3 Phillips, Dana, 158, 190 Plath, Sylvia, x, 36, 57, 101, 106, 111, 116, 121, 123–59, 190, 193–95, 197–200, Ariel, 124; “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” 145, 148, 151–52; “The Bee Meeting,” 145, 148–52, 156–58; “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” 146, 152; “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” 129– 32, 158; “Blackberrying,” 130; “Blue Moles,” 134; “Elm,” 106, 140–45, 150; “Finisterre,” 130; “I Am Vertical,” 135–36, 142, 158; “Mushrooms,” 134–35; “Ocean 1212-W,” 134, 136, 146; “Poems, Potatoes,” 139–40; “Pheasant,” 134; “Private Ground,” 127–28; “The Rabbit Catcher,” 134; “Stillborn,” 133; “Stings,” 145, 199; “The Swarm,” 145; “Two Campers in Cloud Country (Rock Lake, Canada),” 128–29; “Wintering,” 145, 152–58 Poe, Edgar Allen, 91–92, 104–5, 117 Pollan, Michael, 146, 198 Pope, Alexander, 112, 181, 189, 198 postmodernism, 17, 59, 87 Pound, Ezra, 61, 86, 89, 97, 160–61, 178, 190, 194, 198 Rich, Adrienne, 64–65, 95 Roethke, Theodore, 9, 95, 130

index Romanticism, 8, 20, 33, 36–37, 52, 54, 57, 62, 90, 97, 116, 126, 129, 150, 189 sensuous poesis, 2, 13, 16–17, 32, 35, 39, 41, 118, 127, 136, 140, 148, 150, 159, 178–79 Seth, Vikram, 160 Shakespeare, William, 52, 166, 167, 170 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5, 29, 32–33, 38, 129, 198 Sidney, Sir Philip, 4, 8–9, 117, 199 Silliman, Ron, 172 Snyder, Gary, 4, 9, 84, 88–92, 99, 199 Steele, Timothy, 97, 160, 199 Stevens, Wallace, vi, 9, 18, 19–57, 66, 86, 91, 94, 104, 108, 111, 115–17, 128, 130, 134, 142, 148, 150, 156, 159, 177, 188–89, 193–94, 197–99; “Anecdote of the Jar,” 36–38, 40; “The Auroras of Autumn,” 40–54, 128, 177; “Autumn Refrain,” 32–35, 46, 115, 142; “The Comedian as the Letter C,” 19, 21; “Esthetique du Mal,” 55; “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 23, 27, 37; “The Man on the Dump,” 19, 21, 35, 43; “The Plain Sense of Things,” 31, 33; “The Snow Man,” 27–35, 38, 41–43, 49, 156

Till, Emmett, 163, 164, 166–71 Watten, Barrett, 172 White, Richard, 101, 199 Whitman, Walt, 20, 52, 86, 97, 103, 166, 189, 199 Wilbur, Richard, 57, 84–122, 126, 159–60, 162, 176, 189, 196, 198– 200; “A Short History,” 110; “Advice to a Prophet,” 85, 106–9; “All These Birds,” 115–18; “Epistemology,” 111–12; “Lamarck Elaborated,” 109–10; “Looking Into History,” 122; “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” 90, 102; “Lying,” 118–19; “Marginalia,” 113, 120; “Mayflies,” 119–22; “Mind,” 111; “On Having Mis-Identified a Wild Flower,” 95–96; “Poplar, Sycamore,” 102; “Praise in Summer,” 105–8; “Two Voices in a Meadow,” 114–15 Wilde, Oscar, 20, 129, 200 Williams, William Carlos, 20, 86, 89–92, 94, 97, 181, 189, 200 Wilson, E. O., 18, 188, 200 Witte, John, ix, x, 176–85, 191, 200 Wordsworth, William, 14, 19–20, 129, 150, 160, 189, 198 Yeats, William Butler, 43, 104, 187

Thoreau, Henry David, 99, 127, 174, 194

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sS Scott Knickerbocker is assistant professor of English and environmental studies at The College of Idaho. Originally from Ashland, Oregon, Knicker­ bocker earned a BA at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, and an MA and a PhD at the University of Oregon in Eugene. At The College of Idaho, Knick­ erbocker teaches courses in American literature, creative nonfiction, and environmental studies. Every other winter term, he and Dr. Megan Dixon lead an off-campus, interdisciplinary program in the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho called “Winter Wilderness Experience,” which integrates literature and creative writing, cultural geography, winter ecology, and backcountry telemark skiing. His articles have appeared in The Kenyon Review, College Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism.

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E

cocritics and other literary scholars interested in the environment have tended to examine writings that pertain directly to nature and to focus on subject matter more than expression. In this book, Scott Knickerbocker argues that it is time for the next step in ecocriticism: scholars need to explore the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways. Ecopoetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world in the work of modern American poets—in particular Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath. Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems, to make them seem more natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice—not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural world. Indeed, for them, artifice is natural. In examining their work, Knickerbocker charts a new direction for ecocriticism. “Ecopoetics provides inroads for ecocriticism into the study of these significant poets, and will open new possibilities in the critical dis­ course concerning twentieth-century American poetry in general.” —Bernard Quetchenbach, author of Back from Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century SCOTT KNICKERBOCKER is assistant professor of English and environ­ mental studies at The College of Idaho. Cover design by Sally Nichols

Cover painting: Me and the Moon, by Arthur G. Dove, 1937. Wax emulsion on canvas,

18 x 26 in. (47.72 x 66.04 cm). Acquired 1939, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

© The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress